As the anniversary of October 7 approaches, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have decided to escalate their anti-Israel messaging while also adopting the ludicrous position of overtly supporting terrorists.
It’s a strange way for Canada to treat an ally — but not surprising considering the facile and simplistic response of the Liberals to events in the Middle East.
The anniversary of the terror attack should be about many things: remembering the grotesque acts of violence, for instance, or feeling sorrow for the victims, or fearing for the safety of the 97 hostages still held by Hamas thugs. But that would show too much humanity.
Instead, the anniversary will almost certainly be characterized by clown politics and self-engrossed performance art of the type shown by numerous Liberals, union leaders, academics, students and protesters in the past year.
Within hours of the butchery that killed 1,200 people in Israel last year, protesters in Canada were taking to the streets in pro-Palestinian rallies that openly celebrated the slaughter.
Shortly afterwards, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario leader Fred Hahn praised the act of “resistance” in a tweet. He later apologized, but his stunt moved the focus away from where it should have been — on an appalling and evil tragedy.
Soon it was thought acceptable in Canada to tear down posters showing Israeli hostages. Large-scale protests erupted on streets and university campuses, and Jewish businesses, synagogues and daycare centres were attacked.
One has to wonder: did the dead, the victims of mass rape, the butchered, the tortured and the 240 hostages get overshadowed because they were Jews?
Meanwhile, the Liberals added to this fetid atmosphere with a foreign policy that was as inept as it was foul.
In December, the Liberals supported a United Nations General Assembly motion for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza — a motion that never once mentioned Hamas. Canada’s position earned the praise of Ghazi Hamad, the senior Hamas leader who had vowed to carry out the October 7 bloodshed “again and again.”
The Trudeau Liberals stopped issuing new export permits for military equipment destined for Israel and resumed funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the discredited UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
UNRWA has been a prime example of the Liberals’ naivete. Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly resumed funding despite allegations by Israel that UNRWA employees took part in the October 7 attacks. An investigation by the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services concluded that nine employees may have been involved.
And this week, UNRWA admitted that a suspended employee killed in an airstrike in Lebanon was one of Hamas’s top commanders.
But Joly’s wilful blindness continues. This week she tweeted about meeting Mohammad Mustafa, the Palestinian Authority prime minister, at the United Nations while also reaffirming “our support for UNRWA.” She did not mention any Israelis.
The Liberals are also pushing to break with decades of Canadian foreign policy by advancing a Parliamentary committee motion to study the issue of Palestinian statehood. The committee, the motion says, supports “the recognition of a viable and independent State of Palestine.”
Only in a morally void universe where a pervasive Liberal worldview existed would Hamas be rewarded for its vile atrocities and war crimes with the recognition of a State of Palestine.
In the days to come, the clowns will be out on the streets. The anti-Israel Palestinian Youth Movement will be protesting at the Israeli consulate in Montreal on Oct. 7 to honour dead Hamas terrorists as “martyrs.”
Fear of students going on the rampage as the anniversary approaches led Pascale Déry, Quebec’s higher education minister, to meet the heads of her province’s universities to see how they plan to discourage “intimidation, harassment, racism and violence.”
The Toronto District School Board, meanwhile, thought it appropriate to take children as young as eight on a “field trip” last month to demonstration supporting a First Nation community — only for it to morph into an anti-Israel protest.
As we watch the circus spectacle, victims have been sidelined and the utter barbarity of October 7 has gone ignored.
Women, in particular, were brutalized in a sadistic fashion. Mass rape is too sanitized a description for what these women endured. One New York Times investigation from last December recounted breasts cut off, nails driven into thighs, a woman raped and knifed at the same time, severed heads of women passed around like trophies, men “talking, giggling and shouting” as they raped a woman before “literally butchering her.”
Medics and rescue personnel found dozens of dead women, naked, or half-naked, with hands and feet tied.
Many women were dragged off to the gruesome tunnels of Gaza where the sexual violence continued.
The horrific stories and videos are out there if we can stand to read and watch them. But humankind cannot bear too much reality, so we get distracted by the clamorous protests, the vitriolic union leaders, the ignorant teachers and the incompetent politicians.
Too gladly have we suffered fools, instead of caring about those who suffered horrendously on October 7.
Why care at all?
Because no man is an island, wrote English poet John Donne 400 years ago.
“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
But, sadly, Stephen Sondheim is perhaps more relevant. “Send in the clowns/Don’t bother, they’re here.”
National Post