“Oct 7 2023”

Leaders of several Arab and Islamic countries held an emergency summit in Doha on September 15 to discuss Israel’s “aggression” against Qatar. The reference was to the recent Israeli attack on senior Hamas leaders in Qatar. The summit was held at the request of Qatar, the only Gulf state that has long been providing shelter and financial and political aid to the leaders of Hamas, the Iran-backed terror group that carried out the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. The assault resulted in the murder of more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and the wounding of thousands. Another 251 Israelis and foreigners were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, where 48 – dead and alive – remain in Hamas’s captivity.

The Gaza War seems finally to be reaching its climax. On one side, Israel’s opponents are accusing it of genocide and of trying to starve the Palestinians into surrender and Britain, France, and Canada are recognizing the completely discredited Palestine Authority as a sovereign government of “Palestine.” On the other, Israel is finally assaulting the citadel of its terrorist opposition, the intense complex of tunnels and redoubts at the centre of the City of Gaza. There will obviously be a profound inquiry in Israel into every aspect of this war, once it is over, and particularly into why Israel was taken by surprise as it was, and why it has taken until now for the Israeli Defense Forces finally to assault the ultimate strong point of Hamas. The implicit assumption of most of Israel’s critics that the October 7 incident was merely another skirmish in a long-standing border dispute between the Jews and Arabs towards an eventual demarcation between a Jewish and an Arab state is bunk. This was not just another border incident, following Britain’s cavalier promise of 1917 of making Palestine a homeland for the Jews without compromising the rights of the Arabs.

Given that Canada among other Islamist states has recognized Palestine the Israelis should wage war as if no one is watching.

The Israel-Hamas-Iran conflict, still dominating world news, remains volatile. Anti-Israel demonstrations — often devolving into violent riots – have taken place in many countries in the past 23 months. Some were even held on, or just days after, the Hamas massacres in Israel on October 7, 2023 – in support of the massacres. There have been so many events and social media statements that amount to vilifying Israel and the Jewish people — too many “incidents” to ignore. As a Dutch academic, I plead here for less emotion and more dispassionate factual debate on this tragic conflict and about the need for honest solutions for both sides.

Those Zionist magicians have allegedly killed more children than there were in the Gaza Strip before the war. Just read the numbers we are being fed.

“65,000 is the number of Palestinian Arabs killed with certainty, 75 percent of whom were women and children. But we should start thinking about 680,000, because this is the number some scholars and scientists claim is the true death toll in Gaza”.

We are in Geneva, at the UN Palace of Nations, and the speaker is Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories. Any doubts have been dispelled about the 65,000 deaths in Gaza, “of whom 75 percent were women and children,” a figure that has been repeated since October 8, 2023, when Israel’s military response to the Hamas pogrom began. According to Albanese, a leading figure among Palestinian Arab activists, the number is on the order of ten times that number, before adding that the figures – any ot them – cannot be verified.

On Monday afternoon, on Radio-Canada’s Ici RDI news channel, host Christian Latreille asked the network’s Washington, D.C.-based reporter, Élisa Serret, why the United States had not done more to distance itself from Israel. Her response led to Radio-Canada pulling her off the air and putting her on leave.

The uproar was more than justified. But it’s important to look at what she said, and what was wrong with it.