This is war. Whose side is Canada on?

The fault line between global democracy and the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis runs right through Canada and straight up through the Liberal caucus.

Everything one writes now is overshadowed by this ghastly feeling that
we are rushing towards a precipice and, though we shan’t actually
prevent ourselves or anyone else from going over, must put up some
sort of a fight. - letter from George Orwell to Cyril Connolly, 1938.

The Home Front

Late Saturday night Defence Minister Bill Blair issued the following statement about the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City: “Analysis conducted independently by the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command indicates with a high degree of confidence that Israel did not strike the hospital on October 17, 2023. The more likely scenario is that the strike was caused by an errant rocket fired from Gaza.”

Remember: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had spent the week saying the hospital had been destroyed, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians. He’d spent the week insinuating that Israel was responsible.

Within hours of the alleged war crime, it became obvious that the hospital wasn’t destroyed. Not even close. There was an explosion in the hospital parking lot, several vehicles were incinerated and there was some damage to an adjacent building.

This did not matter to Trudeau. Canada’s Five Eyes intelligence partners had already weighed in. This didn’t matter to Trudeau. Set aside for a moment the louche handling of the “story” by several respectable news organizations whose editors should have known better, as in this, which was one of the more responsible accounts: Hundreds feared dead in Gaza hospital explosion amid conflicting accusations

There was never any evidence that the Israeli Air Force bombed a hospital. You had to to take the word of the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry for it. There was never any evidence that a hospital had been destroyed, much less that hundreds of people were killed in the incident.

This is what happened here: Hamas wanted a propaganda victory and Hamas got what it wanted. By the time you read this, Trudeau is likely to have said something anodyne along the lines of, international law must be upheld, civilian life must be protected first and foremost, and so on. If Trudeau were a cabinet minister in any respectable government he'd be made to resign. That will not happen.

The story of Trudeau’s rush to judgment will churn through its iterations in a few more news cycles, and it will likely be forgotten, or in any case lost in any number of instances in which he behaved like an excitable teenaged Tiktok influencer rather than the leader of a G7 country.

A separate statement Saturday was issued jointly by the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces:

“Analysis conducted independently by the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command indicates with a high degree of confidence that Israel did not strike the al-Ahli hospital on 17 October 2023.  Based on analysis of open source and classified reporting, the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces assess that the strike was more likely caused by an errant rocket fired from Gaza.

“This assessment is informed by an analysis of the blast damage to the hospital complex, including adjacent buildings and the area surrounding the hospital, as well as the flight pattern of the incoming munition. Reporting from Canada’s allies corroborates DND/CAF’s findings.”

I suppose we can all take some comfort in the fact that this time around Trudeau did not lower the flags on Parliament Hill and on all federal buildings across the country, but it is worth remembering what the rush to judgment about the al-Ahli hospital incited.

There were riots around the world and attacks on synagogues and Jewish homes and businesses. The summit in Amman between U.S. President Joe Biden, Jordan’s King Abdullah, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al Sisi and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas . . . cancelled.

All of it was about something that never even happened.

Full marks to the Associated Press for undertaking an exhaustive analysis of satellite imagery, photographic evidence and more than a dozen videos from the moments before, during and after the hospital explosion. AP’s conclusion: A rocket that was fired from within Gaza broke up in the air, and the explosion was “most likely caused when part of that rocket crashed to the ground.”

A similar Hamas lie was making the rounds ten days ago: ISRAEL BOMBS AND DESTROYS THE LARGEST CHURCH IN PALESTINE. The Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza, which dates to the 4th Century, was neither bombed nor destroyed. Then, just this week, coincidentally, much the same, from Al Jazeera: Israel bombs Greek Orthodox Gaza church sheltering displaced people.

What happened this week was a genuine tragedy. Dozens of people may have been killed in an assembly building adjacent to the church, but again, Israel did not bomb Saint Porphyrius church this time around, either. The IDF released footage of the strike, which shows that the Israeli Air Force targeted a nearby building but hit the street adjacent to the church compound, collapsing the assembly building.

For all Trudeau’s appeals to humanity and the necessity of safeguarding civilian life in Gaza, you’d think some of his attention might have been drawn, at least in passing, to the 7,400 rockets Hamas and Islamic Jihad have fired into Israel since October 7. Each and every one of those attacks is a double war crime: rockets launched from Palestinian civilian cover, targeting Israeli civilians.

The IDF counts roughly 550 missiles fired at Israel over the past two weeks that landed in Gaza.

The rot runs deeper than you might think

Background to what follows: this Real Story newsletter from last December: Can We Stop Normalizing Antisemitism Now? It may be ineradicable, but can we at least not subsidize it? And if it's not antisemitism we're dealing with, then what are we supposed to call it? When you’re done with today’s newsletter you might also want to read this piece of mine in the National Post, from around the same time: Trudeau Liberals can't stop attracting antisemites.

Michael Levitt is a good egg. Until three years ago, he was a Liberal MP and chair of the House foreign affairs and international development committee. He resigned to take up his post as CEO of the Canadian Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies.

This week was a bit of a heartbreak for him, but he says it confirmed his “longstanding concerns over the alarming anti-Israel bias I have witnessed permeating certain cliques within the Liberal caucus.”

Levitt was referring specifically to this letter, signed by several of his former Liberal colleagues, which calls for “an immediate ceasefire” and blames Israel for the catastrophe ignited by the Hamas pogrom two weeks ago. It absolves Hamas of its ongoing war crimes, and denies Israel the right to defend its people.

Among the signatories are 33 Liberal, NDP and Green MPs. None of those names will be unfamiliar to astute readers of this newsletter. Among them are the usual apologists and errand-runners for Beijing and for Tehran.

Remember their names. The list is at bottom.

Know thine enemy

It seems like a hydra-headed adversary, but it’s also pretty straightforward. The matter of what Hamas is really all about was one of the main points of my conversation with the National Post’s John Ivison and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Sarah Teich. You can listen in or watch it right here: Canadians need to realize Hamas just wants to kill all Jews.

I’ve been doing my damnedest over the past two weeks in this newsletter and in the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen to try to lay out the facts that show Hamas is not and was never just some kind of barbaric national liberation movement, that Hamas is not fighting for the cause of a Palestinian state. What happened on October 7 had nothing to do with any “occupation.”

The primary purpose of Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya is to drive the Jews of the Holy Land into the tomb or into the sea. If you can’t get that into your heads, you will never understand what has happened in Israel and Palestine since October 7, and you will never grasp the depravity of the celebratory All Out For Palestine rallies that have been erupting in the streets or Europe and North America, and perhaps most noticably in Canada, ever since.

Sarah, a widely respected authority on counterterrorism and the laws of war, was quite right when she said that the way I’d put it was not the half of it: “It’s not just ‘let’s push the Jews into the sea’. It’s ‘let’s kill every Jew in the world’.” And it’s not just about Hamas.

It’s about Hamas’ benefactors in the Khomeinist tyranny in Tehran, Vladimir Putin’s genocidal war of conquest in Ukraine, and Beijing’s Han-supremacist “calculated agenda” to cripple the world’s liberal democracies and destroy the institutions of civilization built out of the ashes of the Shoah.

That’s the bigger picture. That’s the “war” I’m talking about. As for the foreground, once more, with feeling:

Hamas is the contemporary equivalent of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. Its origins lie in the 1940s’ concordat between Hassan al-Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood and the Third Reich. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is the direct heir and successor of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem who was Hitler’s chief Arab ally during the 1930s and 1940s.

What happened two Saturdays ago, the bloodiest pogrom since the Holocaust, was indistinguishable from the mass murders of Jews carried out by Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen in Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1940s, and the mass murders of Jews incited by Al-Husseini in the 1920s, from Hebron in the south to Sefat in the north, long before the State of Israel was even born.

John and Sarah and I touched on several issues arising from the crisis - and it is a global crisis. My case is that Israel’s friends among the UN’s member states should no longer burden Israel with the responsibility of coping with Gaza and containing Hamas, no matter the benefits of “stability” this arrangement accrues to the rest of us.

In the Post and the Citizen this week, I laid out that case: The 'Palestinian problem' is not Israel's to solve alone: The international community needs to shoulder responsibility for the nightmare Israelis and Palestinians have been expected to endure.

I’ve been covering this story for 17 years now, from Russia to Hong Kong to Syria and Jordan and Turkey and Iraq and especially from Afghanistan, and occasionally from Israel/Palestine. I’ve never played clairvoyant, at least no more than to hint now and then that a very hard rain would some day fall.

Nobody knows what fresh hell awaits, so the use I’m trying to make of myself with this newsletter is in disabusing Real Story subscribers of the commonplace ill-advised notions about what’s been going on here, and to shed as much light as I can on what’s been happening in plain sight and under the radar for too damn long.

So, to that end, after you’re done here, if you haven’t already, start with this:

Everything has changed. It's not just about Israel. It's about civilization and its enemies. And its enemies are among us. Then this: In front Of One’s Nose: A shadowy alliance of Islamist antisemites and Canadian "progressives" goes back two decades, to a founding gathering in Cairo. . .

Then this: 'How could this be happening?' Bloodcurdling oaths of allegiance to Hamas, faculty-lounge conflations of mass murder with "resistance," Jews from Paris to Vancouver afraid for their children. This did not come out of nowhere. Then this: A reckoning is long past due. Long guarded by taboo and "progressive" manners, left-wing antisemitism has been incubating in Canada for years. This can't go on.

Ther’s no paywall in today’s newsletter, but the work I’m attempting I can’t do for free. So be mensches:

Back to this newsletter’s main event. . .

Well, there it is. It was just bad timing.

Someone else who should not be forgotten in all this is Fred Hahn, national vice-president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees. Hahn’s reaction to the slaughter of all those Jews at the kibbutzim of southern Israel and at the Re'im music festival was to express his happiness with Palestinian “resistance.” This weekend, Hahn “apologized.”

You can read his apology here. Short version: “On any other day, it would have been okay, but because I expressed my delight the day after the bloodiest pogrom in nearly 80 years, it was bad public relations for CUPE, so, sorry about that.”

CUPE’s Fred Hahn. This is not the face of a trade unionist in the tradition of the brave women and men who fought for an eight-hour day, a fair day’s wage for an honest day’s work, and the principle that what we demand for ourselves we want for all.

Remember, for God’s sake. The murderers from the Hamas al-Qassam Brigades’ Nukhba special forces were accompanied by Hamas “journalists,” one of whom, Hasan Eslih, filmed himself in a Gaza supermarket on Friday complaining that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was so dire that he was reduced to relying on a packet of crisps for breakfast.

The Hamas butchers livestreamed their savageries, in the same way the white supremacist and ecofascist Brenton Harrison Tarrant livestreamed his murder of 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, four years ago. That’s something I’ll never forget. During my time in Christchurch in the immediate aftermath there were no mass All Out For Tarrant rallies, and there was no chin-stroking among television “experts” about whether Tarrant perhaps had some sort of point.

In New Zealand, no throngs of marchers shouted their solidarity with white supremacist atrocities or problematized the murder of innocently devout Muslims at prayer in their mosques.

There was no York University Student Union, which declared in an open letter after October 7 that the evisceration of babies and the kidnapping of their mothers constituted a “strong act of resistance” that was “justified and necessary.”

A bit of good news in all this: York University is demanding that the executive boards of three York student unions resign in response to their joint statement about “justified and necessary” pogroms. The student unions face sanctions, including the university’s refusal to recognize their legitimacy as representatives of the university’s students.

Here Come The Peacemakers

I’ve never been what you would call an admirer of the comically-misnamed Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East. This goes to my point that we should not really be surprised by the genteel antisemitic obscenities of the past two weeks: Nine years ago CJPME was very cross with me for writing this story, in the Ottawa Citizen: Why aren't we talking about "The Anti-Israel Lobby"?

Among their boasts: CJPME is Canada’s “premier advocacy organization” on the Middle East and “the ‘go to’ organization for politicians, policy makers, and the media” on Middle East issues, and they had a hand in ensuring that the insufficiently anti-Israel Thomas Mulcair had to fight through four ballots to win the leadership of the New Democratic Party.

Well, here’s CJPME board member Ghada Sasa on Thursday. She claims she’s come across reports from attendees at the “unity and love” Re’im music festival where 260 Jews were massacred that the IDF did the butchering, and the Hamas terrorists meant no harm. “A lot of the people who were killed were actually killed by Israel.” Sasa says festival attendees had reported that “Hamas was not trying to kill us, and the Israelis were just firing at us.”

Can we at least stop pretending this isn’t happening, please?

It’s the duplicity, stupid: Moscow, Beijing, Ottawa

“Beijing and Moscow share the same position on the Palestine issue,” Beijing’s Middle East envoy Zhai Jun said the other day, accompanying his Kremlin counterpart Mikhail Bogdanov in Doha, Qatar. Vladimir Putin had just met with Chinese strongman Xi Jinping in Beijing.

Here’s their position: “The fundamental reason for the current situation in the conflict is that the legitimate rights of the Palestinian nation have not been guaranteed.” Meanwhile, Beijing is bankrolling Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine, and the Hamas paymasters and armourers in Tehran are building a new factory in Russia for 6,000 Iranian-designed drones for Putin to use in slaughtering Ukrainian civilians.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Tehran in September and toured a drone and missile factory, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is off to Tehran for meetings tomorrow. And of course, the Khomeinists claim neutrality in Putin’s genocidal war.

And of course, Putin and Xi say they want a “ceasefire” in the Israel-Hamas war. And of course: “The attack on a hospital in Gaza is a tragedy and a humanitarian catastrophe. I hope that it will be a signal that the conflict must end.” Who said that? No peeking. It could have been Justin Trudeau, but it was Vladimir Putin.

The Beiijing-Moscow line is indistinguishable from the position adopted by those 33 Canadian MPs. It is also indistinguishable from the position of the CJPME, whose statement about the al-Ahli hospital was indistinguishable from the Hamas propaganda lie: “On Tuesday, the bombing of the Anglican Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City killed hundreds of people, most of them children. Over 5,000 people had been sheltering inside. This is a war crime.”

And here’s who has endorsed the CJPME’s Moscow-Beijing “ceasefire” demand: Black Lives Matter - Canada, the United Church of Canada, CUPE Ontario, Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, the Iranian-Canadian Congress, the National Council of Canadian Muslims, the Catholic Archdiocese of Montreal and the Public Service Alliance of Canada. Among many others.

I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether these institutions are are run by useful idiots, or people who genuinely believe what their prime minister says, or whether they know damn well what they’re doing.

The signatories to that letter. . .