The world’s most dangerous nation is Canada’s southern neighbour, and it is a threat to Canada

A full-scale US assault—tariffs, sanctions, border closures, financial pressure, military action—would result in Canada becoming a vassal state. 

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

The United States is the most war‑embracing and dangerous nation in the world. Its record over the last 35 years—and many decades before that—makes this impossible to deny. No other country has launched more wars, bombed more nations, imposed more devastating sanctions, or destabilized more societies. Western politicians insist that China, Russia, or Iran threaten global peace. But the historical evidence points in only one direction—the greatest threat to world peace is the United States itself.

And other than the nations the US attacks, the country that stands to lose the most if the US goes rogue is Canada—America’s closest neighbour, largest trading partner, and most economically dependent ally. Canada’s prosperity, sovereignty, and security are tied to a declining superpower whose foreign policy has become increasingly reckless, militarized, and unpredictable.

This is not hyperbole, its reality.

Bill Clinton: The quiet architect of catastrophe

The calamity that the world faces today began in 1990s following the Persian Gulf War and the end of the Cold War, a time when the US was the only global superpower, a time often remembered as a peaceful decade. In reality, the 90s were the prelude to the global violence that took place in subsequent decades. Under President Bill Clinton, the United States imposed one of the most devastating sanctions regimes in modern history on Iraq. These sanctions crippled Iraq’s economy, destroyed its infrastructure, and led to widespread malnutrition and disease. UNICEF estimated that approximately 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result.

When asked in a 1996 60 Minutes interview whether the deaths of half a million children were “worth it,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.” It was a moment of moral clarity where the vile mindset of senior American officials was revealed for what it was—one where: Washington openly admitted that mass civilian death, and those of children no less, was an acceptable cost of American power.

In 1998, Clinton also ordered the bombing of Sudan’s Al‑Shifa pharmaceutical plant, claiming—without evidence—that it was producing chemical weapons. In reality, the plant produced 50–60% of Sudan’s medicines, including treatments for malaria and tuberculosis, and its destruction plunged Sudan into a public health crisis that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths in subsequent years.

These were not isolated mistakes. They were early signals of a country that had embraced militarism as a permanent operating principle.

George W. Bush is a war criminal shielded by power

George W. Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan which led to a 20 year war and occupation, and its war o Iraq reshaped the Middle East and South Asia. The Iraq War—launched based on lies about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)—was illegal under international law and lacked United Nations authorization. By the international legal standards applied to other leaders, Bush should have been tried and convicted at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for launching a war of aggression, and as the leader of a nation that committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The consequences of the war were catastrophic.  It is estimated that up to a million Iraqis were killed or died from the destruction of the civilian infrastructure of Iraqi society. Millions more were displaced, and a region was destabilized for generations. Iraq had long been a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, and its destruction removed a major political counterweight to Israeli regional ambitions. Israel had openly identified Iraq as a strategic threat and quietly encouraged US confrontation with Saddam Hussein.

Yet Bush has never faced accountability for the destruction caused by his policies. His war crimes have been sanitized through political power, media complicity, the passage of time, and the myth of American exceptionalism.

Barrack Obama: The drone executioner

Under Barack Obama, US warfare expanded dramatically. Obama did not merely inherit Bush’s war machine and continue operating it, he refined it, technologized it, and made it more lethal.  Central to this transformation was the massive enlargement of the CIA’s drone assassination program.

Military drone warfare intensified in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, turning these countries into unacknowledged killing fields.  American missiles struck homes, weddings, funerals, marketplaces, and entire villages. Independent investigations repeatedly found that the vast majority of those killed were civilians, including children.  The Obama administration even adopted a policy that counted any “military‑aged male” in a strike zone as a “combatant” unless proven otherwise—a bureaucratic trick that erased civilian casualties from official records.

These were extrajudicial executions carried out across sovereign nations with which the United States was not formally at war. By any reasonable standard, Barack Obama is a war criminal, as is Hillary Clinton, who championed and defended these operations. Senior US officials who designed and expanded the drone program belong in international tribunals, not lecture halls or corporate boards.

The fact that Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 is one of the most grotesque ironies of the century. Based on his record in office his prize should have been rescinded long ago.

The destruction of Libya

Libya stands out as one of the most consequential and destructive interventions of the 21st century. Obama and Clinton sold the NATO bombing campaign to the UN Security Council as a humanitarian mission in support of Arab Spring protestors. In reality, it was a plan to destroy a functioning state, one which plunged Libya into civil war, and opened the door to slave markets, and effectively made it into a failed state.

Libya was not bombed simply because of the Arab Spring. It was bombed because Muammar Gaddafi threatened Western financial dominance. Gaddafi had proposed a Pan‑African Gold Dinar, a currency backed by gold rather than the US dollar. His plan included: an African central bank; an African investment bank; an African monetary fund, a unified African military, and a common African passport.

These institutions would have reduced Western financial and political control and allowed African nations to trade oil and other natural resources based on the intrinsic value of gold.  Crucially, Gaddafi’s plan threatened the petrodollar system, which underpins American financial hegemony.

Libya was also a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, and  Israel had long viewed Libya as a regional adversary and quietly supported Western pressure against Gaddafi.

By any reasonable standard, Obama, Clinton, and the leaders of NATO nations that participated in the bombing are unindicted war criminals.

Syria and Iran were targeted for supporting Palestinians

Syria and Iran have long stood outside the orbit of American and Israeli geopolitical control. Both nations have been consistent, vocal, and material supporters of the Palestinian cause for decades. And in Washington’s worldview—shaped heavily by Israeli lobbying—this alone has been enough to mark them for punishment.

Syria became a battlefield for US airstrikes under Barack Obama, with bombings justified under the banner of fighting ISIS and supporting Arab Spring protesters in that country. But the reality was far more complex. The United States armed and supported militant groups, imposed sweeping sanctions, and carried out airstrikes that devastated civilian infrastructure. The Costs of War Project at Brown University documents tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Syria attributable to US military operations, sanctions‑driven deprivation, and the cascading effects of regional destabilization.

Syria’s long‑standing support for Palestinian resistance movements made it a target for Israeli pressure, with Israel openly advocating for US confrontation with Damascus, viewing Syria’s alliance with Hezbollah and Iran as a strategic threat. Washington obliged, turning Syria into another front in its endless war doctrine.

Iran is the ultimate target of US–Israeli aggression

Iran has been under US sanctions for more than four decades—sanctions that have crippled its economy, restricted access to medicine, and harmed millions of civilians. These sanctions are not defensive measures but instruments of economic warfare. They are designed to break Iran’s political will by destabilize its society and forcing regime change.

• In recent years, the US–Israeli campaign against Iran has escalated dramatically. The pattern is unmistakable:
• On June 2025 Israel launched strikes deep inside Iran, targeting infrastructure and military sites;
• From February 2026 onward the United States joined Israel in coordinated attacks, striking Iranian facilities, air defenses, and civilian areas;
• These attacks were carried out without UN authorization, making them illegal under international law;
• Western governments refused to condemn the strikes, revealing a profound moral bankruptcy at the heart of the so‑called “rules‑based international order.”

Iran’s crime, in the eyes of Washington and Tel Aviv, is not terrorism, nuclear ambition, or regional aggression. Iran’s crime is supporting Palestine, resisting Israeli expansionism, and refusing to submit to US geopolitical control.

The Human Toll: A Region Bleeding from US Wars

The Costs of War Project provides the most authoritative accounting of the devastation:

• Iraq: Over 300,000 direct deaths, and more than 1 million indirect deaths.
• Afghanistan: Over 176,000 direct deaths, and more than 1 million indirect deaths.
• Pakistan: Tens of thousands killed by US drone strikes and counterterror operations.
• Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria: Hundreds of thousands more killed through US airstrikes, proxy wars, sanctions, and destabilization.

Across the region, the total death toll attributable to US wars since 9/11 exceeds 4.6 million people—a figure Brown University describes as “conservative.”

Iran now stands on the brink of becoming the next Iraq, the next Libya, the next Syria—another nation shattered because it refused to bow to American and Israeli power.

The US–Israeli attack on Iran—both in 2025 and since February 2026— is illegal, unprovoked, and geopolitically reckless. It exposes the West’s hypocrisy: preaching human rights while committing war crimes. It reveals that the “rules‑based order” is a myth—an ideological shield for Western militarism. And it shows that the US is willing to ignite a regional war that could kill millions, destabilize global markets, and plunge the world into crisis.

Canada: The Neighbour Living Beside a Volcano

Canada is the country most economically intertwined with the United Staten, with Canada’s manufacturing sector exporting nearly 75% of Canadian exports go to the US—energy, agricultural produce, steel, aluminum, manufactured goods, and supply chains are deeply dependent on the  American market. If the United States ever turned its economic or military power against Canada, the consequences would be catastrophic.  Canada has received only a taste of that aggression with Donald Trump’s tariff war.

However, if the US launched a full‑scale economic assault—tariffs, sanctions, border closures, or financial pressure—would devastate Canada’s economy within months. If such an assault were combined with military action, Canada would be unable to resist. The Canadian Armed Forces, professional and dedicated though they are, are simply not built to withstand the overwhelming force of the US military. Canada would be routed in weeks, if not days, if Washington ever chose to attack.

This is not speculation. It is history.

The last time Canada had a formal defence plan for responding to a US invasion was in the 1920s and 1930s: Defence Scheme No. 1, a strategy that involved pre‑emptively invading parts of the United States to slow an American advance. The plan was eventually abandoned because it was suicidal.

More recently, Canadian military planners quietly modelled a Taliban‑style insurgency as the only viable response to a hypothetical US invasion. The Canadian government even acknowledged this modelling publicly. Analysts have noted that both countries historically planned for conflict scenarios, though Canada’s options have always been limited.

If the United States continues down a path of militarism, economic coercion, and geopolitical recklessness, Canada will be the first nation to feel the shockwaves.

Canada must recognize that the greatest threat to its future is not a distant authoritarian power—it is the increasingly unstable superpower next door.

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

Anti-Palestinian racism in Canada: The Nakba exhibit as a national test of truth and power

The Nakba exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is far more than a cultural installation, it is a direct test of Canada’s willingness to uphold universal human rights, justice, and equality.

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

The opening of Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) on June 27, 2026 marked a watershed moment in Canadian public memory. For Palestinian Canadians—many of whom contributed family artifacts, testimonies, and archival materials—the exhibit represented something long denied to them—recognition that their history of ethnic cleansing is part of Canada’s human rights story, not a political controversy to be managed. Yet the ferocious backlash from Zionist Jewish organizations and the political pressure exerted on federal officials revealed a deeper truth—that anti‑Palestinian racism is very deeply embedded in Canadian institutions, shaping whose suffering is acknowledged and made public and whose is erased.

The controversy surrounding the exhibit did not emerge spontaneously. It exposed a long‑standing pattern in which Palestinian narratives are treated as dangerous, conditional, or illegitimate—while Zionist organizations assert a proprietary right to define how Palestinians and their history may be represented. The Nakba exhibit thus became more than a cultural installation. It became a test of whether Canada is willing to uphold truth, justice, and equality in the face of political interference and racialized suppression.

A campaign to silence Palestinian memory

Opposition to the exhibit began even before its doors opened. Several Zionist organizations—including the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg, and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA)— publicly attacked the exhibit, claiming it lacked “balance” and failed to include their perspectives. Heritage Minister Mark Miller even demanded that certain “omissions” and “errors” be “rectified.” His specific complaint was the absence of references to Hamas (an organization that didn’t exist until the early 1990s), echoing the talking points of those lobbying to undermine the exhibit. His intervention signaled a willingness to revisit the museum’s independence and to reframe Palestinian narratives through a Zionist lens.

The implications are unmistakable: Palestinians, whose lived experiences form the foundation of the exhibit, are not considered legitimate stakeholders in telling their own history. Instead, Zionist organizations asserted that they were the ones “directly impacted” by an exhibit documenting Palestinians’ history of dispossession, and pressured Miller to intervene.

CIJA escalated its objections, accusing the museum of “engaging extreme political activists” and failing to consult “communities directly impacted by its content.” This framing suggested that Palestinian testimony is inherently suspect unless validated by Zionist and Jewish voices—voices representing the very ideology responsible for the ethnic cleansing and massacre of Palestinians in 1947-48.

The hostility escalated further when Shurat HaDin, an Israel‑based legal organization, threatened legal action against the CMHR, claiming that the exhibit “erases Jewish history” and “delegitimizes Jewish self‑determination.” Such accusations rest on a deeper racialized logic: the presumption that Palestinian narratives are inherently destabilizing to Jewish identity. Beneath the surface, this framing implies that the very act of Palestinians recounting their history, indeed, their existence itself, is a provocation.

Asymmetry of memory: The Holocaust vs. Palestinian erasure

The material imbalance between Jewish and Palestinian narratives at the CMHR is stark. The Holocaust exhibit occupies more than 4,500 square feet, while the Nakba exhibit occupies less than three percent of that space. Canadian governments also funds three standalone Holocaust museums—in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver—each dedicated to ensuring that Nazi crimes are remembered, studied, and taught.

When those institutions were created, no one demanded that Nazis or Nazi sympathizers be consulted to provide “context or “balance” for those institutions. Yet in the case of the Nakba exhibit, Zionist and Jewish organizations insisted that their perspectives be built into the curatorial process. This asymmetry exposes a deeper truth in Canada—that Holocaust memory is treated as unquestionable moral ground, while Palestinian memory is treated as dangerous and conditional.

The is no argument that the Holocaust should be taught in schools, commemorated annually, and memorialized.  The massive amount of cultural and academic knowledge that has been produced since World War Two through museums, monuments, films, and an enormous body of academic research, makes it one of the most studied and memorialized events in modern history. But the contrast with Palestinian history is profound. The Nakba—during which more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and thousands massacred by Jewish terrorist militias and subsequently by the Israeli army in 1948—has received a very small fraction of the institutional attention devoted to the Holocaust. There are no publicly funded Nakba museums, no national commemorations, and no high school curricula dedicated to Palestinian history.

The CMHR exhibit is the first of its kind in a major Canadian institution. Its modest scale is in contrast to the enormous outrage it provoked within segments of the Canadian Jewish community, demonstrating that Palestinian suffering is not merely ignored or forgotten, it is actively suppressed.

A systemic pattern of anti‑Palestinian racism

The reaction to the Nakba exhibit aligns with findings from major studies on anti‑Palestinian racism in Canada. The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) April 2022 report defines anti‑Palestinian racism as systemic discrimination that includes:

• denying Palestinian existence, history, and identity;
• suppressing or punishing Palestinian narratives;
• portraying Palestinians as inherently violent or antisemitic;
• erasing the legitimacy of Palestinian suffering.

Research by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) similarly documents widespread patterns of media bias, political suppression, and institutional hostility toward Palestinian advocacy.

The backlash against the Nakba exhibit is a textbook example of these dynamics. Legacy Jewish organizations’ insistence that Palestinian narratives be “balanced” with Zionist perspectives—especially in a human rights museum—reflects a racialized hierarchy in which Palestinian testimony is treated as incomplete or dangerous unless validated by those who helped produce the conditions of Palestinian dispossession.

This is not neutral “context.” It is a demand that Palestinians be denied the right to narrate their own history.

Zionist Organizations and Supremacist Logic

Zionist organizations’ efforts to shut down, dilute, or reframe the Nakba exhibit reveal the depth of anti‑Palestinian racism embedded in their political advocacy. Their objections were never rooted in concerns about historical accuracy, and instead were driven by a determination to preserve a narrative in which Palestinians appear only as footnotes to a triumphant story of Jewish nation‑building in colonized Palestine.

Any attempt to centre Palestinian experiences of dispossession is treated as a threat—not because the facts are in dispute, but because acknowledging those facts destabilizes the ideological framework these organizations defend.

CIJA’s claim that the exhibit could “contribute to discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students” is a striking example of how Palestinian narratives are stigmatized. The suggestion that acknowledging Palestinian suffering is inherently dangerous to Jews reflects a supremacist worldview in which Palestinians are seen not as victims of human rights violations but as inherent threats to the rights of others by their mere existence.

Similarly, Shurat HaDin’s assertion that the exhibit “delegitimizes Jewish self‑determination” reveals a belief that Palestinian history must be suppressed to protect Jewish identity. This is not political disagreement; it is supremacist logic.

Zionism, as practiced by these organizations, functions as a supremacist ideology—one that justifies the displacement, erasure, and dehumanization of Palestinians. The reaction to the Nakba exhibit demonstrates that these organizations are not defending historical accuracy but rather a political ideology that cannot tolerate the legitimacy of Palestinian narratives.

Institutional Power and Racialized Suppression

The resignation of Mark Berlin—the museum’s only Jewish trustee—became a flashpoint. Berlin accused the CMHR of “institutional anti‑Zionism” and denounced the exhibit as “curation by omission.” His departure illustrated how deeply Zionist ideology is expected to be accommodated in Canadian institutions, and where any attempt to tell stories about Palestinian suffering is swiftly recast as anti‑Jewish, biased, or dangerous.

This reflexive reframing does not arise from evidence. It arises from a political project that treats Palestinian memory as inherently dangerous to Jews and Palestinian voices as needing correction, containment, or counter‑narration.

Canada’s Human Rights Test

The Nakba exhibit is Canada’s human rights test. It asks whether Palestinians can exist in Canadian public memory without being filtered through Zionist ideology. It asks whether Palestinian suffering can be acknowledged without apology, without demands for “context” from those hostile to Palestinian existence, and without political interference.

Canada’s approach to historical memory makes the imbalance unmistakable. The country has invested enormous resources in memorializing the Holocaust but almost none in acknowledging the Zionist Jewish violence and atrocities that accompanied the creation of Israel through Palestinian dispossession. The CMHR exhibit is the first major attempt to acknowledge this history—and even that modest effort has been met with outrage, lobbying, and demands for ideological correction.

This opposition the CMHR display is purely political. The fury directed at the museum for daring to tell Palestinian stories demonstrates that the erasure of Palestinians is not a passive omission but an active project in Canada—one sustained by powerful Zionist organizations that insist Palestinian suffering must be  filtered through their ideological lens.

If Canada is ever to claim a genuine commitment to human rights, it must confront this reality directly. It must reject supremacist ideologies that seek to silence or reshape Palestinian narratives. And it must affirm, unequivocally, the right of Palestinians to narrate their own history—without permission from those who helped produce their dispossession.

Only then can Canada begin to live up to the principles it claims to uphold. 

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

1000 days of genocide: A world after the Gaza Genocide (Part 3/3)

A thousand days of genocide in Gaza have revealed the truth about our world—Israel has committed the crime of crimes, the pinnacle of contemporary evil, and Western governments have enabled it.

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

A thousand days of genocide in Gaza has not only exposed the brutality of Israeli policy and the complicity of Western governments, it has also revealed the machinery that made such violence possible, and part of that machinery is the propaganda apparatus needed to sell genocide to Western publics. No genocide in history has unfolded without such a system to sanitize the violence and dehumanize the victims. In Rwanda, it was Radio Mille Collines. In Nazi Germany, it was Der Stürmer. In Gaza, it has been Western news media.

Across Canada, the United States, and Europe, major outlets softened or erased the reality of Israeli atrocities. Canadian networks—CBC, CTV, Global—and the country’s major newspapers consistently reproduced Israeli government narratives while obscuring Palestinian suffering. They refused to call genocide by its name. They framed mass killing as “conflict,” deliberate starvation as “shortages,” and ethnic cleansing as “evacuation.” This was not a matter of journalistic misjudgment or unconscious bias. It was media complicity. It was the manufacturing of public consent for atrocity, the ideological scaffolding that allowed political leaders to act without accountability. Media executives, editors, and owners bear moral responsibility for this distortion of reality—and if justice ever prevails, they may one day bear legal responsibility as well.

While Western governments and media shielded Israel, the global South took a radically different path. South Africa led the genocide case at the International Court of Justice, invoking the very legal framework the West once claimed as its moral legacy. Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and others condemned Israel’s actions without hesitation. Millions marched across Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America protesting and showing an unmistakable divide—one where the West defended genocide, while the global South and those Westerners with a conscience defended international law. This moment marks a profound geopolitical realignment. The Gaza genocide has accelerated the decline of Western influence and the rise of a multipolar world in which Western moral authority no longer carries the weight it once did. Nations that once deferred to Western leadership have seen enough.

The consequences for Western legitimacy are severe and irreversible. The genocide has shattered the West’s credibility on human rights, revealing that its commitment is conditional, racialized, and politically selective. It has exposed the hollowness of its claims to uphold international law, which it seemingly applies only when convenient and discards the moment it threatens Western interests or those of an ally. It has undermined the integrity of Western democracy, as leaders ignored overwhelming public support for a ceasefire, criminalized anti-genocide protests, smeared human rights activists, and attempted to silence dissent. In doing so, it has destroyed any remaining claim to moral leadership on the global stage.

Rebuilding any semblance of a moral order requires accountability—not symbolic gestures, not rhetorical condemnations, but real consequences for nations that commit horrific crimes. That means broad sanctions on Israel, comprehensive arms embargoes, prosecutions at the International Criminal Court, enforcement of the International Court of Justice’s rulings, universal‑jurisdiction cases against perpetrators, reparations for Palestinians, and political consequences for Western leaders who enabled genocide. Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and other nations must all face a legal and moral reckoning for their complicity in genocide. Without accountability, the international system will remain what Gaza has revealed it to be, a structure designed to protect the powerful and abandon the vulnerable.

Yet despite the devastation, Palestinians remain resolute, still holding fast to the dream of freedom from Israeli oppression and occupation. Israel has destroyed their homes, schools, hospitals, archives, museums, mosques, and churches. It has tried to erase Palestinian culture, history, and memory. It has targeted intellectuals, artists, journalists, and educators in an effort to extinguish the very sources of cultural continuity. But it has failed. Instead of erasing Palestinian consciousness, it has strengthened it—creating not only a generation of Palestinians more determined than ever to assert their identity, but an international community of supporters who refuse to let their struggle be forgotten.

Palestinian identity endures through oral history, literature, art, music, resistance, and global solidarity. A people cannot be erased as long as they continue to proclaim their existence and tell their story. The resilience of Palestinians—under conditions that would have shattered most societies—stands as one of the most extraordinary expressions of collective endurance in modern history.

A thousand days of genocide in Gaza have revealed the truth about our world. One where Israel has committed the crime of crimes, the pinnacle of contemporary evil. Western governments have enabled it, Western media have sold it, and international institutions have failed to stop it. The global South has risen in moral leadership, while Palestinians have shown extraordinary courage and resilience. The genocide in Gaza is not just a crime against a people—it is a crime against the idea of humanity itself.

The world that emerges from this moment will not resemble the world that existed before it. The West’s moral authority is gone. The human rights system it built is broken. The international legal order it claimed to steward is discredited beyond repair. And Palestinians—despite unimaginable suffering, trauma, and the erasure of entire family lines—remain unbowed. Their endurance has become a moral indictment of the global powers that armed their oppressor and a testament to the human capacity to resist annihilation. History will remember who acted, who remained silent, and who chose complicity over humanity. It will remember the governments and politicians that defended a genocidal state, the media institutions that sanitized its crimes, and the millions who marched in defiance of both. It will remember who stood with the oppressed when the cost of doing so was high.

 

The path forward begins with the truth—unvarnished, unfiltered, and unsoftened. The truth of what happened in Gaza. The truth of who ordered it, who carried out the orders, who enabled it, and the truth of how the world allowed it to continue long after the scale of the atrocity was undeniable. That truth must be followed by accountability, real consequences for those who committed, supported, financed, or justified genocide. Accountability for the political leaders who armed the killing, for the institutions that normalized it, and for the states that obstructed justice at every turn. And it must end with justice for the thousands upon thousands of Palestinian dead, for the families erased from the civil registry, for the tens of thousands of children left orphaned, maimed, and traumatized. It must end with justice for a people who have endured dispossession, occupation, apartheid, and mass killing for generations—a people who are, by every measure, the most persecuted minority of the modern era, not just in the land of historic Palestine but also in the diaspora in Western nations.

 

Without truth, accountability, and justice, Gaza will not be the last genocide. It will be the template for other megalomaniacal leaders to follow. It will mark the beginning of a world in which the powerful kill with impunity and the international community looks away. A world where human rights are a slogan, not a standard. A world where law is a weapon wielded by the strong against the weak. The stakes could not be higher. What happens after the Gaza genocide is finally stopped will determine the moral trajectory of the twenty‑first century—whether humanity chooses a future grounded in justice and universal rights, or whether it descends into an era defined by brutality, impunity, and the normalization of mass atrocity.

 

We must ensure that this moment leads us toward a more just world, not a darker one. Gaza must become the turning point, a beacon, the moment when humanity finally confronts the systems that made genocide possible and chooses to build something better. The world after Gaza is unwritten, and it is ours to shape.

  

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

1000 days of genocide: The collapse of Western moral order (Part 2/3)

The Gaza genocide has shown that Western governments, including Canada’s, have abandoned even the pretense of universal human rights. 

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

As the world marked a thousand days of the Gaza genocide today the question is no longer whether Western governments have failed to uphold international law or the principles of justice and equality among peoples. The real question—the one that will define the 21st century—is what it means for the global order when the world’s most powerful democracies enable genocide in real time, with full knowledge, full visibility, and full capacity to stop it.

 
The genocide in Gaza has not only exposed the brutality and inhumanity of Israel and its leadership, it has detonated the foundations of the moral order built on the ashes of World War Two and the Holocaust that the West claimed to embody. For eight decades, Western nations insisted that the horrors of the Holocaust had transformed global ethics. They built institutions—the United Nations, the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the International Criminal Court (ICC)—designed to prevent future atrocities. They taught generations of children that the world had learned its lesson, that “Never Again” was a universal commitment rather than a slogan.
 
Gaza has revealed that this lesson either was never learned, or if it was it has been abandoned. And it has shown that Western governments, including Canada’s, have abandoned even the pretense of universal human rights.
 
The genocide in Gaza is “worse” than the Holocaust in one devastating sense. It is happening in full view of the world, livestreamed, documented, and preventable—yet allowed to continue. The world of the 1930s and 1940s did not have instant communications, or international legal mechanisms capable of intervening in real time. The world of 2023–2026 does. And yet Western governments chose complicity. This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of morality and of humanity.
 
It seems the West’s commitment to “Never Again” was never universal. It was selective, conditional, and politically instrumental. It applied when the perpetrators were enemies, not allies; when the victims were white, not brown; European, not Palestinian or Arab; Christian or Jewish, not Muslim. The moral authority the West claimed after 1945 has evaporated. The world has seen the truth. Western humanity is an illusion, a performance that collapses the moment it conflicts with geopolitical or economic interests.
 
International law as a system of Western power
 
The Genocide Convention imposes three obligations on signatory states: to prevent genocide, to punish genocide, and to refrain from aiding or abetting genocide. The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and other Western democracies have violated all three. These are the nations that helped design the post‑1945 legal order, that claimed to be its guardians, and that possess the political, economic, and military leverage to enforce it. Yet when confronted with a genocide carried out by an ally, they abandoned the law entirely and behaved like outlaws. Their failure is not passive. It is an active and deliberate dereliction of duty that exposes how deeply the international system is shaped by power rather than principles of justice.
 
The UN Charter prohibits aggression, annexation, collective punishment, the targeting of civilians, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure. Israel has violated each of these on multiple occasions since 1948, and is currently doing so in the south of Lebanon.  And rather than legal, political and economic sanctions, Western governments have responded with weapons, diplomatic protection, and political support, essentially allowing Israel to do what it wants. The Geneva Conventions prohibit starvation of civilians, attacks on hospitals and schools, assaults on refugee camps, and forced displacement. Israel has committed all these crimes openly with impunity, and its Western allies have done nothing to stop it.
 
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant—an unprecedented step that should have galvanized Western democracies to defend the very system of international justice they claim to uphold. Instead, Canada and its allies attacked the Court itself, undermining its legitimacy, threatening its prosecutors and judges, and even imposing sanctions on ICC officials for daring to pursue accountability. Israel’s own security establishment joined in, with the former head of Mossad reportedly threatening the ICC’s chief prosecutor in an effort to pressure the Court into dropping a war crimes investigation.
 
The message is unmistakable. For Western governments, international law is not a universal framework but a weapon wielded selectively against nations it wishes to control or punish. It binds the weak, never the powerful. It restrains adversaries, never allies. The architecture of global justice collapses the moment it threatens those with real geopolitical influence globally.
 
Canada’s complicity: A case study in moral abdication
 
If Canada were genuinely committed to international law as it has so often claimed over the years, its actions would have been clear and decisive. It would have imposed a full arms embargo on Israel, suspended the Canada–Israel Free Trade Agreement, sanctioned Israeli political and military leaders responsible for atrocities, supported South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ, expelled the Israeli ambassador, recalled its own ambassador from Tel Aviv, and initiated universal‑jurisdiction prosecutions against those implicated in genocidal crimes in Gaza, including Canadians who have travelled to Israel to join the Israeli military since 2023. None of these measures are radical. They are the minimum legal obligations of any state party to the Genocide Convention when confronted with a nation committing genocide.
 
Instead, Canada retreated into symbolic gestures and empty rhetoric. Both the Trudeau government and the Carney government failed—not because they lacked legal tools, but because they lacked courage and integrity. They feared the political cost of confronting the powerful pro‑Israel lobby in Canada that exerts enormous influence over Canadian foreign policy. They placed strategic alliances above human life. They treated Palestinian suffering as something to be managed rather than confronted. Their decisions revealed a worldview in which Palestinians were not regarded as fully human, and therefore not entitled to the same urgency, protection, or moral consideration afforded to others.
 
The contrast with Canada’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposes this double standard with brutal clarity. Canada acted decisively for Ukraine—sanctions, diplomatic isolation, military support—and even declared Russia’s actions “genocide,” despite the absence of consensus among genocide scholars. Yet when confronted with overwhelming expert consensus that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, Canada refused to use the word at all. It acted decisively for white Christian Europeans and symbolically for brown and primarily Muslim Palestinians.
 
This is not neutrality. It is complicity.
 
The end of Western legitimacy
 
The genocide in Gaza has torn away the last shreds of the illusion that the so‑called “rules‑based international order” is grounded in law, principle, or universal human rights. It has exposed that order for what it has always been: a hierarchy of power masquerading as morality, designed and enforced by Western states to protect their interests, not humanity. In Gaza, the West did not merely fail to uphold its professed values—it abandoned them with breathtaking clarity. Canada, the United States, and Europe watched an entire people starved, bombed, forcibly displaced, and massacred, and instead of intervening chose to arm the perpetrators, shield them diplomatically, and sabotage every attempt at accountability. The moral authority the West claimed after 1945—invoking “Never Again” as a universal promise—has collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy. The world has seen the truth, and it will not be forgotten. There is no moral leadership among Western nations; they have revealed themselves as rogue actors, outlaws in suits, indifferent to the suffering of those who are not like them or of them. Their claim to being the moral guardians of the world order has been shattered, and no amount of rhetoric, no invocation of past virtue, can restore it.
 
And it is precisely at this moment—when Western legitimacy disintegrates in full view—that the story of the world after Gaza begins.
 
The collapse of the moral order the West claimed to uphold has opened a new and profoundly uncertain chapter in world history—one defined not only by global realignment and the erosion of Western credibility, but by the emergence of a multipolar world in which Western governments can no longer dictate the terms of international politics. The genocide in Gaza has become the catalyst for this shift. It has exposed the limits of Western power and the bankruptcy of Western moral claims, and it has emboldened states across the Global South to assert their own visions of justice, sovereignty, and human dignity. The steadfastness of the Palestinian people—their refusal to disappear despite 78 years of occupation, dispossession, apartheid, and brutal oppression—has become a rallying point for a world no longer willing to accept Western double standards as natural law. In Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, governments and civil societies have spoken with remarkable clarity—they reject Western hypocrisy, they reject Western exceptionalism, and they overwhelmingly support the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Their voices, once dismissed or patronized, now carry weight in a world where Western authority is visibly crumbling.
 
This is the landscape of the world after Gaza: a world in which uncertainty is the new order of the day, not because chaos reigns, but because the old certainties—Western dominance, Western rule‑making, Western moral superiority—have been shattered. The Global South is no longer content to be lectured by nations that arm genocide while preaching human rights. It is demanding a seat at the table, demanding accountability, demanding a new international order built not on coercion but on genuine universality. Activists, scholars, and ordinary citizens across the planet are reassessing the foundations of global politics, asking who truly speaks for justice and who merely speaks for power. The question now confronting humanity is profound and unavoidable: what kind of world will emerge from this moment, and who will shape it? Gaza has become the fault line between the collapsing old order and the uncertain but potentially transformative new one. The future will be written not by those who clung to hypocrisy and self-interest, but by those who confronted it, rejected it, and insisted on a different path—one in which Palestinians, and the Global South more broadly, are no longer subjects of Western policy but authors of their own destiny.
 
In the end, the world after Gaza will not be shaped by Western governments clinging to a crumbling order, but by the billions who refused to accept that order’s brutality as inevitable. The uncertainty ahead is real, but it is also an opening—a rupture through which new possibilities can emerge, driven by the moral clarity of those who see the movement to bring freedom to Palestinians as an inflection point, and the unyielding struggle of Palestinians themselves. What comes next will be contested, turbulent, and transformative. But one truth is already unmistakable: the age of Western moral dominance is over, and a new global conversation—one that the West can no longer monopolize—has begun.

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

1000 days of genocide: A story of Western immorality and Israeli inhumanity (Part 1/3)

The Gaza genocide has exposed the end of the post‑1945 human‑rights order, showing that international law for powerful states is applied selectively. 

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

A version of this article has also been published by Rabble.ca.

On July 3, 2026 the world will cross a threshold that should never exist—a thousand days of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A thousand days of mass murder, starvation, displacement, cultural destruction, and the systematic annihilation of a people and society. A thousand days during which Western governments have not merely failed to stop the genocide, but have actively enabled it. A thousand days in which the mask of Western “humanity,” “values,” and “moral leadership” has fallen away, revealing a political order that has decided that Palestinians are less than human and that their lives are disposable.

For the better part of three years, the world has watched the destruction of Gaza unfold in real time. Every major human‑rights organization—Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, the International Federation for Human Rights and others—has documented patterns of killing, destruction, and dehumanizing rhetoric. Each eventually concluded that Israel’s actions meet the legal definition of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Prominent Israeli Holocaust scholars such as Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, and Raz Segal, affirmed the same. United Nations agencies have also repeatedly warned that Israel’s actions constituted genocide.

Yet despite overwhelming evidence, Canada and most of its allies refused to acknowledge the crime. Worse, they continued to supply Israel with weapons, diplomatic cover, and political legitimacy. The United States remained the primary enabler, but Canada, the UK, Germany, France, and others played indispensable supporting roles. Canada exploited a legislative loophole that allowed it to continue exporting weapons and components to Israel via the United States, even as Gaza’s hospitals, universities, refugee camps, and entire neighbourhoods were reduced to rubble.

Western governments have made the truth impossible to deny. Through both their actions and their refusals to act, they have effectively endorsed Israel’s project of erasing the Palestinian population of Gaza. Their persistent refusal to intervene anywhere in the occupied Palestinian territories—Gaza, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem—signals not neutrality or support for a two‑state compromise, but alignment with Israel’s long‑standing ambition to consolidate a “Greater Israel” cleansed of its Indigenous Palestinian population. For decades, Western leaders cloaked this alignment behind the language of a “two‑state solution,” a phrase repeated so often it became a diplomatic reflex rather than a genuine policy. In practice, it functioned as a convenient fiction—an empty slogan used to mask Western complicity in Israel’s expansionist, settler‑colonial agenda and to obscure the reality that their actions consistently advanced the very outcome they claimed to oppose.

A 78 year record of enabling Israeli impunity

If Western governments had ever truly intended to uphold international law, the UN Charter, or the Genocide Convention, they would have acted long before genocidal violence was initiated by Israel in the fall of 2023. Israel’s history since 1948 is a catalogue of violations of the very legal instruments the West claims to defend:

• Ethnic cleansing and mass displacement during the Nakba in 1948;
• Illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem;
• Systematic apartheid, as documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B’Tselem;
• Repeated wars on Gaza, each involving mass civilian casualties—in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, and the ongoing Gaza genocide since 2023;
• Targeting of journalists, medics, and children;
• Collective punishment, prohibited under the Geneva Conventions; and
• Annexation of occupied territory, which is illegal under the UN Charter.

For decades, Western governments responded with statements of “concern,” “regret,” or “alarm”—but never with meaningful action. No sanctions. No arms embargoes. No diplomatic isolation. No accountability.

This is not mere failure. It is deliberate policy.

The West’s unwavering support for Israel—political, military, economic, and ideological—created the conditions in which genocide could occur openly, livestreamed to the world, without consequence. In the process, the so-called “international rules‑based order” has been exposed as a selective system designed to protect Western allies and punish Western adversaries. Palestinians, like many non‑Western peoples, were never part of the moral universe that order claimed to defend.

The death of the responsibility to protect

After the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica, the UN adopted the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), committing states to intervene when mass atrocities occur. Gaza has proven that R2P is a hollow promise. If Western leaders possessed even a fraction of the humanity they claim, they would have invoked R2P the moment genocide was affirmed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, UN agencies, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Israeli human‑rights groups, and leading Holocaust scholars.

Instead, Western governments did the opposite. They shielded Israel from accountability, vetoed UN ceasefire resolutions, and continued supplying weapons. The message to the world was unmistakable: Palestinian lives do not trigger Western moral obligations.

Canada’s Hypocrisy

Canada’s political class—under both the Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney governments—has perfected the art of moral posturing while enabling atrocity. Canadian leaders routinely describe Canada as a defender of human rights, a champion of the UN, and a guardian of the “rules‑based international order.” Yet Canada violated its legal obligations under the UN Charter and the Genocide Convention by refusing to take the actions required when genocide is occurring.

If Canada were truly committed to international law, it would have:

• Imposed a full arms embargo on Israel;
• Suspended the Canada–Israel Free Trade Agreement;
• Sanctioned Israeli political and military leaders responsible for genocidal acts;
• Supported South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justicde (ICJ), as NATO allies Belgium, Iceland, the Netherlands, Spain, Turkiye, along with 16 other countries have done;
• Expelled the Israeli ambassador and recalled Canada’s ambassador; and
• Launched universal‑jurisdiction prosecutions against top Israeli political and military officials.

These actions are not radical. They represent the bare minimum required under the principles of basic morality when genocide is unfolding. Yet Canada undertook none of them. Instead, it continued exporting weapons—often through loopholes—and hid behind symbolic gestures that carried no material consequence for Israel. Its belated, heavily conditioned “recognition” of Palestine, while welcomed, did nothing on the ground, offered no protection to Palestinians, and imposed no cost on Israel. Such gestures function as political theatre designed to placate public outrage while allowing Canada to maintain alignment with Israeli policy.

A Study in Racialized Morality

The clearest demonstration of Western hypocrisy is the contrast between the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Canada acted with speed and moral clarity: sanctions, diplomatic isolation, asset freezes, ICC support, and a unanimous parliamentary declaration of “genocide.” Yet when Israel began its genocide in Gaza, Canada imposed no sanctions, no arms embargo, no diplomatic isolation, no accountability mechanisms, and refused to acknowledge genocide at all.

The only difference between the two cases is the identity of the victims and the political alignment of the aggressors. Ukrainians are white, European, primarily Christian, and aligned with the West. Palestinians are Indigenous, Arab, Muslim, and colonized by a Western ally.

This is not diplomacy. It is the operationalization of a racial hierarchy—a worldview in which the rights, lives, and suffering of some peoples are treated as inherently more valuable than those of others.

A Thousand Days That Changed the World

As the world marks a thousand days of genocide in Gaza, something fundamental has shifted. The world has watched Western inhumanity and Israeli brutality exposed with a clarity that cannot be undone. The illusion of Western moral superiority—already eroding for years—has now collapsed entirely. The global South sees it. Millions across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas see it. Even within Israel, a small but courageous minority sees it.

This moment forces a reckoning. What does it mean for the future of the international system when the world’s most powerful democracies enable genocide? What does it reveal about the structures of law, morality, and global governance that were supposedly built to prevent such crimes? And what does it demand of nations like Canada, which helped make this atrocity possible?

The Gaza genocide has exposed the end of the post‑1945 human‑rights order. It has shown that accountability for powerful states is optional, that international law is applied selectively, and that the principles the West claims to uphold collapse the moment they conflict with geopolitical interests. A thousand days of genocide have laid bare a truth the world can no longer ignore: the system is broken, and those who enabled this crime must one day face a reckoning worthy of its scale.

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