Trump is a bully, but he's not new, he is just an extreme version of the bully that is America

Shout out to Charlie Angus, Canada's Timmins James Bay MP for his schooling on how to deal with bullies.. Words Matter.

Deep respect for Charlie Angus, Canada's member of Parliament for Timmins-James Bay for his fierce defense of Canada's sovereignty but more is insistence on respect. Now that is how you respond to a bully. Full disclosure, and I say this with immense pride, I am from Timmins and it is an honor to have a man of Charlie Angus' character as a representative. This is a politician who lives the belief that we as a society are measured by how we care for all among us, not the strongest, not the richest.

Canada's dilemma with the United States isn't just about Trump, it's about Canada’s historic, relentless, call it what you want, insistence on following the United States, right or wrong.

But it’s not just Canada’s dilemma, it’s a dilemma faced by all of America’s allies because being Washington’s ally has meant following America, right or wrong. The relationship has not developed as an alliance of equals, mutually respected. It has been an alliance of America first and everyone else second. America’s way or the highway.

America says jump and its allies say how high, or suffer the consequences. It’s not new with Trump, it’s just a little cruder, a little louder and a whole lot more of the in-your-face bullying than previous U.S. administrations, who hid behind the empty words of “shared values, shared history,” but like the bully on the block, previous US administrations, also brooked no dissent, criticism, nor did they accept breaking ranks.

The examples are many, like the 2003 Iraq war.

The U.S. invaded Iraq, a sovereign nation, based on lies, killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, even outing its own CIA agent who exposed the lies. The Iraq war gave birth to the deadly terrorist group, the Islamic State, made our world a much more dangerous place and yet the United States has never been held accountable. Like the bully on the block, when the United States wanted to go to war with Iraq, it wanted its minions to line up behind him. Not all did and Washington was angry, not respectful, of those who chose to disagree. They were Canada, France and Germany. At the United Nations they cautioned against the invasion of Iraq, urging Washington to listen to the International Atomic Energy Commission, which questioned the veracity of claims of weapons of mass destruction. They refused to support the invasion.

For France’s audacity to express a contrary opinion, French wine was ceremoniously dumped in the streets and French fries were renamed Freedom Fries. But the response to Canada’s objections was more egregious. A trial of two U.S. pilots whose actions investigators said caused the death of four Canadian soldiers in a friendly fire incident in southern Afghanistan was downgraded. Canada’s loss, while not ignored, was minimized. Still Canada found ways to wiggle its way back into America’s good books, eventually flying some surveillance missions that directed U.S. attack aircraft over Iraq. In Canada there were also loud voices slamming Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s decision not to go to war because they feared saying no to Washington could bring a U.S. economic assault on Canada. No mention of shared values, just fear.

The United States has preferred dictators to socialist governments, even overthrowing those elected by their own people, and imposing dictators, the likes of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, whose death squads killed thousands of Chileans.

It has stolen territory like Guantanamo Bay, where the U.S. plans to hold upward of 30,000 migrants and has held scores of men without charge since 9/11. Guantanamo Bay does not belong to the United States, it belongs to Cuba, but America is not giving it back because, well, it doesn’t want to.

The United States acted with impunity following the 9/11 attacks on the United States, violating human rights and international laws, holding people for decades without charges, torturing people in secret sites around the world. It’s allies, including Canada, said little and to this day the United States, which has refused to sign on to the International Criminal Court, even attacking it, has not been held accountable.

Perhaps today would be different if we had found our voice and our self-respect to speak out sooner against the bully on our block, rather than justifying brutal violations of international laws by the U.S., accepting that because it purports to be a democracy its egregious violations of humanitarian and international laws are somehow less egregious than those committed by bullies elsewhere in our troubled world, who follow an alternate form of government, who lay no claim to democracy. That the bully on our block is a better bully, perhaps a more righteous bully, than the bullies on another’s block has exposed our hypocrisy.

As a result others have paid the price of our hypocrisy.

In Iraq, it was the many civilians killed without accountability and in many cases, even without a recognition of their deaths. In Afghanistan, its the hundreds of Afghans who spent months in jails in Afghanistan without charge, without explanation, terrified before being freed, or those who were subject to summary arrests and in some cases executions by CIA-trained special units. In Gaza it is the more than 45,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom were children and women, killed by Israel, who, with our complicit silence, decimated Gaza, systematically withholding food and water, and indiscriminately bombing hospitals and schools where tens of thousands of people sheltered.

And now, today, the president of the United States is promising to move Palestinians from their homes in Gaza, which to be clear is ethnic cleansing, and turn Gaza into a real estate bonanza. Dress up the words any way one might want, but it is ethnic cleansing.

Sure, folks are speaking out, but America’s allies are not screaming their outrage from the rooftops because they are afraid of antagonizing Mr. Trump, after all Canada and Mexico just got a one-month tariff reprieve, even as Mr. Trump continues to disrespect Canada with his 51st state nonsense.

Instead of outrage plain and simple, allies, like so many analysts, suggest, with something akin to desperation, that his call for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza its a “negotiation tactic” and he has something else in mind.

Ethnic cleansing as a negotiation tactic? What has become of us?

There is a hope, however, that Trump’s extreme manifestation of the bully that is America will cause its allies to find their self-respect, demand a relationship based on equality, and mutual respect, diversify and most of all abandon the illusion of America as some kind of leader, that has respect for the rule of law, equally applied to all and instead understand that it is the size of America’s economy, not its heart, that rules.

No, Donald Trump is not the new bully on the block, he is just an extreme version of the same old bully.