Obama is a shining light in comparison to his two bookends, George Bush and Donald Trump. The veneer is broken in Jeremy Kuzmarov’s new work, Obama’s Unending Wars. Throughout the book he contrasts Obama’s rhetoric about the military helping people live free , protecting them from threats, promoting peace and human rights throughout the world, while all the while throughout his presidency (and after) he supported dictatorships and big business while killing or buying off opponents to the empire. Glen Ford’s introduction sums it all up on the very first line, “Barak Obama may go down in presidential history as the most effective – and deceptive – imperialist of them all.”

As the 300-foot spire of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris tragically came tumbling down on live television, my thoughts ventured to Nuseirat Refugee Camp, my childhood home in the Gaza Strip.

Then, also on television, I watched as a small bulldozer hopelessly clawed through the rubble of my neighbourhood mosque. I grew up around that mosque. I spent many hours there with my grandfather, Mohammed, a refugee from historic Palestine. Before grandpa became a refugee, he was a young Imam in a small mosque in his long-destroyed village of Beit Daras.