NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh wants you to know that he condemns “the horrific Hamas terror attacks in Israel in which 1,200 people were killed,” as he put it in a statement on Monday, the first anniversary of the October 7 massacre. But Singh also wants you to know that he doesn’t think Israel should do anything about it.
Like much of the progressive left in Canada, Singh doesn’t appear to think Israel has any right to protect its citizens or defend itself against external threats, and he is willing to spread distortions and lies in order to paint Israel as an irredeemable monster state.
Rather than issuing a statement to commemorate October 7 and be done with it, Singh attacked “the response” from “Netanyahu’s extremist government” — a response that, according to the NDP leader, was not aimed at eliminating the very real threat from Hamas, but instead constitutes a “brutal assault on the people of Gaza” and an example of “collective punishment.”
He then, insanely and without citing a shred of evidence, accused Israel — sorry, “Netanyahu’s extremist government” — of committing an “ongoing genocide.”
October 7 was a vicious assault on Jewish people by a genocidal death cult that aims to exterminate Israel from existence. And yet, any response from Israel was going to be condemned by “progressives” the world over, who wave away Hamas’s assault as mere “resistance.” The terrorist group started this war, and is now losing it. Progressives want Israel to lose the war instead.
Many of them won’t be satisfied unless Israel permits its enemies to invade without consequence, and gives them free run of the country until the Jewish state is no more. When the fanatics in the streets chant “From Palestine to Lebanon, Israel will soon be gone,” that is exactly what they mean, and this is who the NDP has chosen to side with.
The assault on Gaza has indeed been devastating for the enclave. Some 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to extremely untrustworthy figures from the Hamas-controlled health ministry. However, Israel has killed nearly half that number of Hamas fighters, resulting in the lowest ratio of combatant to civilian casualties of any recent conflict, and perhaps of any modern conflict.
Hamas, on the hand, has turned schools, mosques and hospitals into military bases, and uses its population as a human shield to ensure Israel faces maximum opprobrium, a deliberate strategy, of which it is quite proud. Useful idiots, like those in the Liberal government in Canada, the Democratic party in the United States, the British Labour party and, of course, the NDP, swallow Hamas propaganda without question.
The nonsense left trivializes the Holocaust (six-million dead), the Rwandan genocide (800,000 dead in 100 days) and any number of other atrocities, including the mass starvation of Ukrainians in the 1930s (four-million dead) and Mao’s engineered famine in the ’50s (at least 30-million dead), by conflating acts of war with “genocide.”
The term has become essentially meaningless at this point. The casual way the word “genocide” is dropped without evidence, as if it is uncontested truth, including by Singh, shows that it serves no other purpose but to slander Israel.
In the NDP leader’s statement, he tries to claim he is calling for peace by saying, “there is no possible military solution to this decades-long conflict.” But what he’s actually calling for, whether he’s too foolish to realize it or not, is more violence against Jews.
He demands the Canadian government “recognize the state of Palestine alongside the State of Israel,” a totally ridiculous statement that’s divorced from reality. For starters, there is no “state of Palestine” to recognize. Typically, under international law, a state only exists if it has fixed borders, an uncontested government and control of its foreign relations and security, as well as a permanent population. In the case of “Palestine,” there is simply nothing to recognize.
More to the point, Singh’s suggestion that any Palestinian state should exist “alongside” Israel assumes that a “two-state solution” can be merely willed into existence. History tells a much different story. Virtually every time the Palestinians have been offered a state next to a Jewish state, they have respond with violence.
This happened in 1937, when the British brought forward a partition plan in response to an Arab revolt. Following a break, hostilities resumed after the Arab side rejected the proposal. In 1947, a United Nations partition plan was rejected and the Arab side responded with war. And in 2000, following yet another peace offer, the Palestinians launched the Second Intifada.
The Palestinian leadership is simply uninterested in any solution that does not involve wiping Israel off the map.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Israeli historian Benny Morris put it this way: “They ensure that each time the idea of a two-state solution is proposed, less of Palestine is offered to them.”
He explained that, “In 1937, Palestinians were supposed to get 70 per cent of Palestine or more,” and that by 2000, “The Palestinians were supposed to get 21 per cent, 22 per cent of Palestine.” If there is another agreement, Morris predicts about 15 per cent of “Palestine” will be offered.
Jagmeet Singh, the extremists in the streets and an unfortunate number of university professors have convinced themselves that their cause is just, that Jewish people are somehow colonizers in their own land and that any state not governed by those who they deem to be the correct indigenous group should not exist.
The NDP doesn’t think Israel has any right to defend itself. How long before it says the same of Canada?
National Post