Canada, Straying Far From Its Rooted Values

"When the Qatari government [blessed by Washington] allowed the Taliban to open an office in Doha this week that had the Taliban flag flying outside and signs everywhere proclaiming the office to represent the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai took the symbolism as an affront."

"For Karzai and his government, the announcement, the flags and the signs brought the enemy unwanted legitimacy. Instead of being treated as insurgents or terrorists, the Taliban got the symbols of statehood."

"Just a week earlier, Karzai had been in Doha speaking at the Brookings Institution’s annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum, clearly warning the Americans and the Qataris not to give the Taliban these symbolic victories."

Brookings Institute, June 20, 2013

Taliban security personnel stand guard as a burqa-clad woman passes by a market. AFP/Getty

 

"The terrorist [Hamas]organization’s leadership has been residing in Qatar for over a decade. It has enjoyed a life of luxury and privilege while there."

"Visiting Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, and other countries, those top Hamas officials have been able to fly around the Middle East. They felt safe and secure, even when they cheered the October 7 massacre on, watching Israelis being slaughtered."

"They watched as the Bibas family was carted off to Gaza; they celebrated as they viewed videos of the massacre of young people at the Nova music festival."

Seth J. Frantzman, Jerusalem Post  

Hamas official Khalil Al-Hayya sits at a mourning house for assassinated Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Doha, Qatar, August 2, 2024. (photo credit: REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

 

A Muslim country founded in 1971, Qatar is a monarchy ruled by Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who ascended to the throne in 2013 after his father abdicated his position. Qatar drew attention from around the world when it became an economic success through the discovery of natural gas fields. 

• Qatar has a critical relationship with the United States
• Qatar finances terrorism around the world
• Qatar is also the deal broker in the Middle East

 Qatar maintains a relationship with terrorists, demonstrated by a permissive legal jurisdiction that allows terror financiers to operate in the state and the close connections Qatar has historically held with such illicit channeling of funds. Aside from financing Hamas, Qatar’s alleged support of regional terrorist networks, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, has long been problematic. In 2003, Congress was alerted to several charities in Qatar supporting al-Qaeda. Since then, Qatar has been accused of not only providing refuge to terrorism financiers but also of directly funding terrorist groups.

Mid East Journal  

 

 

Interesting, is it not? Qatar elevating the Taliban -- long before it helped engineer an escape route for the United States out of the quagmire of Afghanistan, enabling the Taliban to return as the repressive regime that tormented its people with its totalitarian Islamist rule in 2021 -- as a 'state-in-waiting'. Much as it and the United Nations and indeed the Western world has been fairly unanimous in elevating 'Palestine' to the status of a state-in-waiting with the recognition of its nascent status, despite the Palestinian leadership refusing to recognize the right of Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

 

Spain, Ireland, France, the United Kingdom and Canada, all anxious to demonstrate their progressive credentials, condemning Israel for its assaults on Hamas in Gaza where the full-scale conflict initiated by the Palestinian terrorist gangs of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Fatah, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and ordinary Palestinian civilians flooding over the border from Gaza into southern Israel to launch a frenzy of mass rape, mutilation, murder and bloodshed on a genocidal scale, followed by abductions of children, families, women, foreign farm workers and IDF sentries into Gaza was answered as any country would, by a drive to destroy the terrorists' leadership, weapons caches and endless tunnels.

 

Qatar -- the backbone of the Muslim Brotherhood, financial saviour of Hamas, whose vast energy resources translate as wealth enabling it to buy an invested presence in the West, disarming suspicions of Islamists as threats to Western civilization -- has presented itself as a trusted interlocutor between democratic nations and the totalitarianism of Islamist jihad. It is as though an evil spell has been cast on those nations of the West whose leaders have allowed themselves to be mesmerized by wealth and assurances of innocently compatible relations.

 

Protesters marched over Westminster Bridge towards Whitehall   Getty Images

 

Canada's current Liberal prime minister, who has shunned and discarded Canada's traditional recognition of Israel as a democratic ally playing follow-the-leader with Britain, France and Australia, casts Israel and its Prime Minister as the villain in an existential battle against the forces of violent terrorism. To Mark Carney, as with Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Anthony Albanese, the Palestinians 'deserve' to have a state of their own, alongside that of Israel. Despite that the Palestinian leadership has continually refused all offers of negotiation between it and Israel to that end.

 

While a massive resurgence of antisemitism has wrought havoc throughout the West with the most recent infiltration of Muslim immigrants, refugees and migrants in organized marches seeking to delegitimize Israel, accusing it of genocide against the Palestinians, threatening the Jewish diaspora that has lived for a millennia throughout Europe, creating chaos in the countries that have amassed a sizeable Muslim presence, few governments have taken steps to protect their Jewish communities, much less put a stop to events of public displays of hatred and threats against their minority Jews.

 

Canada being a case in point, where for over two years, rampant antisemitism has been on display in all cities of the nation, with municipalities, provinces and the federal government sitting back unresponsive to their duty enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteeing respect, security and freedoms to all citizens without exception. The example led by the federal Liberal party has been echoed down the chain of public policy; denounce antisemitism, while linking it to the crime of Islamophobia.

 

Prime Minister Mark Carney meets with President of China Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China on Friday, Jan. 16, 2026. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

 

In prime minister Carney's search to replace Canada's traditional trading partner under the stress of Donald Trump's egregious tariff wars imposed upon allies and enemies alike, he has taken himself to Beijing -- a repressive regime whose own global trade policies are rapacious and politically and socially abusive, to soften the enmity between Canada and China that has resulted when the Chinese Communist Party's penchant for bullying, stealth capture of government and private enterprise security and trade secrets have become too bitter to ignore -- to end up obsequiously grovelling to re-open favourable trade corridors for Canadian raw products.

 

Mr. Carney's zest for prostrating himself before human-rights-abusing states, those whose none-too-secretive advances meant to impede or outright destroy Western values, social cohesion, security and future prospects for peace and intellectual and economic advancement, has taken him further, to that most obvious of civilizational-destroying places, Qatar. Any self-respecting leader of any Western nation has but to look at their own nation's intelligence security reports' descriptions of Qatar to fully comprehend what it represents.

 

But that hasn't deterred Mr. Carney from making his mid-January trip to Doha, to appeal to its leader the emir, for a strong economic link, since they have so much to share: scientific advances, technology, agricultural best practises -- on Canada's part, investments in Canadian natural resources and production facilities presumably -- on Qatar's part. The property management colossus that Mr. Carney previously was associated with as its vice-chairman has inked a $20-billion AI investment scheme, paving the way for Canada's federal government to launch a bilateral agreement with Qatar.

 

Prime Minister Mark Carney, left, is greeted by Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, centre, as he arrives in Doha on Jan. 18. Photo by Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

 

This is Canada -- bereft of confidence in itself as a decent, human-rights-supporting, modern nation that takes pride in its traditional principles -- in allying itself with other states sharing the same values. Integrity of purpose, pride in heritage, history and culture and the decency of the social contract have gone by the wayside in favour of catering to the very countries whose aspirations are the destruction of Canada as a beacon of freedom and equality, upholding global peace and security, offering friendship to those who deserve it, and reserved distance from those who do not.

 

Depends on Whose Ox Is Being Gored

"There are two rumours afloat tonight, but we can confirm nothing. One, that the German fleet has sailed into the Kattegat, north of Denmark, west of Sweden and south of Norway, and is heading for the Skagerrak. Two, that a German expeditionary force is forming at the Baltic pots and that dozens of passenger ships have been hurriedly collected to transport it to Scandinavia."

April 9, 1940

"Hitler this spring day has occupied a couple more countries. At dawn Nazi forces invaded the two neutral states of Denmark and Norway in order, as an official statement piously puts it, 'to protect their freedom and independence'. After twelve swift hours it seems all but over. Denmark, with whom Hitler signed a ten-year non-aggression pact only a year ago, has been completely overrun, and all important military points in Norway, including the capital, are now in Nazi hands. The news is stupefying. Copenhagen occupied this morning, Oslo this afternoon, Kristiansand this evening. All the great Norwegian ports, Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen, Stavanger, captured."

"The Fuhrer has given his answer ... Germany has occupied Danish and Norwegian soil in order to protect those countries from the Allies, and will defend their true neutrality until the end of the war." 

"A special communique of the High Command said Copenhagen had been completely occupied by eight a.m. The German forces, it said, had been transported in ships from Baltic ports during the night, landed at Copenhagen at dawn, and had first occupied the citadel and the radio station."

"It was clear that the Danes had offered no resistance whatsoever. The Norwegians, it appeared, had, though the Germans were confident it would cease by nightfall."

"The Danish Minister here had protested in the Wilhelmstrasse early this morning, but had added quickly that Denmark was not in a position to fight Germany. The Norwegians were not supposed to fight, but apparently did. There are reports of German naval losses. All the Danish and Norwegian correspondents were fished out of their beds at dawn this morning and locked up at the Kaiserhof. It was the first they knew that their countries had been 'protected'.

"Tomorrow the Volkische Beobacter, Hitler's own pride (and money-maker) will bannerline in red ink: "GERMANY SAVES SCANDINAVIA!"

Berlin Diary, William L. Shirer 

Arrival of a transport of Dutch Jews in the Theresienstadt ghetto. Czechoslovakia, February 1944.

"...Thanks to the proximity of Sweden 7,200 Jews and some 700 of their non-Jewish relatives were transported to safety in the course of three weeks in October 1943. In some cases Jews were caught by the local authorities; some did not want to leave; others had no means or connections enabling them to embark on the journey. A total of 482 Jews, mostly elderly and sick, were caught and deported to the camp of Theresienstadt."

"The rescue operation by the Danish underground is exceptional because of the widespread agreement and resolve of many Danes from all walks of life – intellectuals, priests, policemen, doctors, blue-color workers – to save the Jews. While some Danes were pro-Nazi and even joined the Waffen SS and participated in war crimes, the underground members implemented the unique rescue. They viewed it as a national refutation of Nazi Germany and a reaffirmation of democratic and humanistic values. It should be noted that since the 1990’s historians have uncovered new perspectives of this operation. Danish scholars have shown that in many cases big sums of money were paid to the seamen who brought the Jews across to Sweden."

Yad Vashem 

 

That was then. This is now. Now, Denmark and Sweden suggest that Israel be booted out of the United Nations. This would be the United Nations that has, over the years, sanctioned Israel on hundreds of occasions while studiously overlooking the human rights abuses of two members of the permanent Security Council, China and Russia, and obliging Iran with critical UN positions and rarely sanctioning any Islamic-majority states for their institutionalized human rights crimes. Denmark has, while declaring itself a friend of Israel and is a home to 7,000 Danish Jews, consistently voted against Israel at the UN.

 

Statement on behalf of Denmark, France, Greece, Slovenia and the United Kingdom.We welcome the important progress that has been made in recent months to end the bloodshed in Gaza, secure the release of the hostages and turn the page on two tragic years of conflict.While the international community is focused on building a peaceful and prosperous future for Gaza, we must not forget what is happening in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

 

Israel has suffered 80 years of grievous violence committed against it and its people through lethal attacks by the Palestinian community in its unrelenting war against the Jewish State. While European countries talk incessantly of a 'two-state solution', and Israel was willing to make an agreement with the leaders of the Palestinians, each one was refused, even when Israel's outreach sought to make accommodations for all the demands of the Palestinians. To no avail. To this day, no Palestinian leader will agree to recognize Israel. Without that formal concession there is no two-state solution. For Palestinians anticipate that only Israel's destruction is acceptable, leaving the Palestinians to claim Judean ancestral land for their own.

 

The fiction of Palestinians living in 'occupied' territory cannot stand up to scrutiny. Without Israel's constant military oversight of the Palestinian territories, lethal attacks would simply proliferate as they once did, before Israel took steps to materially separate itself from the Palestinian side, making it difficult for terrorists and ordinary Palestinian citizens to enter Israel with the intention to murder Jews. With no intention to live in peace and mutual security with Israel, the Palestinians still manage to convince the West that they wish to live in peace. October 7, 2023, punctured that fantasy, but not convincingly enough for Israel's detractors.

 

Denmark has assembled the support of the European Union and other allies in its resistance to President Donald Trump's determination to coerce, threaten, and bully Greenland and Denmark into agreeing to hand over the strategic Arctic island to the United States for 'security' purposes. Denmark is outraged that the Kingdom's protectorate status of long standing of Greenland is under pressure from the United States. There is no end of support for its refusal to succumb to either blandishment or raging accusation from President Donald Trump.

 

Yet the blood shed of thousands of Israeli Jews by Palestinians and the reality that the Palestinian leadership which has groomed its population since 1948 to consider Jews and Israel their enemy needing to be vanquished by any means in an ongoing territorial battle with a country that wants and deserves to live in peace is of total disinterest to Israel's critics -- among them nations that had long been considered by Israel to be among its allies. Immense oil wealth in Arab sheikdoms has enabled states like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Iran to invest heavily in Western universities, in concert with the Muslim Brotherhood whose agenda is Israel's destruction.

 

Yet such transparent ploys fail to penetrate the logic-oblivious mind of Western governments, which  give heed to slanderous accusations against Israel, in the process to delegitimize the Jewish State whose presence is an assurance of defence of Jews throughout the world now facing a mind-wrenching ambush of virulent antisemitism fuelled by the Middle Eastern enemies of Israel who manipulate wider public opinion on charges of 'genocide' against a nation that has never been free of violent deadly attacks seeking its annihilation.

 

Greenlanders as the original inhabitants of their Arctic island, can be defended against the territorial-acquisitive manoeuvering of a powerful nation's president, with an outraged world looking on and Denmark surrounded with sympathetic allies. Israel, on the other hand, facing existential dilemmas, is viewed as an instigator of violence against a population that claims its territory as their own while perfecting terrorism to a fine degree of barbarity.

 

 

Living In An Orwellian World

"[The fact that the court was willing to discuss the genocide charges was a] mark of shame that will not be erased for generations."

"We will continue to do what is necessary to defend our country and defend our people."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Judges of the International Court of Justice are seen while ruling on a request by South Africa on behalf of Gaza on Friday. (Remko de Waal/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide established in 1948 represented a determination to ensure that the crimes of the Holocaust would never be repeated. The crime of genocide requires proof of intentional destruction "in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". When the Third Reich destroyed the lives of six million Jews in a deliberate, state-planned eradication of Europe's Jews, it was the very quintessence of genocide. The intent was there, the outcome spoke for itself. 

Israel saw its founding that same year of 1948. It exists today as a bulwark against another Holocaust. Finally, Jews had a reborn national territory of their own established on a small portion of their original ancestral land. And that nation developed a military for the obvious purpose of defending itself and Jews from another attempt at genocide. The International Court of Justice delivered its provisional response to South Africa's claim of genocide perpetrated by Israel on Gaza, on the very memorial date of the Holocaust.

Could anything be more spectacularly grim and ironic? Israel, by the metric of the court consenting to hear the case and adjudicate it well into years ahead before reaching a final decision even while failing to order Israel to retreat from Gaza, has been held in suspicion of genocide, marking it as the fifth country to face the charge of genocide in the ICJ. As in the United Nations itself, it is always the human-rights-abusing nations that hold Israel to account for violations of human rights. 

 

Israel's violation can be seen in the fact of its existence, in the indisputable fact that it exists only because it defends itself.

Sudan committed an intended genocide in Darfur. And when its president and the head of the Sudanese military were condemned by the ICC as war criminals the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League paid no mind. Syria's Bashir al-Assad has been accused by the United Nations itself of having killed 300,000 of its own citizens. Today he is in good standing in the Arab League. Iran threatens genocide against Israel, has done so openly, former President Ahmadinejad openly declared at the UN General Assembly Iran's intention to destroy Israel.

Open displays of of rampant antisemitism and the celebration of the Hamas terrorist bloody rampage through southern Israel on October 7 have taken place in huge rallies throughout the Western world. A world that stands by and merely observes 'pro-Palestinian' calls in gatherings on city streets calling for another intifada, calling for a Palestine 'from the river to the sea', calling for 'gas the Jews'. These are akin to the rallies and the vicious propaganda that presaged the Holocaust.

How can any rational mind support a charge of genocide against Palestinians by Israel, when the populations of both Gaza and the West Bank have risen steadily at a rate not seen elsewhere in the world? Of a people considered by the United Nations to be refugees. Whose leaders gather huge sums of funding from the international community free to plunder and amass personal wealth. And for Hamas to build a network of offensive tunnels while amassing a huge cache of weaponry. 

 

The target is Israel. The intent is there, the attacks are deadly. 

In Israel, 20% of the population is comprised of Palestinians. They have citizenship, a quality of life denied Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, while their leaders accumulate personal riches and deny proper administration of the territories that would allow the Palestinian people to prosper, have proper employment and live satisfying lives instead of being fed non-stop malicious lies about a neighbour hoping at some time to be able to relax its military vigilance.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators gather outside the International Court of Justice in the Hague, the Netherlands, on January 26, 2024.

Nikos Oikonomou/Anadolu via Getty Images

GAZA GENOCIDE!

"Is wartime sexual violence a horrific crime? YES, with no mistake."

"But sex exceptionalism is also traditionally used to whip up support for entire military campaigns."

"We see Israel and the  United States doing this now to justify a prolonged disproportionate air and ground war."

Heidi Matthews, Law Professor, York University 

"There is no actual evidence of these rapes and the babies with their heads cut off -- all these things are pieces of misinformation."

"So I think it shows the strength of the Zionist lobby here in Canada."

Ontario MPP Sara Jama (former NDP)

Hamas terrorists stormed the Nova festival on 7 October and killed hundreds  BBC/Nick Millard

 

There is scant sympathy for the truth in many corridors of Palestinian support among unions, academics, even government officials in Canada. And it doesn't seem to take much to convince people to come out en masse with Palestinian flags -- even some Hamas flags -- and keffiyahs, to protest against the Israel Defense Forces' invasion of Gaza after Hamas terrorists flooded through the border  into Israel on October 7 to surprise towns and kibbutz residents as they woke early Sabbath morning to find themselves in the crosshairs of terrorists.

As they march through the streets, blocking traffic, shouting their defiance of Israel and celebrating the great victory of Hamas -- a listed terrorist group in Canada -- calling for the dismantling of Israel, the gassing of Jews, and labelling Israel a genocidal state intent on destroying the lives of Palestinians, neither local authorities nor provincial or federal government agencies bat an eyelash. Muslims who have established themselves as Canadian citizens, bringing their racist hatred with them from the homelands they've rejected.

Accusations of genocide are flung carelessly about. The Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas whose academic dissertation at the Patrice Lamumba University in Moscow questioned the Holocaust, warns the world that Israel is planning a genocide against his people. This is genocide: In 1939 a global population of 16.7 million Jews existed. By 1945 that number was reduced to 11 million. It has taken almost 80 years for the Jewish population to finally reach its 1939 level. 

 

Contrast that with the plight of the Palestinians whom the United Nations has given permanent refugee status to, because no Arab state is willing to absorb those that left Israel in 1948 as refugees, for resettlement as permanent residents with citizenship status. The UN will only surrender their 'refugee' status when they 'return' to the land Israel now sits on, when 'the river to the sea' is accomplished. An estimated 850,000 original refugees has miraculously, despite the threat of genocide, ballooned at the present time to 5.3 million.

 

Accusations of evil Israeli systematic elimination of Palestinians appears to have gone off the rails. While Palestinians in the West Bank (under the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas) and Gaza (under the terrorist group Hamas) have not materially prospered because their leaders have been too engrossed in their plans to destroy Israel and retake what they believe is their entitled land which is in fact ancestral Judaean heritage, adequate state infrastructure has stagnated. Palestinians continue to languish in 'refugee camps' resembling concrete jungles of Soviet-era communal-living high rises.

While the West looks upon Hamas with a degree of tolerance even as a terrorist group, its charter unequivocally calls for the annihilation of the State of Israel and the accompanying destruction of Jewish life. That is genocide. As for the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority (Fatah/PLO/PLFP), their transparent ploy is a call for a two-state 'solution' to solve their victimhood grievances, yet this is not their real agenda, a plan that is simply described as "from the river (Jordan) to the sea (Mediterranean)". That is genocide.

"The most voluminous evidence is of bodily mutilation of sexual organs by bullet, knife or even scissors, according to an NBC News analysis of the evidence currently available. “They had a thing with sexual organs, both in women and men,” a first responder told police in videotaped testimony."

"A woman whose job it was to open the body bags of women and prepare their bodies for burial told NBC News in an interview Monday that she saw multiple female corpses that had been mutilated. “They were shot in the vagina, they were shot in the breast,” she said. “And this seemed like a systematic attempt at genital mutilation.”

Pictures of victims of the Nova music festival attack are displayed at the site near Kibbutz Re'im and Israel's border with Gaza on Nov. 28.  Spencer Platt / Getty Images

The Normalcy of Cultural Psychotic Sadism

"The riots of 1929 were driven by a campaign of incitement and lies perpetuated by Grand Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the spiritual and political leader of Palestine’s Muslims under the British Mandate. Husseini had spent the year preceding the massacre galvanizing Islamic sentiment against Palestine’s Jewish minority. He fomented support for his cause by claiming that the Jews of Palestine sought to destroy Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque to rebuild their ancient Temple, upon whose ruins Al-Aqsa was built. In sermons at Al-Aqsa the day before the massacre in Hebron, clerics called on the faithful to defend Al-Aqsa from the Jews. Armed worshippers flowed from the mosque and down to the Old City, where they attacked Jewish passersby and set fire to Jewish shops. Within hours, the riots spread throughout the country, killing 133 Jews across Palestine and wounding nearly 400 others."

"Jews had lived in Hebron since biblical times, their lives centered around the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah are believed to be buried. Much like the Jews who were killed on Oct. 7 were not settlers, the Jews killed in Hebron in 1929 were not Zionists. They did not need to be. They just needed to be Jewish."

"One of the world’s most ancient Jewish communities, composed of some 800 people before the massacre, was decimated, along with centuries of coexistence that had made Hebron a model of peace between Jews and Muslims. In the aftermath of the attack, the British authorities that ruled Palestine forced the Jews of Hebron to evacuate, turning them into refugees."

Yardena Schwartz, Tablet Magazine

 

"There can, in our view, be no doubt that racial animosity on the part of the Arabs, consequent upon the disappointment of their national political aspirations and fer for their economic future, was the fundamental cause of the outbreak of August last."

British Shaw commission 

Israeli soldiers at the forensic center in the Shura military base near Ramle, where hundreds of dead bodies arrived since the October 7 Hamas onslaught, October 24, 2023. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)

 

Only a culture that distinguishes itself through a pathology of psychotic events replete with an invasive onslaught surprising civilian residents of towns and villages for the distinct purpose of inflicting inhuman acts of violent rage and hatred could fail to be shamed after its first such breakdown of human behaviour running completely counter to our best instincts, could or would retain the memory not in shame, but as a sterling example of what had once been done, could and would be repeated. For as long as it would take to destroy those it considers a hated impediment to their own aspirations.

If those aspirations are consumed with the fixed idea that land not theirs should be theirs in perpetuity rather than the legitimate inheritors of ancestral patrimony, they have proven that nothing will dissuade them from their course of action; in effect a genocide. Imagine a scenario of recent vintage that has shocked the world in its crude and sadistic savagery where a violent invasion led to planned mass rape, slaughter, abductions of  children and the elderly, torture and mutilation of helpless civilians. That happened on October 7 of this year.

Then there are unsettling details such as house-to-house searches for frightened occupants where butchery took place, or bombs or fires set to destroy the lives of quavering people hiding in safe rooms; where  young girls and women were raped, tortured and raped again, where people were mutilated for the amusement of the invaders relishing their agonies before death took them. A baker's head thrust into a stove. A Rabbi's brain extracted from his skull. A Jewish woman hung by her feet. Breasts, noses, hands cut off bodies.

That is a description of an event that occurred in 1929, in Hebron when 3,000 Muslim Arabs armed with clubs and swords and knives mobbed the town in a frenzy of bloodlust. Add beheading babies, baking them alive in ovens, mass raping girls and women, abducting 240 infants, elderly, infirm, foreign farm workers, soldiers, and you've moved forward in time to October 7, 2023 when Palestinian Muslim Arabs reenacted scenes of stark horror on Israelis in southern Israel close to the Gaza border.

 

Zaka personnel collect clothes that belong to the victims of the October 7 Hamas massacre, near the Israeli-Gaza border, southern Israel, November 19, 2023. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

 

In Hebron in 1929, Jewish babies were thrown by Arab gangs into fires.  In 2023 babies were baked in the ovens their Jewish mothers busied themselves in their kitchens to prepare meals for their families on normal days. Instead those Jewish mothers were forced to bear witness to the unspeakable atrocities committed by Hamas operatives in pre-planned horrors designed to convince Israel it has no business installing itself where Palestinian Arabs aspire to live and reproduce.

In that earlier event, hundreds of Muslims shouting "Allah is great! Down with the Jews!" inside the Jaffa gate, seeing a Jewish man shouted "Here is a Jew" then seized him and used daggers to repeatedly stab him to death. Viewings of bodies slaughtered that day were refused by authorities in view of the fact they had been unrecognizably mutilated. In the current rendition of a similar atrocity, months after the October 7 tragedy pathologists and medical experts are still trying to identify the remains of Israelis whose corpses have been burned beyond recognition, their bones shattered and scattered.

Not to be overlooked was the eager cooperation in both instances of ordinary Muslims in the orgy of slaughter and rape and mutilation of Jews. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the PLFP may have been the active fomenters and brutalizers, but they were eagerly joined by hordes of ordinary Palestinian Gazans for whom the opportunity to join the raping, the murders, the hostage-taking appeared irresistible. And far from ordinary Gazan civilians reacting in horror to what their rulers did, they applauded the injured and frightened trophies brought back to Gaza, celebrating a victory over Israel in the guise of captured infants, grandparents, women and soldiers.

Personal effects are scattered around the Supernova Music Festival site, where hundreds were killed and dozens taken by Hamas.  Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

Deadly Delusional

"When protesters chant, 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' it is not, as some suggest, an aspirational cry echoing the hopes of Palestinians for freedom from Israeli occupation; it is -- according to this poll -- the clear expression of the genocidal intent of most Palestinians [three out of four people], who want to obliterate Israel from the map."

"Prime Minister Justin Trudeau believes [that] Israel's war against Hamas will make it harder to get to a two-state solution. He might want to run his views past ordinary Palestinians, who, according to [this] recent poll, appear committed to a Middle East where Israel doesn't exist at all."

Michael Higgins, journalist, National Post

A Palestinian demonstration in Nablus in support of prisoners held in Israeli prisons, November 14, 2023 (WAFA)

A poll, conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development, which is a research organization based in the West Bank -- recognized by the United Nations -- in a November 14 survey, asked Palestinians in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (obviously during a period with Israel's military responding to the Hamas 'provocation' of October 7 when its operatives invaded Israel to spend a horrendous day of mass butcher, rape and abduction) what type of state they would want to establish.

 

The choice was for one state for two disparate groups of people representing Arabs or Jews (i.e. Palestinians or Israelis), to which 5.4 percent responded in support. The choice of a two-state solution saw support by 17.2 percent. Then came the most popular of all the given 'solutions', the enthusiastic 74.7 percent popularity, a "Palestinian state from the river to the sea". This kind of response was not necessarily a total surprise. Previous such polls garnered similar responses.

Peace, on the terms that the West envisages, with two peaceful states side-by-side, each respecting the autonomy of the other, with a healthy trade between them and prospects of prosperity for both, seems far from the minds of the very people involved; Palestinians themselves. The survey results made it quite clear that a large majority of Palestinians are in support of terrorist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And by extension, supportive of the savage attacks of October 7 that saw 1,200 Israelis butchered.

Indeed, Palestinians saw comfort in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations taking place around the world; 78.2 percent were hopeful of the future of humanity, given the extent of those demonstrations, despite their belief that the West hates Muslims. Researchers interviewed 668 people, evenly split between men and women. The respondents included farmers, tradespeople, professionals like doctors and engineers, along with students and housewives. Of the group. the median age was 31, reflective of Palestinians as a 'young' demographic.

The question "How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th?" saw strong support of 59.3 percent, another 15.7 percent supporting it somewhat, for a combined total of 75 percent approving the slaughter of men, women and children. As for how Palestinians view the Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military wing that presumably carried out the deadly raid,79.1 percent of Gazans held a positive view of the group.

In the West Bank, however, that approval rating increased to 95.4 percent. Close to 60 percent of Gazans held a positive regard for Hamas, but in the West Bank, the approval rated 87.7 percent. The terrorist organization Islamic Jihad saw support of 71.9 percent of Gazans and over 90 percent of respondents in the West Bank, while the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade was positively viewed by close to 70 percent of Gazans and over 80 percent of West Bank respondents.

According to Justin Trudeau, a man who cannot deplore the prevalence of antisemitism in Canada without mourning the presence of Islamophobia, Israel's 'war on Hamas' will see the "pathway toward a secure, viable, independent Jewish state alongside a secure, viable independent Palestinian state" more difficult to achieve. An accomplishment indeed were it to occur, given the reality of one of those presumptive states supporting the destruction of the other.

When asked whether "your conviction in the possibility" of achieving peace with Israel or coexistence between Palestinians and Israel had increased or decreased, close to 90 percent responded it had decreased in both instances. Coexistence does appear under these circumstances, unlikely to occur without the inconvenient occasional daily disruptions of violent attacks by Palestinians against Jewish Israelis. 

When asked for a response to the question why it is that the United States and the West support Israel, answers included: 

• the Israeli lobby (91.5 percent);
• hatred of Muslims and Islam (89.5 percent); and
• political and economic interests in the region (96.3 percent).

Another question revealed that a large proportion of the Palestinian population will never 'forgive' Israel, with almost 96 percent cleaving to that sentiment (though the puzzle is forgive Israel for what? its existence?). And those who will never 'forget' what Israel 'did', garnered 93 percent. (What Israel DID? Does that mean having the bloody nerve to protect itself from deadly assaults?) The absolute capper: the number of Palestinians who feel pride after October 7: 94.3 percent.

 

Almost 80 percent of Palestinians are increasingly committed to a Palestinian state, than ever before. And from the responses to this poll it seems obvious enough that their dream of statehood can only come to fruition with the destruction of Israel. Their reliance on terrorist groups to deliver that prize to them sums up the chances of Israel achieving peace anytime soon -- if ever -- with a society and culture addicted to hate and violence. 

 

Palestinians shout slogans during a protest in the West Bank city of Hebron on Nov. 17. Photo by HAZEM BADER/AFP

"While support for terror organizations is high, 87.3% of the Palestinians believe that the Palestinian Authority plays a negative role. Only 23.2% believe that Fatah plays a positive role. When asked who should govern the Gaza Strip and the areas in Judea and Samaria that are under the control of the PA, only 8.4% supported the PA. In comparison, 85.8% supported Hamas continuing to play a role in the Palestinian government – 13.6% supported a Hamas-only government, while 72.2% supported a “national unity” government – i.e., a government comprised of Fatah and Hamas."

Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

Jewish Indigeneity

"We will not recognize Israel at all, because it is our land."

"At that moment [when two Hamas operatives dressed as ultra-Orthodox Jews before detonating two separate bombs to maximize Jewish deaths] I remembered what Israel did against our people."

"I say it's the fault of those who came from America, Britain, South Africa, to settle in my country, to settle in Palestine. They killed themselves."

"According to the Koran, Jews will be dismissed from Palestine and Palestine will be liberated by Muslims."

"An open-ended ceasefire is forbidden, because our land is occupied."

(Now deceased) Hamas political leader Dr.(MD) Abdel Aziz Rantisi

 

Jews, as it happens are not authentically indigenous to Poland or to Brooklyn. New genetic technologies confirm that Jewish origins are in the Middle East, going back to the Neolithic era. There has been, furthermore a permanent presence of Jews in the Middle East in all the millennia since then. Much, much predating the Zionist movement calling on the diaspora to re-assemble in their ancestral homeland, made urgent for survival of Judeans following the Holocaust. 

 

In Israel the majority of the population are primarily descended from North African and Middle Eastern Jewish communities who sought refuge in Arab communities after their forcible expulsion from Judaea, by the Roman occupiers of Judaic geography, after the cataclysmic Judean revolt and Roman response that levelled much of Jerusalem, along with the Second Temple of Solomon. The rest are comprised of the descendants of European Jewry returned to the homeland.

 

Hamas named their October 7 massacre in southern Israel after the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood occurred as a savagely sadistic sacrifice to Islam by a theocratic fanatical terrorist group. The Al-Aqsa Mosque was built over the ruins of the Temple Mount which formerly sited the Temple of Jerusalem, erected in 515 BCE, its destruction by Rome dating from the year 70CE. The laughable fiction that Jews are not indigenous to the land that Israel sits on is a Palestinian fantasy.

In 1948 when the United Nations partitioned the British Mandate of Palestine with a Jewish portion and an Arab portion, the Jewish establishment in the region immediately accepted, while the Arabs refused, leading to a joint Arab-military invasion to evacuate Jews from their nascent state. An enterprise which failed, leaving the Arabs calling themselves Palestinians who had fled prior to the invasion, disappointed that their expectation of return to take possession of the land Israel sits on, was no longer possible.

Since that long-ago event, attempts to work out peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinian leaders negotiating on behalf of those whose interests they claimed to represent failed, time and again. Despite the fact that Israel offered concessions and compromises and the Palestinians offered none on their part, in the end refusing all conciliatory offers for peace. The latest such agreement, hosted by former U.S. President Clinton, saw Yasser Arafat in 2000 tell Bill Clinton that he would be risking  his life by agreeing to the peace offer. 

When Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005 from the Gaza Strip, forcibly evacuating settlers to leave the area to the Palestinians, Ariel Sharon thought that this would be an opportunity to convince the Palestinians that peace was possible. Philanthropic American Jews spent millions offering a vast greenhouse operation to the Palestinians in Gaza, who contemptuously destroyed it rather than develop it into a worthwhile enterprise and opportunity for employment. Palestinians destroyed all the synagogues after the withdrawal.

Lawlessness became the order of the day in Gaza, although the secular Fatah which also ruled the West Bank was in authority. With the arrival of Hamas, for whom Islam is paramount, the two factions faced off in a civil war of extreme brutality, with Hamas finally prevailing, killing and expelling Fatah from Gaza. Hamas's rule served to restore order, and it was an order based on ruthless autocracy, one that focused not on building a civil infrastructure but a military encampment to which the population's welfare was an afterthought.

"As Hamas took over the remnants of PA institutions in the strip, it established a judiciary and put in place authoritarian institutions. In theory, Hamas governs in accordance with the sharia-based Palestinian Basic Law, as does the PA; but it has generally been more restrictive than the law requires, including by controlling how women dress and enforcing gender segregation in public during the early years of its rule. The watchdog group Freedom House found in 2020 that the “Hamas-controlled government has no effective or independent mechanisms for ensuring transparency in its funding, procurements, or operations.” Hamas also represses the Gazan media, civilian activism on social media, the political opposition, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), leaving it without mechanisms for accountability."

Council on Foreign Relations

A parade for the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s militant arm, is held in Gaza. Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Antisemitism at University of Toronto Medical School

"Personal experiences as a faculty member and as a clinician [including antisemitism that I personally witnessed or experienced] led to the writing of this report]."

"There are those who do not only cross over the line to anti-Jewish hatred but who do so proudly and perhaps sometimes as the primary goal, hiding behind the Palestinian cause all the while."

"I personally experienced many instances of antisemitism, including being told that all Jews are liars, that Jews lie to control the university or the faculty or the world, to oppress or hurt others, and/or for other forms of gain; and that antisemitism can't exist because everything Jews say are lies, including any claims to have experienced discrimination."

Dr. Ayelet Kuper, associate professor, department of medicine, University of oronto

 Thee was a time in Canada -- and Toronto -- in the 1930s when signs were erected reading: "No Jews, Blacks of Dogs Allowed". It was a time when entry to universities was difficult for Jews with strictly limited enforced quotas. When universities adopted a rigid system of exclusion, just as private clubs did. Public parks and beaches were also off limits to Jews. Antisemitism ran rampant, so deeply entrenched that when Jews were desperate to escape Germany and certain death few countries saw their way clear to accepting these refugees, certainly not Canada. 

 

Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Incidents of antisemitism have once again crept out of the dank, dark sewers that once quietly hosted them, to again find free expression in places where Jews once felt comfortably that they were finally accepted and the miserable days of active Jew-hate was firmly and permanently relegated to the past. A contrite world post-Holocaust made it socially unacceptable for people to utter racist comments in public. People who harboured rank beliefs in Jewish plots to control the world kept their own counsel.

And then, over a gradual period, with the rebirth of the Jewish state of Israel, conflict between Arabs living in the area that was historically Judean, named as a province of 'Palestine' -- where indigenous Jews traditionally lived -- by the Roman occupation a the time of the Roman empire, was contested by Arabs throughout the Middle East as Arab/Muslim land, not Judean. The first reaction to the establishment of Israel reborn, was military violence which failed to reach its goal.

 

Until the Arab population of 'Palestine' took for themselves the identification of Palestinians as well as the historical presence that was Judaean in character, claiming themselves to be the legitimate authentic indigenous population, Jews mere colonialists. Palestinians draped themselves in victimhood and the world responded with concern. Not concern over Palestinian Arab violence extinguishing the lives of Jews, but the public relations campaign launched to slander the very existence of Israel as illegitimate.

It was a campaign that couldn't fail to resonate with closet antisemites until they become sufficiently emboldened to air their anti-Jewish slurs in the light of day, portraying themselves as sympathetic to the Palestinian 'cause' against invading, oppressive Jews. Hiding behind the noxious vision of a Jewish state bent on wresting control of territory from its original inhabitants as Palestinian Arabs claimed themselves to be, the campaign of disentitlement and delegitimization spread in lock step with visible antisemitism.

Now, on university campuses all over North America, and Canada in particular, Jewish students are harassed and subjected to the racist label of oppressors of victimized Palestinians. A front, in actual fact for the oldest hate in the world. It has become 'legitimate' to criticize Israel and arguing that to do so has nothing to do with antisemitism. In the process victimizing Canadian Jews as accessories to the Jewish state's unwillingness to allow itself to be destroyed. The upshot is that verbal, violent antisemitism has become a dominant creed once again.

Toronto's premier institute of higher education has tarnished itself by becoming an accessory to blatant lies about Israel and harming the lives of Jewish Canadians through the semi-institutionalization of antisemitism. A new academic paper published in the Canadian Medical Education Journal by a credible witness within the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at University of Toronto describes the situation, within a greater aura of disinterest in and unwillingness to do anything about the viral presence of antisemitism.

And while the Faculty of Medicine at the university issued a rote condemnation of antisemitism to the effect of stating that "it takes courage to step forward and shine a light on hate. We hear you. We see you and we are with you", nothing has followed that kindly sentiment.

• Being told that because she was born in Israel and refuses to denounce the Jewish state, she is “inherently racist, and therefore any discrimination I encounter as a Jew in Canada is therefore deserved.” 
• A faculty member [told her] that Jews mustn’t be allowed to speak on their own behalf about antisemitism and shouldn’t even be subject to the protection from discrimination as outlined in the Ontario Human Rights Code, on the grounds that what Jews call antisemitism isn’t real.
• “In the years before the war in Gaza, I overheard faculty colleagues complaining about ‘those Jews who think their Holocaust means they know something about oppression.’” 
• [I] heard about non-Jewish students who thought a Jewish classmate had the power to block their residency matches. 
• Non-Jewish students asked her why educational content about Jews was “being forced on the students by the Jew who bought the faculty.” 

Dr. Ayelet Kuper’s article in the Canadian Medical Education Journal.

For The Record

"The organizer of this event wrote : 'As Canadians, we need to condemn this illegal annexation and condemn Trudeau’s support of Israel, as well as show our support for Palestine and demand justice for it’s (sic) people. Palestinian or not, this is a human rights issue and we all need to come together to stand against it'."

"But far from marching 'as Canadians' for a 'human rights issue', the protestors could barely conceal their hatred of Jews and their clear rejection of Canada as their country."

"One slogan chanted by the crowd revealed the true nature of the protest as not being against Israel’s ill-fated annexation bid, but a visceral hatred of Jews and the call for an extermination of the State of Israel itself."

"A video shows the protesters chanting : 'Palestine is our country / The Jews are our dogs'."

"The slogan, 'Free Palestine, From the River to the Sea' is understood by Israelis as a call for their country’s eradication despite many apologists on the left having tried to sugarcoat the slogan with politically correct interpretations."

Tarek Fatah, Toronto Sun

Canada is an immigrant nation insofar as its population is largely comprised of people who migrated to Canada's top third of North America from their places of birth elsewhere, around the globe. And around the globe is precisely where they came from; everywhere in the world. Escaping persecution, conflict, lack of opportunity, hunger; all manner of reasons that would impel people to leave their countries of origin. Refugees too have found their place in Canada, a place where those hounded by fear and terror fled to find safety elsewhere.

In early migrations people were glad to escape their insecurity and to forge a way for themselves to prosper in peace and security, where their children could receive good educations, and future prospects for employment and satisfaction in life were all connected. And while ethnic or religious groups tended to gather in little communities, they also tended to integrate into the larger society's culture and values.

There are populous communities of East Indians, Chinese, Germans, Italians, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Somalians and many others who found comfortable homes in Canada; secure, safe and full of opportunities. People accommodating themselves to the presence of others. Many such communities brought with them the emotional disengagement forced upon them by dictatorial governments, glad to escape, resentful they had to. 

Generation after  generation of hyphenated Canadians, finding their place in the country, learning the language, finding employment, housing, schooling and access to good medical care. Canada has become a nation whose universities draw foreign students to study and achieve and often to become Canadian citizens and remain; students from China, from India, from African countries, Saudi Arabia....

Many of those communities have been in Canada for a century and more, with long-established roots there. All, invariably, retain at least a vestige of connection through extended family and friends in their countries of origin. And then there are the Palestinians, many of whom migrated to Canada to become citizens. And who brought their violent animus against Jews and Israel with them. Leading to mounting public relations ploys to focus on the creation of the State of Israel.

The unrelenting hostility aimed at Israel and targeting Jews of the diaspora in Canada has mounted year after year. The infiltration of academia, the political arena, and social culture has been relentless; the barbs and arrows shooting straight at Jews and Israel. Anywhere in the world can be found fertile ground for Jew-hatred seeping out of the sewers of mindless bigotry, readily harnessed to a 'cause' that vilifies the Jews. The campaign that led to BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions} among them.

Not to be forgotten is the now-annual "Israel Apartheid Week". Labelling Israel as an apartheid state when 2 million of its roughly 9 million population is Arab Palestinian. There are Kurds and Druze, Christians and B'hai with Israeli citizenship. And among the Arabs and the Druze and the Kurds there are those elected to government as MKs, there are non-Jewish judges, ambassadors, professionals of all stripes including Palestinian Arabs staffing hospitals in Israel.

On both the left and the right extremes anti-Semitism flourishes and it is fuelled now in large part by 'sympathy' for the 'Palestinian cause'. Where Jewish or Israeli supporters and speakers are persona non-grata, through the organized Palestinian movement of disenfranchising Israel as a settler-colonist state. It is where Palestinians and their non-Arab supporters raise their anti-Israel placards at any public event, any organized protest having nothing whatever to do with the MidEast; events that are invariably co-opted for the Palestinian 'cause' against 'apartheid' and Israeli 'occupation' of its ancient homeland, Judea.

On the streets of Canadian citizens Jews have been threatened, in Edmonton and Montreal and Toronto, with young Palestinian men chanting "The Jews are our dogs!". When a disturbed (non Jewish) mind ran down a family of Muslims in London, Ontario leading to the death of four people, injuring the fifth, Jews were among those aghast at the targeted carnage. 

And then further aghast when a London imam during a nationally broadcast memorial service for the family intoned "Whatever is happening in Jerusalem and Gaza is related to whatever happened in London, Ontario. Period." Whatever happens anywhere, at any time, occurs through a Jewish plot. The audience at the mosque broke into loud cheers. The producer of an Arabic-language program on OMNI Television repeatedly stated the killer of the Muslim family was a Jew.

This is the Canada today for Jewish Canadians. Generations of Jewish Canadians who at one time suffered public humiliation when signs at golf courses and private clubs read "No Jews, Blacks or dogs permitted entry". Where universities had quotas for Jewish attendance. During World War II the government of the day turned away the St.Louis carrying German Jews trying to escape their fate in Germany, only to be turned back by every national port they entered.

Anti-Jewish discrimination, although unlawful in Canadian law at the present time has resurfaced with a vengeance. Among the documented cases of discriminatory racist attacks, Jews suffer the most of those assaults against human rights and human dignity, in Canada.

Heroes of the Palestinian 'Resistance'

"Palestinian society views its prisoners in Israeli jails as soldiers on the frontlines of the violent rejectionism that has characterized the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for more than a century.

Palestinian terrorists sitting in Israeli jails are lionized and paid handsomely for their 'sacrifice'. The so-called "pay for slay" stipends to prisoners and their families are seen as vital for the Palestinian Authority."

Palestinian society views prisoners in Israeli jails as soldiers on the front lines.

"As Palestinian Authority leaders have repeatedly said, the prisoners are at the forefront of their conflict against the Jewish state. P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas has stated repeatedly: 'If we had only a single penny left, we would pay it to families of the martyrs and prisoners'."

"In July, at a ceremony honoring terrorists in Israeli prisons, he called them 'pioneers' and 'stars in the firmament of the Palestinian people's struggle'."

Gregg Roman, Middle East Forum

Israel too mourns its dead; civilians targeted for death and those in the military who fight for Israel's right to exist, challenged continually by the Palestinian factions of Fatah and Hamas where the agenda of the former is to 'persuade' Israel to disappear and that of the latter which is to violently destroy it. Both pursue their agendas with vigour and determination, inciting their followers to 'resist' the 'occupiers' by employing any means at hand to maim and kill and terrorize Israelis.

 

While Israelis mourns their dead as victims of violence, the Palestinians mourn theirs as martyrs for the cause, that cause being the elimination of Israel and the triumphant conquest of 'Palestine' which Arabs who identify themselves as Palestinian claim has been theirs in perpetuity. That would be the very same 'Palestine' of historical, Biblical inheritance, the home of Judeans, ancestors of the present-day Jewish Israelis. Palestinian Arabs have co-opted Jewish history as their own.

 

A year ago Israeli forces shot dead a young Palestinian man who had deliberately driven his car at speed into a military checkpoint. Ahmed Erekat plowed his vehicle with intent toward the Israeli soldiers manning the checkpoint. A not uncommon occurrence, one the military responds to with lethal force themselves to halt an ongoing attack. The dead man's father, Mustafa Erekat, claims his son was innocent, shot in cold blood for no reason whatever. 

 

He was, in fact, following in the incitement-footsteps of his late uncle Saeb Erekat a vehement spokesman for the Palestinian Authority.

A Palestinian rights group, the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center (Palestinians love the sound of legitimacy the use of 'human rights' in a title gives them) claims that Israel holds bodies of Palestinians who were killed while in the act of committing attacks against Israelis as an unfair cudgel of authority against innocent Palestinians. Israel, on the other hand, does so as ammunition to enable them to make exchanges with Fatah and Hamas of Israeli dead kept by Hamas and Fatah as bargaining chips.

Which often sees lopsided agreements take place, with Israel agreeing to release hundreds of Palestinians both dead and those who are prisoners to secure the release of a single Israeli civilian or soldier. Close to 200 Lebanese and Palestinians killed in fighting were released in 2008 for the remains of two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah two years earlier. That trade included five Lebanese prisoners, one of whom was a notorious terrorist.

"They have no right to keep my son and it is my right for my son to have a good funeral", Mustafa Erekat insists. His son Ahmed was to be married shortly. "He had a house that was ready for him." His grievance includes that he has no idea where his son is buried. There is a reason for that. Israel keeps the details of where it buries the corpses of those killed while attempting to or succeeding in murdering Israelis, to prevent them from becoming shrines to the 'martyrs' they are claimed to be.

When the Palestinian Authority (Fatah) or Hamas has possession of Israeli bodies they don't divulge where they are and they are mourned in absentia, their families awaiting closure with the release of the body for proper burial. They have no appeal to a lawful authority at their command. Whereas Palestinians can appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court for a judgement in their case which may or may not result in upholding their appeal or rejecting it. In the case of rejection, as in Mustafa Erekat's son's case, he plans to appeal the Supreme Court decision.

 

Israeli security forces cover the body of Palestinian Ahmad Erekat, who was shot dead at a checkpoint near Abu Dis in the West Bank