Zionist racism and Palestinian dehumanization are the foundations of Israel’s moral character

Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, envisioned a racist Jewish state as a “civilizing” outpost of Europe in Palestine —  implicitly superior to the “barbaric” indigenous population.  

  

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

From its earliest formulations in late‑19th‑century Europe, Zionism imagined a political order in historic Palestine built around the supremacy of one ethnonational group—Jews. Over the decades, that vision hardened into a state structure that one Israeli human rights organization—B’Tselem—has described as a “regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Other groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and numerous scholars of genocide and settler colonialism have concluded that Israeli governance across all of historic Palestine constitutes apartheid, and in the eyes of some genocide scholars an unfolding genocidal process.

This is not a claim about Judaism or Jewish identity. It is a claim about state power, ideology, and structures of supremacy. And it is a claim increasingly made by courageous Israelis who defy the powerful interests of a state committing genocide.

Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard captured this internal reckoning with painful clarity when he said, “I look at these young people who are poisoned with racism and hatred, and at some of their elders, who are their spiritual mentors and implant in them toxic notions of Jewish supremacy… How did we produce from among us the replicas of our persecutors?”

Sfard’s question is not rhetorical. It is a diagnosis of a society shaped by decades of occupation, settlement, and ethnonational fear—one in which Jewish supremacy and dehumanization of Palestinians has become normalized, even valorized.

Zionism’s racialized and fascist foundations

Zionism emerged in the same intellectual climate that produced European colonialism, racial hierarchy, and the early currents of ethnonationalism that would later culminate in fascist movements. Theodor Herzl, the movement’s founder, envisioned a racist Jewish state in Palestine as a civilizing outpost of Europe. In Der Judenstaat and Altneuland, Herzl described the future Jewish society as modern, rational, and European—implicitly superior to the “backward” native population.

Herzl’s writings repeatedly framed Palestinians not as a people with political rights, but as an obstacle to be managed, displaced, or subordinated to the Zionist agenda. His admiration for European colonial models—particularly British rule in South Africa—reveals a worldview steeped in racial hierarchy.

Critics and scholars have argued that Herzl’s political imagination contained proto‑fascist elements, including: a belief in demographic engineering; a vision of a homogenous ethnonational state; a hierarchical worldview that placed European Jews at the apex; and a willingness to subordinate or remove indigenous populations.

These elements do not make Herzl a fascist. But they place him within the intellectual family of European racial nationalism, a genealogy that later fed into the fascist ideologies that dominated Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. If one removes the Jewish identity component, Herzl’s framework shares structural similarities with other European ethnonationalist movements of his era—movements that came to dominate politics in Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Portugal.

This is not an accusation of personal malevolence but a recognition that Herzl’s political imagination was shaped by the dominant ideologies of his time, namely settler colonialism, racialized progress, and ethnonational exclusivity. These ideas later crystallized into policies within the Zionist movement that promoted Jewish demographic dominance and territorial control over Palestinian rights.

The making of a supremacist regime

The Nakba of 1948—marked by mass displacement, village destruction, and the permanent exclusion of over 750,000 Palestinian refugees—was not an aberration but a foundational moment. Laws such as the Absentee Property Law ensured that Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed could never return to their homes, while their land was transferred to Jewish ownership.

After 1967, the occupation entrenched a dual legal system, one where Israeli settlers in the West Bank lived under Israeli civil law, enjoyed full political rights, and received state protection, while Palestinians lived under military law, faced movement restrictions, home demolitions, land seizures, and arbitrary detention. B’Tselem concluded in 2021 that this constitutes “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” effectively making Israel an apartheid state.

Human Rights Watch’s A Threshold Crossed reached the same conclusion, documenting policies designed to maintain Jewish demographic and political dominance through land control, movement restrictions, and discriminatory laws.

Along with a similar report by Amnesty International in 2022, these claims of Israel being an apartheid state are not fringe interpretations. They are the assessments of leading human rights institutions, and are supported by research by human rights scholars.

Dehumanization as policy and culture

Supremacy is sustained not only through laws but through dehumanizing language. Israeli political leaders have long deployed rhetoric that erases Palestinian identity and strips Palestinians of their humanity. They rarely refer to Palestinians as “Palestinians” at all, choosing instead the generic term “Arabs,” a deliberate linguistic move that denies a people their name, their history, and their nationhood. This erasure is reinforced by explicit dehumanization. Senior officials have repeatedly used language that casts Palestinians as subhuman or inherently threatening. Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked notoriously described Palestinian children as “little snakes,” even calling for the killing of Palestinian mothers to prevent future generations. Such rhetoric is not incidental; it is part of the ideological machinery that makes domination thinkable and violence permissible.

Such language is not merely hateful—it is functional. It prepares the public to accept policies of collective punishment, siege, and large‑scale military assault.  Also, settler violence, often carried out with impunity and the support if Israeli authorities, reinforces this logic. Sfard’s comparison of extremist settlers to the Ku Klux Klan is not hyperbole but a reflection of vigilante terror used to enforce ethnic hierarchy.

This dehumanization has intensified during Israel’s repeated assaults on Gaza over the years. By mid‑November 2023, Holocaust and genocide scholars—including Marion Kaplan, Omer Bartov, and Barry Trachtenberg—warned that Israel’s actions risked or constituted genocide. Their warnings were grounded in patterns familiar from other cases of forced displacement, destruction of civilian infrastructure, mass killing, and rhetoric invoking biblical annihilation narratives.

Holocaust survivors and descendants have echoed these warnings, arguing that the dehumanization of Palestinians mirrors patterns they recognize from their own histories. Their testimony cannot be dismissed as it is rooted in lived experience and scholarly expertise.

For decades, Israel enjoyed near-total impunity in the international legal system. That era is ending. Cases before the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court have forced a global reckoning with the legal and moral implications of prolonged occupation and systemic discrimination. Some Holocaust scholars who initially defended Israel’s actions in Gaza have since gone silent. Their earlier support for state violence—rather than for the universal principles of human rights—reveals a troubling willingness to subordinate anti‑racist commitments to ethnonational loyalty.

As critics have noted, this silence is a betrayal of the very lessons the field of genocide studies was created to uphold.

Parallels between Zionism and white supremacy

We must also confront the fact that Zionism, as practiced by the Israeli state, shares structural parallels with white supremacy. Both are systems of domination built on similar foundations. Each constructs a superior in‑group understood as uniquely entitled to land, sovereignty, and political power. Each justifies the dispossession of an Indigenous or subordinate population through narratives of civilizational advancement or historical destiny. Both rely on demographic engineering to secure permanent control, deploy stories of cultural or racial superiority to legitimize exclusion, and normalize segregation, unequal citizenship, and the systematic denial of rights. These are not incidental similarities. They reflect the underlying architecture of two regimes organized around maintaining the dominance of one group over another.

In the United States, “manifest destiny” justified the displacement of Indigenous peoples. In Israel, the Law of Return grants automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide while denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes. Academic work in Holy Land Studies and other journals describes Zionism as a racial regime that reproduces whiteness through land control and exclusion of Arabs and non‑European Jews.

A society shaped by ethnosupremacy

Haaretz has documented how Jewish supremacy has fractured Israeli society itself, empowering extremist settlers and far‑right movements that now dominate national politics.  The Oslo era did not moderate these forces, it entrenched them. Settlement expansion accelerated, Palestinian territory fragmented into disconnected enclaves, and the logic of domination became normalized. Jewish self‑determination has been transformed into a system of supremacy that denies Palestinians equivalent rights.

This is not a fringe view. It is increasingly the consensus among scholars of settler colonialism, apartheid, and ethnonationalism. Recognizing the supremacist structures embedded in Israeli governance does not diminish Jewish suffering or deny the trauma of antisemitism. It does not delegitimize Jewish collective identity or aspirations for safety. But it does demand a reckoning with the reality that no people can secure their freedom by denying another’s.

Ending the occupation, dismantling apartheid structures, and recognizing Palestinian political and human rights are not acts of hostility toward Jews. They are acts of fidelity to universal principles of justice.

As Sfard asked: How did we produce replicas of our persecutors? The answer lies not in Jewish identity, but in the corrosive power of Zionism, an ideology of ethnonational supremacy. The task now is to build a political order grounded not in domination, but in equality.

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

Ottawa judge whitewashes racist attack by Swiss man against Palestinian-Canadian woman

Justice Norman Boxall's judgment is so unjust that it undermines the promise that “everyone is equal before the law.”

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

On May 29, 2024, outside Ottawa’s EY Centre, a 21‑year‑old Palestinian‑Canadian woman in a hijab protesting a defence contractors conference was punched in the face and knocked to the ground by a Swiss man attending the CANSEC expo. When she told him he was “actively supporting genocide” by attending, he responded with his fist. That moment was brutal, racist, and unmistakably criminal—but it was not when Canada’s justice system failed her. The failure came earlier this week inside an Ottawa courtroom, when Justice Norman Boxall decided that this assault deserved no conviction, no sentence, and no meaningful consequence at all.

The facts are not in dispute. David Henschel, a 58‑year‑old Swiss national and employee of defence contractor Rheinmetall Waffe Munition Schweiz AG, encountered multiple protesters on his way to CANSEC. According to agreed facts read in court, one protester called him a racist. Henschel replied, “I’m a f---ing racist and I’m proud of it.” He then crossed the street, where the young woman told him his presence meant he was supporting genocide and said, “Shame on you, sir.” In response Henschel swung his arm and struck her in the face with a closed fist, dropping her to the ground, then forcefully shoved another protester before continuing toward the conference.

He was arrested and eventually pled guilty to assault in a 2025 court hearing. During sentencing submissions in June 2026, he tried to explain the attack away with claims of low blood sugar and PTSD, supported by a psychiatrist whose assessment relied largely on Henschel’s own self‑reporting. The Crown rightly challenged this as a thin, self‑serving narrative designed to minimize responsibility for a targeted attack on a visibly Muslim woman at a peaceful protest.

Then, on July 22, 2026, Justice Norman Boxall delivered the real blow—not to Henschel, but to the victim and to public faith in the courts. He granted an absolute discharge—a finding of guilt with no conviction, no probation, no conditions, and no sentence tied to the assault itself. The only financial consequence—a $5,000 surcharge—was imposed not for the attack, but because Henschel had failed to appear in person at an earlier sentencing date.

Boxall went further. He rejected the Crown’s argument that the assault was fuelled by racist and hateful attitudes, despite Henschel’s own declaration that he was a racist and proud of it, delivered moments before he punched a Palestinian‑Canadian woman in a hijab. He framed the assault as a “frustrated and emotional response,” a “situational” lapse, and accepted the defence’s request for no conviction.

This was not neutral judging in support of justice for the victim. It was judicial complicity in the minimization of racist violence.

When a judge watches a video showing a man openly proclaiming himself a racist, sees him striking a visibly Muslim woman in the face at a peaceful protest, hears witnesses confirm the details of the events, and reads victim impact statements describing the assault as part of a broader pattern of anti‑Palestinian and anti‑Muslim hostility—yet still concludes the attack was not motivated by racism—that judge has not made simply made an error. Rather he is declaring, through his ruling, that racism against Palestinians and Muslims does not count in his courtroom. And a judge who cannot recognize racism in a case this blatant has no business sitting on the bench or presiding over matters of justice.

The victim’s father, Bassam Hashem, captured the reality outside court when he said, “We came to this country for one reason . . . that we can express ourselves. That we are equal citizens. Today we were told, ‘No. You are second‑class citizens. You can be assaulted and that’s OK.’”

Hashem’s children no longer attend demonstrations. They no longer feel safe. That is the direct consequence of Boxall’s ruling: a chilling effect on protest, a message to racialized communities that their safety is negotiable, and a public declaration that a racist assault on a Palestinian‑Canadian woman can be washed away as a momentary emotional lapse.

The Crown has already filed a notice of appeal, calling the sentence “demonstrably unfit.” They are right. But the problem is not only the sentence—it is the judge. A justice who cannot recognize racism when a perpetrator announces it; who accepts low‑blood‑sugar excuses over the lived reality of a targeted attack; who treats a violent assault on a peaceful protester as discharge‑worthy has forfeited the moral authority required to sit on the bench.

This is not a marginal disagreement over sentencing philosophy. It is a failure of judgment so profound that it undermines the promise that “everyone is equal before the law.”

Justice Norman Boxall should not remain on the bench. At minimum, he should be subjected to serious remedial training on hate‑motivated violence, anti‑Palestinian and anti‑Muslim racism, and the rights of protesters. But the deeper truth is more disturbing. A judge who refuses to see racism in a case like this cannot be trusted to adjudicate cases involving racialized communities at all.

On May 29, 2024, a Muslim Palestinian‑Canadian woman was assaulted for daring to confront an arms dealer about genocide. On July 22, 2026, the Ontario Court of Justice told her, in effect, that her attacker’s comfort mattered more than her safety, her dignity, or her rights.

Only one of those events was unavoidable—and it wasn’t the ruling.

If Canada is serious about equal justice, this decision cannot stand. The appeal must succeed. And the judge whose reasoning turned a racist assault into a consequence‑free discharge should be held to account, not quietly shielded by the institution he has just disgraced.

Justice for the victim is not a discharge. Justice is accountability for the person who committed the crime. And on that measure, Justice Norman Boxall has failed.

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

Israel’s war in Lebanon is another example of the criminal impunity of a rogue, terrorist state

Israel’s actions have destabilized Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. They have inflamed regional tensions, fuelled extremism, and undermined diplomatic efforts.  

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

While the genocide in Gaza continues unabated Israeli leaders have now expanded their war crimes regime to Lebanon, where the 2026 invasion is not an aberration, not a sudden eruption of violence, and certainly not a defensive reflex. It is the latest chapter in a decades‑long pattern of criminal impunity—an extension of the same tactics, doctrines, and policies that have devastated Gaza. What is unfolding today in southern Lebanon is not merely a “spillover” from Gaza or a confrontation with Hezbollah. It is the exportation of the Gaza model of military aggression—the systematic destruction, mass displacement, territorial engineering, and steady normalization of Israel’s annexationist ambitions that have animated its leaders’ strategic thinking for decades.

Since the beginning of the Israeli invasion Lebanese authorities have reported more than 4,300 killed and over 12,000 wounded, with over one million displaced—roughly one‑fifth of the country forced from their homes. Israel has conducted thousands of airstrikes, bulldozed entire villages, bombed the suburbs of Beirut, and expanded operations far beyond its self‑declared “Yellow Line,” pushing up to ten kilometers into Lebanese territory. These are not temporary incursions, and this has been confirmed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in conversations with Israeli soldiers. They are in effect the creation of “facts on the ground,” the same methodical approach Israel has used for decades in the West Bank to transform an illegal occupation into a permanent presence.

The Gaza model exported

Israel’s military leaders have openly described their Lebanon campaign as a replication of tactics used in the Gaza genocide. Defence Minister Israel Katz referenced the “Rafah and Beit Hanoun model,” promising to demolish homes, flatten neighborhoods, and prevent civilian returns until Israel’s objectives are met. Soldiers have told reporters they are “operating exactly as we do in Gaza,” with daily destruction quotas and target lists.

Satellite imagery confirms the scale of devastation. Villages such as Bint Jbeil, Ayta al‑Shaab, and Khiam have been razed through controlled demolitions and bulldozing of buildings, mirroring Gaza’s obliterated districts. Additionally, Israel has struck civilian infrastructure—bridges over the Litani River, water facilities near the Qaraoun Dam, hospitals, schools, mosques, and farmland—all considered war crimes under international law. Furthermore, reported use of white phosphorus against civilian targets—already documented extensively in Gaza—have emerged again in Lebanon.  Another instance of Israel committing a war crime.

These actions are neither counterterrorism nor acts of self-defence. They are collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and territorial reconfiguration intended to support long-term occupation. It is the Gaza doctrine applied against a sovereign state.

A historical pattern of territorial ambition

While Israel’s defenders insist that these operations are purely defensive, aimed at neutralizing Hezbollah, the scale, the systematic razing of villages, the infrastructure destruction, and the establishment of a de facto occupied buffer zone suggest something far more ambitious, demographic engineering with the intent of effectively annexing territory.

This ambition is not new. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978, again in 1982, and occupied southern Lebanon until 2000. It launched a massive war in 2006, destroying swaths of the country. Each time, Israeli leaders spoke of “security zones,” “buffer areas,” and “temporary measures.” Each time, those measures hardened into long‑term territorial claims.

These actions align with a broader ideological project often referred to as “Greater Israel”— a maximalist vision proposed by Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl, rooted in biblical nationalism and embraced by elements of Israel’s political and religious right. This project imagines Israeli control stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, and from Turkey to northern Saudi Arabia. While not official state policy, its influence is unmistakable in settlement expansion, annexation rhetoric, and repeated military incursions into neighboring states.

Lebanon, characterized by political fragmentation, deep economic crisis, a weak military and the overwhelming impact of incessant and highly destructive attacks by Israel, is uniquely vulnerable to such ambitions. Israel’s current operations—creating cleared zones, establishing military outposts, and preventing civilians from returning to their homes and properties—mirror the early stages of territorial absorption seen in the West Bank. The logic is clear. Israel weakens the state, depopulates strategic areas, and normalizes Israeli presence, all in violation of international law.

Crimes under international law

The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment, the destruction of civilian property and infrastructure, and the forcible transfer of populations—precisely the kinds of actions Israel has carried out in Lebanon. The Rome Statute defines war crimes as intentional attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and crimes against humanity as widespread or systematic assaults on civilian populations. Israel’s conduct in Lebanon falls squarely within these prohibitions.

The mass displacement of over one million people, the razing of villages, the destruction of essential infrastructure, and the establishment of a de facto occupation zone constitute grave breaches of international law. Additionally, UN experts and human rights organizations have warned of ethnic cleansing and potential crimes against humanity.  These warnings echo those issued during Israel’s Gaza campaign, where the International Court of Justice found a “plausible risk of genocide” and ordered provisional measures to prevent further atrocities. Enabled by its Western allies, the US in particular, Israel ignored them.

US backing fuels Israeli impunity

Israel’s ability to commit these crimes repeatedly—and expand them into new theaters—rests on one foundation: unconditional US support.

The United States provides billions in military aid annually, vetoes UN resolutions calling for ceasefires or accountability, and shields Israel from sanctions or international prosecution. This support persists regardless of the severity of Israeli crimes. It persisted through the flattening of Gaza, the mass murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and the destruction of hospitals, schools, and refugee camps, and it now continues with Israeli crimes in Lebanon.

The contrast with Western responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is staggering. Russia’s aggression triggered sweeping sanctions, diplomatic isolation, ICC arrest warrants, and massive military support for Ukraine. Israel’s aggression in Gaza triggered statements of “concern” and “alarm” followed by expedited weapons shipments. This double standard is not merely hypocrisy—it is blatant complicity. Under international law, states that knowingly provide material support enabling war crimes share responsibility for those crimes.

Israel as the region’s most destabilizing force

Israel’s defenders claim that as the only “democracy” in the Middle-East it is a stabilizing force in a volatile region. However, decades of evidence suggests the opposite.

Israel has launched major wars or invasions against Lebanon (1978, 1982, 1996, 2006, 2026), Gaza (2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023–26), and repeatedly escalated tensions with Syria and Iran. It maintains an apartheid system in the West Bank, enforces a siege on Gaza, and conducts regular strikes across the region.  No other Middle Eastern state has initiated as many cross‑border conflicts, displaced as many civilians, or destroyed as much infrastructure in neighboring countries. No other state has repeatedly violated international law with such impunity, and yet the world has done nothing to stop them.

Israel’s actions have destabilized Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. They have inflamed regional tensions, fuelled extremism, and undermined diplomatic efforts. And because Israel can influence US military policy—through lobbying, intelligence partnerships, and political pressure—it can and has dragged the world’s most powerful military into regional escalations.

A state that repeatedly violates international law, destabilizes its neighbors, and wields disproportionate influence over US foreign policy is not merely a regional threat. It is a potential threat to world peace.

The biker gang analogy

If a biker gang rolled into a town, torched buildings, murdered residents, and declared parts of the territory off‑limits, the full weight of law enforcement would descend. No appeals to “self‑defence” against adversaries would excuse systematic destruction.

Yet when Israel does the same—flattening villages, displacing millions, occupying foreign soil—the international response has been muted, and there has been no effort to hold its leaders accountable. This selective enforcement of law reveals the moral bankruptcy of the so‑called international “rules‑based order” which Western nations so often invoke against their adversaries

Israel’s war in Lebanon is not an isolated conflict. It is part of a decades‑long pattern of aggression, territorial ambition, and criminal impunity. Without accountability—through sanctions, arms embargoes, ICC prosecutions, and diplomatic pressure—the cycle is bound to continue.

The world cannot remain passive in the face of Israeli exceptionalism. The credibility of international law, the stability of the Middle East, and even the prospects for global peace depend on ending this impunity and holding Israel’s leaders fully accountable.

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

Defending human rights is a moral imperative that Western governments are abandoning

The preservation of human rights must become a global moral imperative—a  commitment rooted in the understanding that without human rights, civilization collapses into violence, moral decay, and barbarism.  

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

Before the modern human rights system emerged from the ruins of the Second World War, humanity lived in a world where rights were not inherent but conditional—granted or withdrawn at the whim of empires, monarchies, political systems, racial hierarchies, and economic elites. Across continents, people were governed by systems of domination rather than universal principles, where elites saw certain groups as inferior and unequal based on race, skin colour, ethnicity, faith, sexual identity or other defining characteristic. Colonial powers carved up territories and categorized peoples in terms of resources to be exploited without regard to any inherent rights.

In the America’s, Africa and Australia indigenous peoples were dispossessed and annihilated, to the point that in North America (present day Canada, Mexico and the United States), their populations declined to 5% of their pre-Columbian levels by the 1890s—a death toll of more than 95 million. Enslavement, segregation, caste oppression, and patriarchal subjugation were woven into the fabric of societies and were part and parcel of political governance. Workers laboured under conditions that amounted to economic bondage, and dissent was criminalized, while entire populations lived under the constant threat of violence by the state or economic elites who were only too willing to violently exploit workers.

This was the 19th Century world that shaped the views of American abolitionist and social reformer Frederick Douglass, who said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” It was the world of the Jim Crow era US south that Rosa Parks confronted when she refused to surrender her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama—a simple act that exposed the absurdity and cruelty of the system of racial hierarchy that affected the lives of millions of Black Americans. It was the world B.R. Ambedkar, who fought to transform colonial India, arguing that democracy without social justice is merely a new form of tyranny. And it was the world that 18th century French playwright and political activist Olympe de Gouges challenged when she demanded equality for women, knowing full well that such demands were a threat to her own life.

Human rights, before 1945, were not universal—they were fragile aspirations, and often violently denied by political, economic and social elites.

The shock that forced a reckoning

The Second World War shattered any illusion that humanity could survive without a universal moral framework. The Holocaust, the mechanized extermination of millions, the mass slaughter of civilians in Europe and the Far East, and the global devastation of total war forced the world to confront the consequences of unrestrained state power. The scale of atrocity was so vast, so systematic—between 60 and 70 million killed—tthat it demanded a new global rights infrastructure.

The architects of the post‑war order understood that without binding principles, humanity would again descend into a barbarism that could engulf the world. Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the drafting committee for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, insisted that the new system must reflect the dignity of all people, not merely the interests of powerful states. Her work, alongside French jurist René Cassin, Lebanese politician and diplomat Charles Malik, Chinese academic and diplomat Peng Chun Chang, and Canadian diplomat and human rights activist John Humphrey, produced a document intended as a “common standard of achievement”—a moral compass for a world emerging from darkness.

The UN Charter (1945), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Genocide Convention (1948), the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), and eventually the International Court of Justice were built on the ashes of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Nanjing, and Hiroshima. They were designed to ensure that no state could again commit mass atrocities with impunity.

Elie Wiesel, speaking from the experience of genocide, warned that silence in the face of atrocity is itself a crime. His words became the ethical foundation of the post‑war human rights system—a reminder that neutrality is never neutral when human beings are being systematically annihilated.

The promise and the slow betrayal

For several decades after the war, the human rights architecture held—unevenly, imperfectly, but with enough force to restrain the worst impulses of states. Anti‑colonial movements invoked human rights to dismantle Europe’s empires. Civil rights leaders used its language to challenge segregation in the US. Feminist, Indigenous, labour, and LGBTQ movements drew strength from its universal principles. Nelson Mandela argued that denying human rights was an assault on human dignity itself. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. taught that moral courage requires confronting injustice even when the majority remains silent. And South African Anglican Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu reminded the world that neutrality in the face of oppression was a form of complicity.

However, the end of the Cold War in 1991 appeared to mark a turning point. With the collapse of the global bipolar power structure, the international human rights order built after World War II began to fray. Its erosion was visible in the Bosnian Genocide (1992–1995), the Rwandan Genocide (1994), and the sanctions and embargo regime imposed on Iraq in the 1990s, which led to the deaths of more than 500,000 children—a toll that former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously said was “worth it” in a 1996 interview. As the United States emerged as the world’s lone superpower, it increasingly treated its international legal obligations not as binding commitments but as optional constraints it could disregard when convenient.

Israel—shielded by unwavering Western diplomatic and military backing, above all from the United States—has been able to violate Palestinian human rights repeatedly and with complete impunity for decades. No meaningful accountability has ever followed. Russia carried out atrocities in Chechnya and later in Ukraine, beginning with its 2014 annexation of Crimea. China constructed a surveillance‑driven authoritarian system and imprisoned millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps, abducting Uyghur children and placing them in indoctrination facilities—acts that meet the Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide. Both Moscow and Beijing were condemned for their crimes.

By comparison, the United Kingdom, France, and other European Union states supported US wars that violated international law, yet none faced consequences. The pattern became unmistakable—powerful states could break the rules without penalty, while weaker states were punished for far less. Observing this double standard, governments around the world logically concluded that it was power—not principle—that determined what was permissible in the realm of human rights.

The post‑Cold War era saw the rise of a global double standard where Human rights were invoked when convenient and ignored when politically expedient. The international system expanded in scope, but enforcement weakened, with serious violations increasingly going unpunished. In the process, the moral authority of the post‑war human rights order began to collapse, with genocides taking place in Darfur, Sudan (2003–present); Myanmar (2016–present); Xinjiang, China (2017–present); and Tigray, Ethiopia (2020–2022), with the erosion ultimately culminating in the current genocide in Gaza.

The collapse of global moral authority

The Israeli‑Palestinian conflict has deep historical roots, shaped by colonial legacies, competing nationalisms, and decades of conflict. But the events that have occurred since 2023 marked a moral rupture unprecedented in the modern era. Entire neighborhoods in Gaza have been leveled, while hospitals, schools, and refugee camps have been bombed. Civilians were intentionally targeted, starved, displaced, and massacred. International law was shredded in full view of the world, and Western humanity was shown to be a charade.  Additionally, the major Western powers did not merely fail to stop Israel’s genocidal crimes, they enabled it, particularly the US, by selling weapons to Israel which were used in their military assault on Gaza.

The United States served as Israel’s primary arms supplier, with the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and others close behind—and Washington defended Israel’s actions diplomatically at every turn. Canada wavered between muted criticism and active complicity, continuing to provide military components even as the scale of Israel’s violence became undeniable. The European Union voiced rhetorical concern, but offered no meaningful action capable of halting the atrocities. In Gaza, the international legal order—created precisely to prevent the kind of heinous, genocidal crimes Israel carried out and continues to carry out—was not merely ineffective, it was immobilized by the geopolitical interests of the very states entrusted with upholding it.

The betrayal of Palestinians can be summed up in the following statement: We must refuse to compromise our humanity and never back down from speaking the inconvenient truth to power, for people whose very humanity is under attack.

This is the moral crisis of our time. The very states that built the human rights system have chosen to abandoned it, and leave innocent people to be slaughtered, unless intervening advantages a higher political purpose. Which, in the case of Palestinians, doesn’t seem to be the case.

The voices that still guide us

In this moment of collapse, the wisdom of human rights icons becomes not historical reflection but urgent instruction.

South African anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko taught that oppression thrives when people internalize silence. Kenyan social and political activist Wangari Maathai showed that human rights include the right to a livable planet. South African musician and civil rights activist Miriam Makeba used her voice to expose apartheid’s brutality. American labour unionist Cesar Chavez demonstrated that economic justice is inseparable from human dignity. Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero died defending the poor against state violence, while Malcolm X insisted that dignity requires refusing subjugation in all its forms and speaking truth with uncompromising clarity.

Along with Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., these voices form a chorus across continents and centuries, united by one truth—that human rights are not granted by states—they are won with the blood, sweat and tears of ordinary people.

The moral imperative today

We now live in a world where the major powers—the US, the UK, Russia, China and others—have abandoned the very international order they once claimed to uphold. They have returned to the logic of empire where power takes priority over principle and geopolitical agendas over human rights.

This is what political barbarism looks like. And the only force capable of stopping it is the collective moral courage of ordinary people, human rights organizations, activists, scholars, journalists, and anyone with even a modicum of economic or political influence that still possess a moral compass.

It’s clear from history that human rights don’t come about naturally.  They only exist if they are protected and defended.

To maintain human rights as part of our society and culture we have to live by the adage that when those in power are telling you to move as you stand for principle, you need to plant yourself like a tree and say, “No, you move.”

This is the ethos the world needs now.

The preservation of human rights must become a global moral imperative. Not a slogan. Not a diplomatic talking point. A commitment rooted in the understanding that without human rights, civilization collapses into violence, moral decay and barbarism.

Human rights organizations must refuse to be cowed by political pressure, and activists must continue to speak truth to power even when power threatens them. Scholars must expose injustice with uncompromising clarity, journalists must refuse to sanitize atrocity, and citizens must demand accountability from their governments.

As before, the future will be shaped not by presidents or prime ministers but by social movements built by ordinary people—by those who refuse to accept a world where genocide is normalized, where oppression is rationalized, and where human dignity is treated as negotiable. American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead captured this truth with unmistakable force when she said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only

thing that ever has.”

The post–World War II human rights system was created because those who witnessed the horrors of that war understood that nothing less than a new moral architecture was required to prevent such crimes from happening again. If the system we rely on to defend human rights is to survive—let alone be renewed—it will be because ordinary people insisted on defending it when governments would not.

The world stands at a crossroads. One path leads back to barbarism, where human life is expendable. The other leads toward justice. It is up to us, collectively, to decide which path humanity will take.

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

Mark Carney and Justin Trudeau: The morally bankrupt leaders who ignored the Gaza genocide

Trudeau's and Carney's refusal to acknowledge that genocide is taking place in Gaza is factually indefensible and politically grotesque.  

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

When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared in mid-May that the treatment of civilians aboard the Sumud Flotilla to Gaza—kidnapped in international waters by Israeli forces—was “abominable”, he revealed far more about his government than he intended. His statement was meant to project moral outrage, to signal that Canada still possesses a moral compass. Instead, it exposed a government that has lost its ethical bearings entirely. Because if Carney truly believed that the abuse of civilians was “abominable,” he would have said so long before a video of Itamar Ben‑Gvir taunting bound activists forced his hand.

But Carney did not, and the reason is simple. Carney has no moral compass, especially when it comes to how Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs are treated, whether by a foreign government or by his own administration in Canada.

Mark Carney only entered politics in early 2025, after Justin Trudeau announced his resignation as Liberal leader. Before that, Carney spent decades in elite financial institutions—Goldman Sachs, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England—where he cultivated a reputation for technocratic competence and global statesmanship. Yet in all those years, through Israel’s decades-long brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, its repeated assaults on the Gaza Strip, and finally its ongoing genocide, Carney never made a public comment. Not a word about the siege. Not a word about the occupation. Not a word about apartheid. Not a word about the mass killing of Palestinians. And this is for the most part understandable given the trajectory of his career.

However, his silence was not accidental, but it was revealing. It was the silence of a man who had never needed to confront the consequences of Western power, who had never needed to reckon with the violence that Western powers inflicted on the world’s most vulnerable, under the guise of maintaining an “international rules based order.” And so when he entered politics, his silence became a part of Canadian government policy.

Trudeau’s legacy of weakness and denial

However, this wasn’t new policy. Carney inherited this moral vacuum from former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose own record on Israel and Palestine was defined by weakness, evasion, and denial. Trudeau made occasional statements expressing “concern” about Israeli atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, but these were always carefully calibrated to avoid offending Israel or the US.  Ultimately they were meaningless because he condemned very little of Israel’s criminal acts, recognized even less, and took no action to uphold international law or hold Israel accountable.

And at the end of his prime ministership, Trudeau finally said the quiet part out loud—he declared himself to be a Zionist. With that admission, everything became clear. His refusal to condemn Israel’s actions was not diplomatic caution, it was ideological alignment. His refusal to recognize genocide was not uncertainty, it was political loyalty to a foreign state. His government’s unwavering support for Israel, even as the death toll in Gaza climbed into the tens of thousands, was not a lack of courage, it was a deliberate choice and admission that Trudeau was an anti-Palestinian racist.

When Carney became prime minister he simply continued Trudeau’s policy of denial, complicity, and moral collapse.

Choosing not to see genocide in Gaza

Since it started both Trudeau and Carney refused to acknowledge that genocide was taking place in Gaza.  This denial is not only factually indefensible, it is politically grotesque. Because the list of institutions, experts, and humanitarian organizations that have declared Israel’s assault on Gaza’s population as genocidal is unprecedented in modern history.

Among the organizations and individuals recognizing that Israel is committing the crime of genocide as defined under Genocide Convention are:

• the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry;
• the UN Special Committee;
• the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights;
• the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories;
• the former UN Humanitarian Chief;
• Amnesty International;
• Human Rights Watch;
• Israeli human rights group B’Tselem;
• Physicians for Human Rights Israel;
• Doctors Without Borders;
• Oxfam;
• Save the Children;
• Action Aid;
• Action on Armed Violence;
• the International Federation of Human Rights;
• the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS);
• Melanie O’Brien, president of the IAGS;
• Dirk Moses, editor of the Journal of Genocide Research;
• Martin Shaw, author of What Is Genocide?;
• Leading Israeli Holocaust scholars: Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, Daniel Blatman, Raz Segal, Shmuel Lederman;
• the Norwegian Refugee Council;
• the Danish Refugee Council;
• Refugees International;
• the International Rescue Committee;
• Moshe Yaalon, former head of Israel’s military;
• Amiram Levin, former deputy head of Mossad;
• Ehud Olmert, former Prime Minister of Israel; and
• the 30 nations supporting South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

This list is not merely long—it is overwhelming. It represents the broadest consensus on genocide since Rwanda. Yet Canada, a nation that claims to champion human rights, has rejected all of it.

Canada is violating its international legal obligations

Under the Genocide Convention, Canada is obligated not only to prevent genocide but to punish those who participate in it. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, Canada must act to stop grave breaches, including collective punishment, targeting civilians, and starvation as a method of warfare. Under the UN Charter, Canada must uphold international peace and security and oppose violations of international humanitarian law.

Instead, Canada continues to:

• Sell weapons and weapons components to Israel;
• Provide diplomatic cover for Israel;
• Refuse to sanction Israeli officials responsible for mass atrocities;
• Reject international legal findings of genocide; and
• Attack Canadian human rights advocates who speak out.

This is not neutrality. It is complicity.

Carney’s Hypocrisy Is Impossible to Ignore

Carney’s condemnation of Ben‑Gvir was not wrong. Ben‑Gvir is a racist extremist who celebrated his birthday with a cake emblazoned with a noose, who raised a champagne glass when the Knesset advanced a death‑penalty bill that applies only to Palestinians, and who has repeatedly called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. But Carney’s selective outrage is revealing. Ben‑Gvir is not an outlier; he is the distilled expression of a much wider system of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal violence in Israeli society — a society where a 2025 poll showed that 47% of Jewish Israelis supported the Gaza genocide. Singling him out for sanctions while continuing to arm the state he serves is not moral leadership. It is political posturing, a gesture designed to look principled while avoiding the far more consequential act of holding Israel itself accountable.

If Carney truly believed Ben‑Gvir’s actions were “unacceptable,” he would sanction the entire Israeli government and military leadership. He would halt all weapons exports immediately. He would prosecute Canadians who have joined the Israeli military and participated in war crimes. He would recognize the genocide that the rest of the world has already named.

He has done none of these things.

Historically, Canada avoided pursuing war criminals

There is a myth in Canada that the country has a proud and robust history of prosecuting war criminals. It is a comforting story, one that allows Canadians to imagine themselves as steadfast defenders of human rights and international justice. But the moment this narrative is examined with even minimal scrutiny, it collapses. In truth, Canada has not made much effort to hunt down war criminals since World War Two, and its record is defined far more by avoidance, delay, and half‑measures than by genuine accountability.

For decades, Canada preferred to look away rather than confront perpetrators of atrocity, just as it is doing with Israel. Instead of launching serious investigations, pursuing criminal trials, or building the legal capacity to prosecute genocidal criminals, Canada has relied on bureaucratic tools—denaturalization and deportation—that allow the government to quietly remove individuals without ever proving guilt in court. These measures create the appearance of action while avoiding actual prosecution. Far from being a global leader in accountability, Canada’s war‑crimes record is a story of institutional reluctance, political timidity, and systemic inertia. It is a record that reveals a country far more committed to protecting its own political convenience than to upholding the principles of international law it claims to champion.

Following the Second World War Canada prosecuted a small number of Nazi war criminals immediately afterwards—almost all of them POWs already in Canadian custody. After 1948, however, Canada entered a 30‑year period of complete inactivity. During the 1950s through the 1980s, hundreds of suspected Nazi collaborators entered Canada, yet the government made no serious attempt to locate, investigate, or criminally prosecute them.

The 1985 Deschênes Commission confirmed what survivors and human‑rights advocates had long known: Canada had never meaningfully prosecuted Nazi war criminals domestically, despite ample evidence and decades of opportunity. The few criminal trials attempted in the 1990s—including the high‑profile case of Imre Finta—ended in acquittals, after which Canada effectively abandoned domestic prosecution altogether.

The rare exception of Rwandan génocidaires

Canada’s record of domestic war‑crimes prosecution is remarkably thin, and its only true success stands out precisely because it is so rare. The single case in which Canada managed to secure a conviction under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act was the prosecution of Désiré Munyaneza, a Rwandan génocidaire found guilty in 2009. His conviction was historic: the first time Canada used the principle of universal jurisdiction to try an individual for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes committed abroad. Munyaneza’s trial demonstrated that Canada could hold perpetrators of mass atrocity accountable when it chose to invest the political will, legal expertise, and prosecutorial resources required.

But Munyaneza’s case was the exception, not the beginning of a sustained effort. The only other attempt at a domestic war‑crimes trial under the same legislation—Jacques Mungwarere—ended in acquittal in 2013. After that, Canada effectively retreated from the field. No further domestic prosecutions followed, and no institutional momentum emerged to build on the precedent set. Instead of developing a robust system capable of confronting atrocity, Canada returned to its longstanding reliance on administrative measures.  The result is a war‑crimes record defined not by a legacy of accountability, but by one conviction surrounded by decades of institutional reluctance.

Canada’s support for Israel is built on lies

For decades, Canadian governments have insisted that Canada is a defender of human rights, a champion of international law, and a guardian of the rules‑based order. But these claims collapse under the weight of scrutiny, and certainly as we witness Canada’s lack of action around the Gaza genocide.

Canada cannot claim to defend human rights while arming a genocidal state. Canada cannot claim to uphold international law while ignoring the world’s legal findings. Canada cannot claim to support peace while enabling mass slaughter.

The Carney government’s position is not simply hypocritical—it is morally bankrupt, as was that of Justin Trudeau’s government

What is truly “unacceptable”

When he saw the video of Israeli minister Ben-Gvir taunting the imprisoned activists from the Sumud Flotilla he used the word “unacceptable” in reaction to what he saw. But what is truly unacceptable is Canada’s complicity. What is unacceptable is the refusal to name genocide. What is unacceptable is the sale of Canadian weapons to a state committing mass atrocities. What is unacceptable is the betrayal of international law. What is unacceptable is the dehumanization of Palestinians through complicity.

Carney’s government has failed the most basic test of moral leadership—the ability to recognize human suffering and act to stop it. Instead, Canada has become a bystander to genocide, and worse, an enabler of the crime of crimes.

History will not forget this moment. And it will not forgive those who chose silence, denial, and complicity over justice.

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