Canada covers itself in shame over Israel

By Conrad Black

On May 19, a joint statement was issued by the governments of the United Kingdom, France, and Canada whose principal points were: ”We call on the Israeli government to stop its military operations in Gaza and immediately allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. This must include engaging with the UN to ensure a return to delivery of aid in line with humanitarian principles.” “Israel suffered a heinous attack on October 7. We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism. But this escalation is wholly disproportionate.” “If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response.” “It is a ceasefire, the release of all remaining hostages and a long-term political solution that offer the best hope of ending the agony of the hostages and their families, alleviating the suffering of civilians in Gaza, ending Hamas’s control of Gaza and achieving a pathway to a two-state solution.”

Every citizen of all three countries should be profoundly ashamed at this disgraceful travesty of the facts. Almost every word cited above is false and all three governments know that they are false. The tripartite declaration is part of what American commentator David Harsanyi accurately described (Commentary, June, 2025) as “an arms race in moral idiocy.” The tripartite declaration’s desire to get humanitarian aid to noncombatants is unexceptionable, but the United Nations would be one of the last agents to engage in any such endeavour. It is under the United Nations’s watch over that Hamas steals much of the ample assistance which Israel allows into Gaza. The deceased Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar referred to the Palestinian dead as “necessary sacrifices.” This is the mentality that has produced a death-cult in the Middle East and justifies not only the massacre of Israeli civilians, including women and children, but uses its own population as human shields in schools and mosques and hospitals to maximize civilian casualties and inflame the sensibilities of the gullible West.

The United Nations is profoundly complicit in the continuation of the terrorist campaign in Gaza. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is enmeshed with Hamas itself and has been thoroughly suborned and corrupted by Hamas, as is well known to the relevant officials of all three governments which have uttered this declaration. If the United Kingdom, France, and Canada were not absolutely morally bankrupt on the issue of Israel’s contest with neighbouring terrorist organizations, they would accompany their demand for humanitarian assistance by the complete exclusion of any role for the United Nations in the distribution of that assistance. The U.N. Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher said on May 20 that 14,000 babies would die in Gaza within two days because of a lack of aid, a claim the U.N. promptly walked back. This was an unspeakable blood libel but no surprise from a senior U.N. official

It is also false that these governments effectively supported at any time since October 7, 2023 the right of Israel to defend itself. This was like the Biden administration’s pious fraud that Israel “has the right to defend itself,” which in practice meant that it had the right to expel Hamas invaders from Israeli territory but not to take any action that might reduce the possibilities of a repetition of such an attack. There was a fleeting consensus in the outside world that the massacre of Israeli civilians was a bad thing in itself but almost from the start it was generally seen in the context of supposedly illegal and even criminal conduct by Israel in having the effrontery to exist and defend its existence as a Jewish state. What these three countries did, and what many others have done as well, is to make a formulaic statement of Israel’s right to self-defence followed by an open-ended condemnation of their exercise of that right. It is like assertion of the liberty of self-expression accompanied by the severe punishment of any exercise of that liberty

The use of the word “disproportionate” is also scandalous. The Israeli Defense Forces have done absolutely nothing in Gaza that could be considered proportionate, let alone disproportionate, to the slaughter of babies and brutal rape of women prior to murdering them committed by Hamas. And the concept of proportion in a war is also utter nonsense. Hamas committed an act of war against Israel to forestall a durable peace agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and Israel accepted it at the outset as an act of war creating a state of war. By any definition and throughout human experience, war is a hellish and destructive activity full of mortal peril and of soul-testing violence. But once war is unleashed, in this case in violation of a ceasefire and with no pretense of a just cause and with maximum treachery and surprise, there is no alternative than to bring that war to the swiftest possible satisfactory conclusion at the minimum possible cost in lives of the responding country and its allies and non-combatants. Israel has behaved scrupulously within those guidelines and when the rank propaganda is extracted from figures published by the so-called Gaza Health Ministry, as eminent military historian Andrew Roberts has stated, the proportion of civilian to military casualties in the Gaza war has been one of the most humane ever recorded in urban counter-guerrilla warfare

This wasn’t another skirmish or border incident; it was a premeditated savage and barbarous invasion. The proportionate loss of life in Canada would have been 5,500 civilians murdered by terrorists in one day, and in the United States 44,000 civilians murdered in one day, 14 times the number of dead in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and 18 times the number killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, where the casualties were almost entirely military personnel, and which started the Pacific War in which the Americans ultimately killed approximately 3,000,000 Japanese, including by the only military use of atomic bombs in history. No one said to the American presidents of those times after 18 months that they had killed more of their enemy than the number of deaths that their country had suffered and therefore retribution must stop. Not even the authors of those crimes, Al-Qaeda and the government of Imperialist Japan, claimed that.

The most scurrilous of all the falsehoods in this joint declaration was that simply ending the Israeli action in Gaza would end “Hamas’ control of Gaza and (would achieve) a pathway to a two state solution.” What a piercing insight that is: Israel should just declare a unilateral ceasefire and ask Hamas to leave Gaza. No one could possibly believe such bunk. We are chiefly concerned with Canada here but the conscient citizens of all three countries should demand to know why their governments are propagating such fatuous and monstrous lies. If the leaders of the new government of this country believe this, Parliament should throw them out next week, bag and baggage. They are dishonouring Canada and joining an international conspiracy to make three leading western democracies useful idiots of the most odious, murderous, and psychotic terrorists in the world. They have covered all three countries in shame.

First published in the National Post