Why Islamic History Month matters: Knowledge that Western publics have been denied

Islamic History Month exists to celebrate achievements and but also challenge ignorance. Understanding this history is particularly important in an era when anti-Muslim prejudice is widespread. 

By Fareed Khan  
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

October is Islamic History Month in Canada. Like Black History Month, Indigenous History Month and other such designated months, it is sometimes met with questions from those who wonder why such observances are necessary, or who complain that they elevate the history of one group above that of the broader population. Such criticisms overlook the purpose of these commemorations. They exist not to privilege one community's history, but to address historical omissions, challenge prejudice, and ensure that the contributions of communities that have often been marginalized, misrepresented, or erased are recognized as part of our shared national story.

Islamic History Month serves precisely that purpose. Officially proclaimed by the Parliament of Canada in 2007, it recognizes the history, diversity, and contributions of Muslims while providing an opportunity to confront Islamophobia and deepen public understanding of the Islamic faith and Muslim societies. More importantly, it challenges one of the most enduring distortions in popular historical memory—the notion that Muslim civilizations stood at the margins of human progress rather than at its very centre. By highlighting a heritage that has profoundly shaped science, medicine, mathematics, philosophy, culture, and the modern world itself, Islamic History Month helps restore an essential chapter of human history that is too often overlooked or deliberately ignored in the West.

For most of us who grew up in Canada and other Western societies, the story of civilization is often told from a Eurocentric perspective, as if intellectual progress moved directly from ancient Greece and Rome to Renaissance Europe. Yet historical evidence reveals a much richer and more complex reality. Between the eighth and fifteenth centuries, Muslim societies were among the most advanced, literate, scientifically productive, and culturally dynamic civilizations on Earth. Their scholars preserved ancient knowledge, expanded it, challenged it, and created entirely new fields of inquiry. The achievements of the Islamic Golden Age helped lay the foundations for mathematics, medicine, astronomy, engineering, philosophy, chemistry, optics, and the scientific method itself, and kick started the Renaissance in Europe.

From the Atlantic shores of North Africa and Spain to South Asia, Muslim societies created a vast intellectual network that dominated scientific and cultural life for centuries. Baghdad's House of Wisdom, the universities and libraries of Córdoba, the observatories of Persia, and the centres of learning stretching across the Muslim world—including the world’s first and oldest university established by a Muslim woman—became repositories of human knowledge at a time when Christian Europe was fragmented and intellectually stagnant.

Contributions of Muslim scholars cannot be overstated

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi developed algebra and helped popularize the Arabic numeral system, including the mathematical use of zero. His work gave the world the very word "algebra," while the term "algorithm" derives from the Latinized form of his name. Every computer program, smartphone application, banking network, and telecommunications system in existence today relies upon mathematical principles that emerged from his scientific scholarship.

Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, authored The Canon of Medicine, one of the most influential medical texts in human history. It remained a standard reference in European universities for centuries. Al-Zahrawi revolutionized surgery through detailed medical encyclopaedias and the design of instruments that remain recognizable to modern surgeons. Ibn al-Haytham—a mathematician, astronomer, and physicist—transformed humanity's understanding of light, optics, and vision. He demonstrated that sight occurs when light reflects from objects into the eye, overturning classical misconceptions and helping establish the foundations of experimental science.

Muslim scholars also revolutionized astronomy through the establishment of sophisticated observatories, the compilation of accurate star catalogues, advances in spherical trigonometry, and the development of navigational instruments that transformed exploration and navigation. Among these innovators was Al-Ijliyyah, a renowned female tenth-century astronomer and astrolabe maker from what is now Syria, whose work contributed to the refinement of the astrolabe, one of the most important scientific instruments of the medieval world. Meanwhile, engineers such as al-Jazari pioneered technologies including the crankshaft, water pumps, mechanical clocks, automated devices, and sophisticated machines whose underlying principles would influence technological development for centuries to come.

Many inventions and practices that are taken for granted today either originated in, or were significantly refined within, Muslim civilization. These include algebra, algorithms, cryptography, surgical instruments, optical research, chemistry, distillation techniques, hospitals, advanced irrigation systems, paper production, navigational sciences, mechanical engineering, and sophisticated banking instruments such as cheques. These achievements were not isolated discoveries. They formed an integrated knowledge system that sustained scientific and cultural leadership in Europe, North Africa, the Middle-East, and West Asia for centuries. Muslim scholars translated and preserved the works of Greek, Persian, Indian, and earlier civilizations. But they did far more than preserve knowledge. They critiqued, corrected, expanded, and transformed it.

This intellectual blossoming played a decisive role in Europe's emergence from the Dark Ages. Through Muslim Spain, the Ottoman Empire, the Crusader states, and Mediterranean trade networks, Europe encountered advanced mathematics, medicine, philosophy, geography, astronomy, engineering, and administrative systems. The translation centres of Toledo and other cities transmitted Arabic-language scholarship into Latin. The curricula of Europe's earliest universities drew heavily upon texts that had been preserved or developed within Islamic civilization.

The Muslim states of modern day Spain became one of the most remarkable centres of knowledge and culture in the world. Historians have documented how Islamic rule transformed the Iberian Peninsula into a society known for scholarship, architecture, medicine, mathematics, and learning. Cordoba emerged as one of Europe's largest and most sophisticated cities. At a time when literacy levels were low in much of Europe, Muslim states in Spain (and beyond) boasted libraries, universities, hospitals, public infrastructure, and thriving intellectual life.

This historical reality complicates simplistic narratives that portray Europe as the sole source of modern civilization. Increasingly, scholars acknowledge that the Renaissance did not emerge in isolation but was profoundly influenced by knowledge transmitted through Islamic societies.

At the same time, many historians have noted that later European narratives often minimized Islamic contributions or erased them entirely. Renaissance and Enlightenment histories frequently presented Europe's intellectual revival as a direct inheritance from ancient Greece and Rome, bypassing the centuries during which Muslim scholars preserved, transmitted, and expanded that knowledge, and claiming credit for that knowledge by suppressing its origins. There is legitimate scholarly debate about the extent of direct borrowing and attribution. However, there is little dispute that many foundational scientific texts used in Europe originated in Muslim scholarship and that the contributions of Muslim thinkers have often been underrepresented in mainstream historical accounts.

Examples frequently cited by historians include the influence of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and Ibn al-Shatir on later astronomical models associated with Copernicus, the transmission of mathematical methods through the works of al-Khwarizmi and other Muslim scholars, and the profound impact of Ibn al-Haytham's optics on European scientific thought. While it would be inaccurate to reduce European intellectual history to simple theft, it is fair to argue that Muslim contributions have often been marginalized, obscured, or detached from their original historical context.

Understanding this history is particularly important in an era when anti-Muslim prejudice is widespread in the West. Islamic History Month exists not only to celebrate achievements but also to challenge ignorance. Too often, Muslims are portrayed as newcomers to Western societies or as outsiders to Western history and culture. The historical record demonstrates otherwise.

Muslims have been present in North America for centuries

Many enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslims. Historians estimate that millions of enslaved people taken from West Africa practised Islam and carried with them Islamic traditions, literacy, and scholarship. Their labour helped build the economic foundations of North America while their identities were frequently erased through slavery and forced assimilation.

In Canada, Muslim history extends far beyond contemporary immigration. Historical records indicate that some of the earliest Muslims arrived as enslaved persons with United Empire Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. The first documented Muslim family in what became Canada, converts James and Agnes Love, settled in southwestern Ontario in 1851. Muslims appeared in the Canadian census for the first time in 1871, established community organizations in the early twentieth century, started businesses, and built the Al-Rashid Mosque in Edmonton in 1938—Canada's first mosque.

The story of Muslims in Canada is therefore not a recent story. It is a story rooted in Canadian history since before Confederation.

The same holds true of Muslim presence in the United States, where they have been woven into the fabric of the nation for since the 17th century. As labourers, soldiers, workers, scholars, entrepreneurs, physicians, artists, and public servants, they have helped shape American society in countless ways. To portray Muslims as outsiders to North America is to ignore a documented history that stretches back generations.

Muslim-Jewish relations

Islamic History Month is also important because it provides an opportunity to challenge misconceptions about relations between Muslims and Jews over the centuries.

Contemporary political conflicts relating to Israel and Palestinians have been projected backward into history by pro-Israel voices, creating the false impression that Muslims and Jews have been locked in eternal hostility for millennia. But historical reality is far more nuanced.

Prominent Jewish scholars have asserted that Islamic civilization created conditions under which Jewish communities survived and flourished. Historian David Wasserstein, for example, has written that Islam provided a cultural and political environment that saved Jewish communities across the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain, allowing them to prosper, maintain their religious institutions, and produce some of the greatest achievements in Jewish intellectual history.

Under Muslim rule, Jewish communities often experienced degrees of security, autonomy, and cultural flourishing that contrasted sharply with conditions in many parts of medieval Christian Europe where anti-Jewish prejudice and pogroms were common. Islamic Spain witnessed what many scholars describe as a Jewish Golden Age, where Jewish philosophers, poets, physicians, scholars, and statesmen made extraordinary contributions while participating in the broader cultural life of Muslim society.

This is not to suggest that relations between Muslims and Jews were always free of tension or conflict. Like all civilizations, Muslim societies experienced periods of discrimination, exclusion, and political division. However, historical honesty requires placing those realities in their proper context. During many of the same centuries when Jewish communities faced persecution, ghettoization, forced conversion, expulsion, and periodic massacres in parts of Christian Europe, many Jewish communities living under Muslim rule enjoyed a greater degree of security, religious freedom, and cultural flourishing. This does not mean life was perfect or that equality was absolute, but it does undermine the modern political narrative pushed by Zionists that portrays Muslim-Jewish relations as an inevitable and uninterrupted centuries-long conflict. The historical record instead reveals extensive periods of coexistence, intellectual exchange, commercial partnership, and shared cultural achievement that enriched both communities and produced some of the most remarkable advances of the medieval world.

Indeed, the collapse of Muslim rule in Spain in 1492 and the subsequent expulsion of Jews and Muslims dramatically altered centuries of coexistence in Iberia. The imposition of religious uniformity and persecution by the Spanish Inquisition replaced the more pluralistic social order that had existed under centuries of Muslim rule, forcing countless families, scholars, artisans, merchants, and professionals into exile. Recognizing both the humanitarian tragedy and the intellectual opportunity, Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II dispatched ships to evacuate many refugees and welcome them into the Ottoman Empire. He is famously reported to have mocked the Spanish monarchs for impoverishing their own kingdom by expelling some of its most educated and productive citizens while enriching his own. The expulsions not only uprooted entire communities but also marked the end of an era in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians had lived, worked, and contributed to a shared intellectual and cultural landscape across much of medieval Iberia.

In Canada today, Islamic History Month serves as a reminder that Muslims are not a footnote to national history but part of its fabric. They are descendants of enslaved Africans, pioneers, immigrants, professionals, workers, activists, artists, and public servants. Their story intersects with the stories of Indigenous peoples, Black Canadians, newcomers, and all those who helped build the country.

At a deeper level, Islamic History Month asks Canadians to reconsider whose achievements are remembered and whose are forgotten. The technologies we use, the medicines we rely upon, the mathematics that power our digital world, and many of the scientific methods that guide modern research owe an enormous debt to centuries of Muslim civilization. Yet those contributions are often absent or deleted from public education and popular understanding.

Recognizing this history is not about diminishing anyone else's achievements. It is about telling the truth, and teaching a complete history of how Western civilization evolved to its current state.

When we acknowledge the accomplishments of Muslim scholars, we enrich our understanding of civilization itself. When we recognize the long presence of Muslims in North America, we challenge Eurocentric narratives of exclusion. When we remember the periods in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived, learned, and created together, we undermine the politics of division and hatred that we see too often in our society today.

That is why Islamic History Month matters. It is an act of historical reclamation. It is a rejection of ignorance and prejudice and a recognition that Muslim civilization helped shape the modern world, and that Muslims have long been part of the Canadian and North American story. Most importantly, it reminds us that knowledge, innovation, and human progress have always emerged from the contributions of many cultures and peoples working across boundaries of faith, language, and geography.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

How Western media manufactured consent for genocide in Gaza

Western media do not simply reflect reality they produce . . . In the context of Israel-Palestinian story telling they shape public consciousness and manufacture consent for state violence. 

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

In his seminal work Covering Islam, one of his books on the subject of “Orientalism”, Palestinian-American academic Edward Said discussed how Western news media constructs, distorts, and weaponizes narratives about Muslims, Arabs, and the Middle East. Said demonstrated that Western media do not simply misrepresent Islam and Arab societies, they also produce an entire worldview in which Muslims, and specifically Middle-Eastern societies, are rendered suspect, irrational, violent, and culturally inferior.

In his book Said showed that news media in the West through the lens of Orientalism depicts “Islam as a monolithic force”, a view shaped by ignorance, racism, bigotry, and geopolitical interests. His analysis exposed the machinery through which Western media manufacture fear, justify domination, oppression, and erase the humanity of those living under Western-backed violence. Nowhere is this structure more visible — or more lethal — than in Western coverage of Palestinian issues over the decades, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The Gaza Genocide through a biased Western media lens

Said warned that Western media portray Islam and Muslims through a “hostile and belligerent” lens, reviving “discredited Orientalist views” whenever geopolitical interests demand it. That lens is now the default through which the Gaza genocide is covered. Palestinians are framed not as human beings with rights, histories, agency, and suffering, but as abstractions — “human shields,” “Hamas sympathizers,” “terrorist-adjacent populations.” Meanwhile Israeli lives are individualized, named, and mourned while Palestinian lives are recognized only through death tolls, and their narratives doubted, minimized, or erased.

This is not accidental, and has been happening for decades whenever Palestine and Israel have been discussed in the West, and more so over the past three years.  The news media have fuelled Israel’s genocide by uncritically repeating Israeli claims, suppressing Palestinian testimony, and framing Israel’s brutal violence as “self-defence” even when it has targeted hospitals, schools, journalists, and entire families. This provides credence to Said’s argument that Orientalism functions by privileging Western voices and those of its Israeli ally over those of Middle Eastern Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. For decades since its creation the Israeli narrative has been treated as authoritative and trustworthy, while Palestinian voices are treated as emotional, biased, suspect, and dangerous.

Canadian media’s coverage of Palestinians is no exception. A study by The Review of Journalism found that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) flagship program The National featured more Israeli voices than Palestinian ones in its Gaza coverage, giving disproportionate weight to Israeli perspectives and marginalizing those of Palestinians. This is Orientalism in practice, where the colonizer’s voice is legitimized, and the colonized are not spoken to as people with agency, but spoken about as if they have none.

Said emphasized that Orientalism is not only about what is said, but how it is said. Language constructs reality, and Western media’s linguistic choices when talking about Palestinians or Muslims reveals a hierarchy of human worth, with Palestinians and Muslims sitting near the bottom.

Israeli deaths are described with emotional and graphic specificity — “slaughtered,” “massacred,” “butchered.” Whereas Palestinian deaths — even when numbering in the tens of thousands — are described with passive, distancing language — “died,” “were killed,” “perished,” or the most dehumanizing of all, “casualties.”

As the independent news outlet The Maple reported in 2020, there is a “devastating” pro-Israel bias in Canadian media. Stories on mainstream Canadian news outlets have repeatedly used an active voice to describe Israeli deaths while consistently using a passive voice for Palestinian deaths, subtly implying agency when Israelis are harmed and inevitability when Palestinians are deliberately killed by Israeli forces even when they are peacefully resisting occupation. This linguistic asymmetry is not neutral but rather a moral ranking mechanism. When Israel kills Palestinians, the media ask: What did Hamas do to cause this? When Israelis are killed by Palestinians the media ask: Why did Palestinians murder Israelis for no apparent reason?

This is precisely the Orientalist logic Said identified, one where the West (and its allies) act and those in the Middle East are acted upon. Israeli violence is contextualized while almost eight decades of Palestinian dispossession, oppression, suffering and death are not.

Silencing pro-Palestinian voices is the new McCarthyism

Said wrote that Western media relies on “experts” to reinforce dominant colonial and imperialist narratives — well-known and credentialed voices who reproduce the Western worldview of power while masquerading as neutral analysts. These experts, he argued, are selected not for their insight but for their ideological reliability. That is, they tell the public the Israeli and pro-Western narrative in favourable terms, reinforcing already established Orientalist narratives. Today, this dynamic has intensified to the point of open intimidation. Journalists who are sympathetic to Palestinian narratives — especially those who report honestly on Israeli atrocities — are not merely marginalized, they are disciplined or fired. Newsrooms that once claimed to value independence and fairness in coverage now enforce ideological conformity in how Israel and the story of Palestinians are portrayed, with the rigidity of a security apparatus.

Reporters who attempt to humanize Palestinians, verify Israeli claims, or document Israeli war crimes, face investigations, suspensions, and removal from their jobs, as editors spike stories that contradict Israeli talking points. Freelance reporters lose contracts for expressing grief or sympathy over the suffering of Palestinian children or posting social media comments, and entire careers are destroyed for refusing to participate in the dehumanization of a people living under a brutal occupation for almost eight decades. This is not a marketplace of free speech as much as it is a system of control, with prejudiced and racist editors and producers controlling how Palestinian humanity is represented in stories. It is the modern incarnation of what Said identified decades ago — a media environment in which dissenting news stories are treated as threats to the dominant narrative, and truth-tellers are disciplined into silence to reinforce Israel’s anti-Palestinian propaganda.

Across Canada, journalists have been suspended, fired, or censured for expressing even mild sympathy for Palestinians or for criticizing Israeli war crimes. The Maple documents how Canadian journalists who attempted to report on the scale of Palestinian suffering were reprimanded or removed from assignments. Breach Media reports that Canadian op-ed pages have overwhelmingly published pro-Israel commentary while rejecting Palestinian perspectives long before the start of the Gaza genocide. Middle East Eye shows how Western media have “manufactured consent” for Israel’s killing of hundreds of Palestinian journalists by downplaying or ignoring these targeted assassinations.

This is not merely media bias, it is repression and censorship. It is the policing of acceptable speech by media gatekeepers, and the enforcement of a narrative that protects Israeli power and erases Palestinian humanity. Said warned that Orientalism is not merely an academic discourse but also a political weapon that promotes oppression. And that is evident today, as this weapon is being used against journalists who refuse to participate in the sanitization of Israel’s horrific crimes and the vilification of Palestinians.

The long history of Anti-Palestinian racism

Anti-Palestinian prejudice did not begin on October 8, 2023. It has been embedded in Western media and society for decades. As Rabble.ca notes, Western media have a long history of ignoring or minimizing atrocities committed by Israel, from the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982 to the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019 — a weekly peaceful protest in which Palestinians in Gaza demonstrated for their right of return to the homes from which they were ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948, 1967 and the decades since then. It is clear from the history of Palestinians since before Israel came into being that Western media portrayal of the Middle East is conducted through a lens shaped by “geopolitics and economic interests,” not by truth.

What has changed in how Western media portrays Palestinians over the past few years is not the scope of anti-Palestinian prejudice but its visibility. The Gaza genocide has exposed the depth of Western news media’s structural anti-Palestinian racism, particularly in major broadcasters and newspapers like CNN, BBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Mail, and others. It has revealed how deeply Orientalist assumptions are woven into Western newsroom culture, editorial decision-making, and journalistic norms. In Canada, newsrooms cling to “flawed notions of objectivity” that unquestioningly treat Israeli state narratives as authentic and truthful while Palestinian narratives are questioned and seen as biased. This is Orientalism masquerading as professionalism — a veneer of journalistic neutrality that conceals a racialized hierarchy of credibility. The result is a media environment where Palestinian suffering is filtered through skepticism and prejudice, Israeli claims are granted automatic legitimacy, and the very idea of Palestinian humanity becomes negotiable within the offices of Western news editors and producers.

Western media do not simply reflect reality they produce it claimed Said. In the context of Israel-Palestinian story telling they shape public consciousness and manufacture consent for state violence. If one looks closely at news stories in Western media about the Gaza genocide, they have played a role that is structurally analogous to the role the tabloid Der Stürmer played in Nazi Germany, not in ideology, but in function.

Der Stürmer dehumanized Jews, justified state violence, and normalized atrocity. Western media today dehumanizes Palestinians, legitimizes Israeli violence, and normalizes genocide. Western media have become a weapon in the Gaza genocide, shaping public opinion to enable mass killing, and have systematically suppressed images, testimonies, and evidence of Israeli atrocities.

When media systems consistently dehumanize a people, erase their suffering, and amplify the narratives of their oppressors, they are not neutral observers. They are participants and criminally complicit.

There needs to be accountability

If international law is to have any meaning, then institutions that materially contribute to atrocity crimes must face scrutiny and be held legally accountable. This includes media institutions whose coverage enables, rationalizes, or sanitizes genocide. While media systems — as institutions — can be complicit in mass violence, such complicity does not arise spontaneously. It is shaped and enforced by people — executives, editors, and senior decision‑makers — who determine which narratives are amplified and which are suppressed. The precedent is clear. At the Nuremberg Tribunals, Nazi propagandists were tried and convicted because their media apparatus played a structural role in enabling the Holocaust. Similarly Western media executives have played a significant role in the atrocities carried out by Israel in Gaza. The principle established at Nuremberg — that propaganda and disinformation can constitute participation in atrocity — remains relevant today. Western media have spent three years repeating Israeli talking points, reiterating its claims without verification ignoring Palestinian testimony, and denying that genocide is taking place. In effect, Western outlets have adopted Israeli military language, framing mass killing as “precision strikes” and ethnic cleansing as “evacuations,” thereby laundering and legitimizing Israeli state violence through their framing of genocidal acts.

Said taught that knowledge is never neutral and that media power always constitutes political power. When that power is mobilized to facilitate or obscure genocide, the question becomes unavoidable: what forms of accountability are necessary for institutions that help enable mass atrocity? His critique of Western media bias, once dismissed by some as academic overreach, now reads as prophetic. The analytical framework he developed is not merely relevant to the present moment, it is indispensable in understanding how the Gaza genocide has been narrated, justified, and normalized in the West.

The atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza have revealed the true nature of Western media, not as watchdogs of power, but as instruments of it, not as defenders of truth, but as manufacturers of consent, not as neutral observers, but as structural participants in atrocity. The patterns Said identified decades ago — the privileging of colonial narratives, the erasure of Indigenous voices, the racialized hierarchy of credibility — have all re-emerged with devastating clarity. They shape which deaths are to be mourned, which claims are to be believed, and which atrocities are to be rendered invisible.

Said warned that Orientalism was not a relic of the past but an active system of thought that would continue to shape Western perceptions of the Middle East unless confronted directly. The world did not listen and for the past three years, a genocide has unfolded in real time, with Western media helping to make it possible — through distortion, through silence, through selective empathy, and through the steady reproduction of the narratives that justify the dehumanization of Palestinians.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Israel has no "right to exist" under International law

By invoking Israel’s “right to exist,” Zionists deliberately conflate criticism of Israeli crimes into claims of genocidal intent toward Jews—a distortion as cynical as it is false.

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

In contemporary political debate, few questions are wielded like a cudgel and with more moral theatrics than “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” It is posed to those critical of Israel’s criminal actions against Palestinians as a litmus test of decency, a trapdoor under which critics of Israeli policy are meant to fall. Answer with anything less than an unqualified “yes,” and you are immediately accused of antisemitism, of hating Jews, and wanting to wipe Jews off the map. Yet this question, treated as sacred and untouchable, rests on a false premise that nation states have a “right to exist.”

The truth is that under international law, no state has a “right to exist.” Rights belong to human beings and peoples, not to abstract political constructs. And Israel, given its decades of criminal actions against Palestinians and neighbouring nations, its violations of the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and other international norms, certainly cannot claim an exceptional right denied to every other state in history.

International law defines statehood through factual criteria, not metaphysical entitlements. The 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, a cornerstone of modern international law, lists four qualifications for statehood: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. There is no clause granting any state an inherent, perpetual “right to exist.” States exist as a matter of fact, not as bearers of eternal rights. They emerge, transform, dissolve, and reconstitute themselves through revolutions, secessions, negotiated partitions, and collapses. International law accommodates these changes, but it does not forbid them.

The United Nations Charter reinforces this reality. Article 2(4) prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. This is a rule governing conduct among existing states, not a guarantee that any particular state will survive unchanged forever. Territorial integrity is protected against forcible alteration by other states, but states themselves can dissolve, merge, or split through internal processes. The Soviet Union did not violate some mystical “right to exist” when it collapsed into fifteen independent republics. Yugoslavia did not breach international law when it fragmented into multiple states. Czechoslovakia did not commit a crime when it peacefully divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. East Germany did not violate a metaphysical right when it disappeared into a unified Germany. South Vietnam, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro‑Hungarian Empire, a unified Korea, the British Empire—all of these entities once existed and no longer do. Their disappearance did not breach any legal right, because no such right exists.

If states possessed a “right to exist,” the world map would be frozen in time. The British Empire would still stretch across continents. The Ottoman Empire would still rule vast territories in the Middle East. The Austro‑Hungarian Empire would still dominate Central Europe. A unified Korea would still exist. South Vietnam would not have vanished. The Soviet Union would still be intact. History itself refutes the notion that states have an inherent right to exist. History shows that borders are not sacred. They are contingent expressions of power, identity, and consent.

The same logic applies to movements of self‑determination. Pakistan emerged from the partition of British India. Bangladesh was born from the struggle against Pakistani domination. Eritrea, East Timor, and South Sudan came into being through long, painful fights for independence. Dozens of former European colonies across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean asserted their right to self‑determination and became states. If colonial powers had possessed a “right to exist” in their imperial form, none of these nations would exist today. The very idea of decolonization would have been illegal. Yet international law recognizes the right of peoples to self‑determination, not the right of empires to perpetuate themselves.

The same principle holds in Canada. Sovereignty movements in Quebec and Alberta have been allowed to pursue independence referendums. If Canada had a “right to exist” as it is currently constituted, such referendums would be forbidden. Any attempt to alter the country’s borders or political structure would be a violation of Canada’s supposed right to exist. But that is not how international law works. Canadians have rights, but Canada as a political construct does not.

Israel is a particularly unstable example for any claim about a state’s “right to exist,” because its borders have never been legally defined, other than those agreed to with Jordan and Egypt. The 1948 armistice lines were ceasefire boundaries, not permanent borders. Since then, Israel has refused to specify its territorial limits in law. After 1967, it occupied the remainder of historic Palestine and parts of Syria, creating a situation in which the legal status of these territories remains contested and unresolved. Influential factions within Israel openly endorse the concept of a “Greater Israel” extending “from the Nile to the Euphrates”, and encompassing all of historic Palestine, as well as all or part of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Even Israel’s own political leadership cannot agree on where the state is supposed to begin or end. A state that refuses to define its borders, that expands through occupation and annexation, cannot coherently claim a “right to exist.”

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has repeatedly affirmed that Israel’s occupation, settlement enterprise, and annexation of Palestinian territory are illegal under international law. In its 2004 Advisory Opinion on the construction of the separation wall, the ICJ held that the wall and the associated regime “severely impedes the exercise by the Palestinian people of its right to self‑determination” and that Israel’s measures “are contrary to international law.” In its 2024 Advisory Opinion on Israel’s 57-year long occupation of Palestinian territories the Court went further, concluding that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful, that it must end its unlawful presence as rapidly as possible, evacuate all settlers, and that all states must refrain from recognizing or assisting Israel’s illegal actions.

These are not marginal opinions. They are authoritative legal determinations by the world’s highest judicial body. They confirm that Israel’s occupation is illegal, its settlements are illegal, its annexation is illegal, and its regime in the occupied territories violates fundamental norms of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention’s prohibition on transferring the occupier’s civilian population into occupied territory. A state that maintains an illegal occupation, that builds illegal settlements, that annexes territory in defiance of the UN Charter’s ban on the acquisition of territory by force, cannot plausibly claim a “right to exist” in its current form.

Yet whenever critics raise Israel’s atrocities—its bombing of civilians, its destruction of homes, its starvation of populations, its attacks on neighbouring countries—Israel’s defenders pivot to the same question: “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” This is a diversionary tactic. The goal is to shift attention away from Israel’s criminal behaviour and toward an abstract, emotionally charged claim. The question is posed most aggressively when Israel’s actions are hardest to defend—after massacres in Gaza, after airstrikes in Lebanon and Syria, after assassinations in Iran, after attacks on Yemen, after documented war crimes and crimes against humanity.

By insisting on Israel’s supposed “right to exist,” Zionists and their supporters seek to conflate criticism of a state’s policies with a desire to exterminate its people. They want the public to infer, without it ever being spelled out, that anyone who denies Israel’s “right to exist” is calling for the annihilation of Jews around the world. In this framing, even those who explicitly call for equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians are smeared as extremists. Jewish critics of Zionism, Holocaust survivors who oppose Israeli apartheid, Palestinian human rights advocates, reputable legal scholars—all are painted as enemies of Israel’s existence.

This rhetorical strategy is designed to protect a rogue state, not a vulnerable population. It is meant to shield Israel from accountability for its actions—its decades‑long occupation, its apartheid regime, its ethnic cleansing, its repeated violations of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force against other states, its war crimes and crimes against humanity. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, and other human rights organizations have documented Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel itself.

The ICJ, UN bodies, Holocaust and genocide scholars have warned that Israel’s actions in Gaza—indiscriminate bombing, deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, obstruction of humanitarian aid, and the use of starvation as a weapon—meet the threshold for genocide under the Genocide Convention. A state committing genocide cannot claim a “right to exist” in its current form. Apartheid South Africa had no right to exist as an apartheid regime. Nazi Germany had no right to exist as a genocidal state. Rhodesia had no right to exist as a white supremacist entity. Israel, whose crimes are more severe than apartheid South Africa’s, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu observed after visiting the occupied territories, cannot be granted a unique carve‑out.

The mistake at the heart of the “right to exist” discourse is to conflate the state with the people it claims to represent. Israelis as individuals have a right to exist. They have a right not to be oppressed, ethnically cleansed, or be subjected to genocide. Palestinians have the same right. They have a right to live in dignity, to be free from occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. But Israel as a political construct has no right to exist as an ethnocratic, apartheid, occupying, genocidal state. When a state is used to oppress another people, it becomes illegitimate. It must be reconstituted in ways that restore legitimacy by guaranteeing equal rights to all.

The Palestinians have never had a state, neither historically nor in the modern era. During the past 2000 years they have lived under the rule of the Roman Empire, various Arab and Turkic empires, the Ottoman Empire, under the British mandate, and they now live under Israeli occupation. They were excluded from the decolonization process that followed the Second World War. Their armed resistance movements—PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad—are liberation movements recognized under international law as fighting against colonial domination and occupation, despite the fact that some Western nations have labelled them as “terrorists.” The Palestinians are struggling to achieve what others have already achieved—a political framework that protects them from being oppressed, ethnically cleansed, and genocided by a state that claims to represent all Jews globally.

That framework could take different forms. It might be a Palestinian state alongside a reconstituted Israeli state, both committed to equal rights. It might be a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine, with equal citizenship for Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others. It might be a binational confederation. Whatever the arrangement, it will not possess a metaphysical “right to exist.” It will have to earn its legitimacy by serving the dignity and security of all people living within it.

Nationalism, which elevates the state above the human being, is an ideology that is at the root of many wars and conflicts since the late 1800s. It is a modern ideology that has already produced catastrophic failures—bloody revolutions, world wars, genocides, ethnic cleansings, and the dissolution of empires. Thinkers across disciplines have diagnosed nationalism as a dangerous pathology. Albert Einstein called it “an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” Erich Fromm described it as “our form of incest, our idolatry, our insanity,” with patriotism as its cult. Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt traced the origins of totalitarian movements to European imperialism and nationalism, which eroded the nation‑state system by pursuing unlimited expansion and racial hierarchies incompatible with bounded territorial politics. George Orwell, in “Notes on Nationalism,” distinguished it from patriotism, arguing that nationalism is not love of one’s country but the will to dominate others in its name.

Nationalism demands loyalty to an abstract “nation” while subordinating universal human rights to collective myths. It turns territory into “holy land,” political texts into sacred scrolls, and the state into an object of worship. It defines the stranger as an enemy rather than a neighbour. In a world of nuclear weapons, climate crisis, and global economic interdependence, this ideology is not only morally bankrupt, it is existentially dangerous.

The only legitimate foundation for political order is universal human rights. Any state—Israel, Canada, Australia, the United States, or any other—must guarantee equal rights to all people within its borders, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or origin. When a state violates those rights, it loses legitimacy. Israel’s defenders ask the wrong question. The correct question is: Do Israelis and Palestinians have a right to live in equality, dignity, and safety? International law answers unequivocally “yes.”

In the end, the question that must confront the world is not whether a particular state deserves metaphysical permanence, but whether human beings—Palestinian and Israeli alike—deserve to live free from domination, dispossession, and fear. International law, history, and basic moral reasoning all point to the same conclusion—political entities are transient, but human dignity is not. Israel’s invocation of a “right to exist” is a political shield meant to obscure the reality of a genocidal apartheid regime sustained through occupation, annexation, and overwhelming military force. No slogan can erase the legal record or the human suffering inflicted by Palestinians by Israel since its creation and by Zionist terrorists before it came into existence. The future will not be secured by defending the permanence of any state, but by dismantling systems of supremacy and building a political order rooted in equality, accountability, and shared humanity. Only when the rights of people—not the privileges of states—become the foundation of our politics will a just and lasting peace be possible in historic Palestine, the wider Middle-East, and beyond.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize a slap in the face to Israel and the US

The Nobel Committee sent a message in awarding the 2026 Peace Prize. It chose the rule of law over geopolitical convenience, accountability over impunity, and principle over power.

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article is available on Substack. 

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that former International Criminal Court (ICC) judge Navi Pillay would receive the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, it did far more than honour a single jurist’s lifetime of work. It issued a moral verdict on the state of international law itself. It signaled that the Gaza genocide — as identified by the UN Commission of Inquiry Pillay chaired — is not merely a regional catastrophe but a global threat to peace. And it delivered a metaphorical slap in the face to those who have spent years undermining the ICC, attacking international legal institutions, and shielding Israel from accountability — namely Donald Trump, the US government, and Israel’s political leadership.

Pillay’s award is not just a recognition of her commitment to justice and international law, it is a reminder that the world’s most powerful states cannot indefinitely suppress the truth or escape the consequences of their criminal actions.

A laureate whose work confronts power

The Nobel Committee praised Pillay for her “exceptional courage and integrity” in advancing a global legal order capable of prosecuting war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. This was not diplomatic boilerplate. Pillay’s career has been defined by confronting entrenched power — from apartheid South Africa to the Rwandan genocide to Israel’s decades‑long occupation of Palestinian territory.

Her most recent and politically explosive work came as chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In 2025, the commission concluded that Israel is responsible for genocide in Gaza, citing four of the five acts listed under the Genocide Convention, including killing members of a protected group, inflicting serious bodily harm, and imposing conditions intended to bring about the group’s destruction.

Pillay herself emphasized that her final act before leaving the commission was delivering the report naming Israel’s actions as genocide. She expressed surprise that people praised her “courage,” asking why speaking the truth based on facts and law should require bravery. That question, which is simple, piercing, and devastating, underscores why her Nobel award matters more than other awards of recent years.

International law is under attack and we should be worried

The Nobel Committee made clear that its decision was not only about Pillay’s personal achievements but about defending the very architecture of international justice. Committee Chair Jorgen Watne Frydnes warned that international law is “under tremendous pressure” and its institutions “under attack.” Judges, he said, “guard the thin red line between order and chaos.”

This is not abstract rhetoric, but a direct response to the political reality that the UN, ICC, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) investigative bodies have been relentlessly targeted by the US and Israel whenever these institutions threaten to hold them accountable.  The US has imposed sanctions on the ICC, with senior government officials calling the court an “outlaw.” Israel has repeatedly attacked UN investigative bodies, dismissed genocide findings as “blood libels,” and denounced Pillay personally. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called her a “bigot” and accused the Nobel Committee of losing its “moral compass,” a laughable claim from a man who has shown he never had one.

By awarding Pillay the Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee rejected these attacks and reaffirmed the legitimacy of international law, showing the world that the campaign to discredit the ICC, smear UN investigators, and bury the truth about Gaza has failed — and that those who stand against accountability cannot escape the judgment of the global community.

Gaza genocide as a threat to world peace

The Nobel Committee’s decision implicitly acknowledges a reality that many governments have tried to deny, that the genocide in Gaza is not merely a humanitarian catastrophe but a profound destabilizing force in global politics. Pillay’s commission concluded that senior Israeli officials — including the president, prime minister, and former defense minister — had incited genocide, identifying multiple acts that meet the legal threshold under the Genocide Convention. This finding is not only a legal assessment, it is a warning about the consequences of allowing a state to commit mass atrocities with impunity.

We should all be aware that genocide is never a local crime, but a a rupture in the international system itself. It is a tearing of the legal and moral fabric that holds global order together. It erodes norms that prevent conflict, fuels radicalization and extremism, and destabilizes entire regions. When powerful states enable, excuse, or actively support genocide, they do more than betray their professed values, they undermine the foundations of global order and world peace. They signal to other governments that international law is optional, that mass violence can be justified, and that accountability is something that only applies to the weak.

The Nobel Committee’s press release underscored this point with unusual clarity, stressing that international law is “an absolute necessity” in a world facing existential challenges and rising conflict. The implication is unmistakable — ignoring or minimizing the genocide in Gaza does not merely endanger Palestinians, it threatens the stability of the international order itself. A world that tolerates genocide is a world that invites further atrocities, accelerates geopolitical fragmentation, and weakens the institutions designed to prevent global conflict. By elevating Pillay, the committee is effectively declaring that the path to peace runs through accountability, and the refusal to confront Israel’s actions in Gaza is a direct threat to that peace.

A rejection of Trump’s anti‑ICC crusade

In his response to the award announcement Trump’s response was predictable, stating that he should have received the Nobel Peace Prize. His grievance‑laden response was met with Pillay’s dry humour when she quipped that she might share the prize with him “if you clap a little bit more,” a remark that simultaneously punctured Trump’s self‑aggrandizement and underscored the absurdity of his claim to a peace legacy. Her joke was light, but the political symbolism behind the moment was anything but.

Because the deeper meaning of the Nobel Committee’s decision goes far beyond Trump’s wounded ego.

Trump’s administration waged one of the most aggressive campaigns in modern history against the International Criminal Court. He sanctioned ICC officials, threatened prosecutors, and sought to block investigations into US war crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli crimes in Palestine. His government treated the ICC not as an institution of justice but as an enemy to be neutralized. In that context, the Nobel Committee’s choice to honour a former ICC judge — one who has consistently defended the court’s independence and insisted on accountability for powerful states — is a direct and unmistakable repudiation of Trump’s efforts to dismantle international legal mechanisms.

It is also a rejection of the broader US policy of shielding Israel from scrutiny, a policy that has enabled the Gaza genocide by ensuring Israel faces no meaningful consequences for its actions. For decades, successive American administrations have used diplomatic pressure, veto power, and political intimidation to block investigations, suppress UN reports, and delegitimize any attempt to hold Israel accountable. This patter has intensified during Trump’s time in office but it predates his administrations.

By awarding Pillay the Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee effectively declared that this era of impunity must end. It signaled that the world sees through the political theatre, understands the stakes, and refuses to accept a global order in which international law does not apply to the most powerful nations in the world. The prize is not just a celebration of Pillay’s work in the cause of justice. It is also a rebuke to those who have tried to bury the truth, undermine the ICC, and protect Israel from facing justice for its genocidal actions in Gaza.

A rejection of Israel’s campaign against accountability

Israel’s reaction to Pillay’s award was furious. Its foreign ministry called the decision a “grotesque exploitation” and compared international reactions to “Goebbels’s applause from hell.” Netanyahu accused Pillay of inventing “blood libels.”

Israel’s reaction to Pillay’s award was immediate and predictable. Its foreign ministry denounced the Nobel Committee’s decision as a “grotesque exploitation,” even going so far as to compare international praise for Pillay to “applause from hell” by Joseph Goebbels—Hitler’s Nazi propaganda minister.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu escalated the rhetoric further, accusing Pillay of fabricating “blood libels” — a phrase deliberately chosen for its historical weight and its role in Israel’s longstanding strategy of portraying any criticism of its actions as inherently malicious and antisemitic. These attacks were part of a well‑rehearsed and frequently repeated political script designed to discredit anyone who documents Israel’s criminal actions and violations of international law, and they attacks are not merely rhetorical.

They reflect a decades‑long pattern in which Israel responds to legal scrutiny not with evidence or engagement but with smear campaigns, delegitimization, political intimidation, and propaganda. Whether directed at UN rapporteurs, human rights organizations, ICC prosecutors, or genocide scholars, Israel’s strategy has been consistent — attack the messenger to bury the message. Pillay’s award disrupts that strategy. It exposes the hollowness of Israel’s accusations and demonstrates that the world is no longer willing to accept its reflexive dismissal of every investigation as biased or hateful. The Nobel Committee’s decision affirms that the genocide findings are serious, credible, and grounded in international law — and that no amount of political pressure or rhetorical escalation can erase the documented reality of Israeli atrocities being committed in Gaza.

By elevating Pillay, the Nobel Committee has effectively insulated her work from Israel’s attempts to discredit it. It has placed her findings within the moral authority of the Nobel tradition, making it far more difficult for Israel to dismiss the genocide determination as fringe or politically motivated. The award signals that the global community recognizes the gravity of the crimes documented in Gaza and refuses to be intimidated by Israel’s efforts to silence accountability. In doing so, it underscores the message that when a state responds to genocide findings with insults rather than evidence, it reveals more about its own culpability than about the integrity of those who investigate it.

The ICC is under siege by the US and Israel

Pillay’s career has been intertwined with the ICC and other international tribunals. She served as a judge at the ICC, presided over the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and has continued to work as an ad hoc judge at the ICJ. Her Nobel Prize is therefore also a tribute to the ICC itself — an institution under unprecedented political attack by the US and Israel. As Pillay noted in her Nobel interview, the award is “huge recognition” for all those who work quietly to uphold international law, especially “in the climate of the ICC being under threat.”

The Nobel Committee has effectively declared that defending the ICC is essential to defending peace. Its decision is a challenge to states that claim to support international law but hesitate when powerful allies violate it — Canada being one of many that fall into that category. UN Secretary‑General António Guterres said the award is “a tribute to all those working to uphold and defend international law.” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa praised Pillay’s “progressive contributions” to peace and human dignity.

These statements underscore a widening and increasingly consequential divide in global politics between states that believe international law must apply universally, and those that behave as though they stand above it — treating the law not as a binding framework for all nations, but as a weapon to wield against adversaries while shielding themselves and their allies from scrutiny. This divide is no longer theoretical. It is shaping the future of global governance, determining which institutions survive, and defining whether the international system retains any credibility at all.

The Nobel Committee has made clear which side it is on. In choosing Navi Pillay as the 2026 laureate, it chose the rule of law over geopolitical convenience, accountability over impunity, and principle over power. By awarding the prize to a jurist who has confronted states accused of genocide — including Israel — and defended the independence of the ICC, the committee did more than honour her work. It sent a message to the international community that the integrity of international law is inseparable from global peace and stability.

It also affirmed the genocide findings in Gaza as credible and urgent; reasserted the ICC’s indispensable role in upholding international law; rejected US and Israeli efforts to undermine international justice; signaled that the Gaza genocide threatens global peace; and encouraged nations committed to international law to stand firm.

This was not a neutral or apolitical decision. It was a moral intervention — a reminder that peace cannot exist without justice, and justice cannot exist without accountability. In honouring Pillay, the Nobel Committee has reminded the world that silence in the face of genocide is complicity. And it has issued a warning — the future of world peace depends on defending the institutions that protect humanity from its darkest impulses.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.