How Zionists have tried to erase Palestinians, and centuries of their culture and history in Palestine

Palestinians were erased or demonized—first as feudal obstacles to “progress”, later as terrorists whose very existence threatened the apartheid, Zionist ethno state.

 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

 

For almost eight decades, a meticulously crafted false Zionist narrative has dominated Western understanding of Palestine, portraying it as a barren land, sparsely populated by nomadic Arabs, miraculously transformed by pioneering European Jews into a modern democracy. This story—endlessly repeated in Western classrooms, newsrooms, and parliaments—rests on a single, staggering falsehood that Palestinians, as a people with deep historical roots, never truly existed on the soil of historic Palestine, and don’t constitute a people. That claim is not an oversight. It is a political weapon used to promote a lie built upon a foundation of lies, designed to justify the violent dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of Palestine that had lived, farmed, traded, and worshipped on that land for centuries.

The truth, irrefutably documented in Israel’s own archives, is that Jews constituted a small minority in historic Palestine for well over 2,000 years, only becoming a majority through the systematic ethnic cleansing of 1947–1949 and the mass importation of diaspora Jews into territory seized from its Palestinian owners.

The demographic record is unambiguous. In 1800, the population of Palestine stood at approximately 275,000, of whom only 6,000–7,000 (2–3 %) were Jews. By 1880, after the first faint stirrings of Zionist immigration, Jews still numbered no more than 24,000 out of half a million inhabitants (3–5 %). On the eve of the First World War in 1914, the Jewish community had grown to roughly 60,000 in a total population of 750,000—barely 8%. Even the accelerated immigration of the British Mandate period did not overturn this reality. The 1931 census recorded 174,000 Jews against 1,035,000 total residents (17%), and by November 1947, on the eve of partition, Jews comprised 32% of the population, of whom more than 70% were recent immigrants who had arrived after 1919.

These figures are drawn from Ottoman registries, British Mandate censuses, and the meticulous work of researchs. They demolish the Zionist claim of centuries of Jewish demographic dominance in Palestine. For almost two millennia—from the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE until the late nineteenth century—Jews remained a small, mostly urban minority in a land whose villages, orchards, and ports were overwhelmingly Palestinian Arab.

That population of Palestine was not a transient collection of Bedouin or Ottoman-era migrants, as Zionist propaganda has insisted. It was a settled, multilingual, multi-religious society whose roots reached back to the Canaanites, Jebusites, Philistines, and the Arab conquests of the seventh century. By the sixteenth century, under Ottoman rule, more than 80% of the inhabitants were Palestinian Muslims, 10–11 % were Palestinain Christians, and 5–7% were Jews, most of them Arabic-speaking Sephardim who considered Palestine their home long before Herzl ever dreamed of a Jewish state. Western travellers from the 1830s to the 1880s—Mark Twain’s travelogue notwithstanding—described thriving towns (Nablus, Gaza, Jaffa, Hebron, Jerusalem), terraced hillsides heavy with olive and fig orchards, and a citrus industry centered on the Palestinian-invented Shamouti orange that would later be rebranded as the iconic “Jaffa Orange” after the Zionist dispossession of Palestinian orchards.

This was no wilderness awaiting redemption. It was a living civilization with its own dialects, folklore, land deeds, and centuries-old family lineages. The transformation of this Muslim-Christian majority country into a Jewish-majority state required violence on a scale that Zionist mythology has spent decades concealing and lying about. 

Between December 1947 and May 1948—before a single soldier from any regular Arab army crossed the borders of Palestine—Zionist forces expelled at least 250,000 Palestinians and seized large swathes of territory allocated to the Palestinian state under the UN partition plan. The master blueprint for the conquest of Palestine was Plan Dalet, adopted by the Haganah high command in March 1948. Declassified Israeli documents reveal that the plan explicitly authorized the “destruction of villages,” the “expulsion” of inhabitants, and the “encirclement” of Palestinian urban neighborhoods to prevent any return. 

Over the following eighteen months, more than 530 Palestinian villages—totalling two-thirds of all existing villages—were razed or repopulated with European Jewish immigrants. The human toll was staggering. More than 750,000 Palestinians—over half the Arab population—became refugees, and at least 70 documented massacres punctuated the campaign. The Deir Yassin, Lydda, Saliha, Al-Dawayima and Safsaf massacres, and dozens more are not Palestinian fairy tales. They are acknowledged in the war diaries of Israeli officers and intelligence reports of the Israel Defense Forces themselves.

This was not a war of self-defence against overwhelming Arab aggression, as perpetuated in the myth told to Israeli children. The combined Arab armies that entered Palestine on 15 May 1948 were poorly equipped, uncoordinated, and often more interested in achieving their own geopolitical agendas than in defending Palestinian rights. By that date, the Yishuv’s fighting strength already outnumbered all Arab forces inside Palestine combined, and the Haganah possessed tanks, aircraft, and a unified command structure that the Palestinians and their reluctant allies utterly lacked.

The “David and Goliath” legend (with Israel as David) collapses under the weight of the information contained in the Israeli archives. For decades, these truths were suppressed. Until the late 1970s, Israel kept its military and state archives sealed. Israeli school textbooks portrayed Palestine before 1882 as a desolate wasteland dotted with ruins, and when indigenous Palestinian inhabitants were mentioned at all they were reduced to generic “Arabs” who “sold their land willingly” or “fled on orders from their leaders.” Only when the thirty-year classification rule began to expire, and when a generation of Israeli scholars—Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Baruch Kimmerling—gained access to the files, did the scale of Israel’s deception become undeniable. Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004) lists 24 confirmed massacres by Zionist forces, and admits that in the majority of cases, the decisive cause of Palestinians fleeing was terror attacks by Haganah, Irgun, or Lehi.

Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) demonstrates that the expulsions were not “collateral damage” but the deliberate implementation of Plan Dalet to conquer territory that had belonged to Palestinians for generations. Avi Shlaim’s work on the collusion between Zionist leaders and King Abdullah of Jordan further exposed the myth of a united Arab invasion bent on “driving the Jews into the sea.”

Yet the West swallowed the original narrative whole. From the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to Hollywood epics like Exodus (1960), from the front pages of The New York Times to the speeches of American presidents, the story was always the same—a persecuted people returning to an empty homeland, making the desert bloom, defending Western civilization against barbarism. Palestinians were erased or demonized—first as feudal obstacles to “progress”, and later as terrorists whose very existence threatened the apartheid, Zionist ethno state. Palestinian American academic Edward Said diagnosed this phenomenon as “Orientalism”— the systematic de-humanization of the Muslim and Arab “other” to justify colonial domination.

Seventy-seven years after the Nakba, the consequences of that erasure are everywhere. Israel maintains more than sixty-five laws that privilege Jewish citizens over the 20% of its population that is Palestinian, not unlike the Jim Crow laws of the US south in the pre-civil rights era that oppressed Black Americans. More than six million Palestinian refugees and their descendants are still denied the right of return guaranteed by UN Resolution 194. The West Bank is fragmented by walls and settlements. Gaza is an open-air prison turned genocidal killing field. And whenever Palestinians resist, the same tired myths are trotted out to demonize Palestinians—“there’s no partner for peace,” “they teach their children to hate,” “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.”

It is long past time for a reckoning. The archives are open and the evidence is overwhelming. The New Historians—many of them Jewish Israelis who love their country enough to demand it face the truth—have done the heavy lifting. What remains is for Western societies to undertake a deliberate, institutional re-education and reveal the truth behind Israeli propaganda. Curricula must centre Palestinian historians—Rashid Khalidi, Nur Masalha, Walid Khalidi—alongside the Israeli revisionists. Western news media outlets must abandon the false equivalence that treats occupier and occupied as moral equals. Politicians must stop reciting talking points written in Tel Aviv and start acknowledging that Israel was not “born in purity” but forged through a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that have never ended.

Only when the West confronts the foundational lie—that Palestine was a land without a people—can there be any hope of justice. Palestinians are not interlopers on someone else’s supposed biblical birthright. They are the descendants of the people who harvested the olives, tilled the land, and prayed in the churches and mosques of that land for centuries before the ethno-supremacist ideology of Zionism decided their presence was an inconvenience to its colonial project. Recognizing their history, and supporting their right to self-determination and freedom from a suffocating and brutal Israeli occupation, is not anti-Semitism. It is the bare minimum required for an honest accounting of the past and a viable path toward coexistence.

The Israeli myths are crumbling. Let us finish the job of tearing them down, and bring justice and peace to Palestinians—a people that should rightfully be seen as the most persecuted and brutalized minority in the world today.  

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

An appointment with the courts awaits Western media executives complicit in the Gaza genocide

A comprehensive analysis of over 14,000 news articles reveals systematic biases in Western media reports on Israel and Gaza, including the sanitization of Palestinian suffering . . . 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

When the unspeakable horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza finally grinds to a halt—after the rubble settles on shattered Gaza neighbourhoods, as the echoes of potentially hundreds of thousands of deaths fade, lost to bombings, snipers, starvation, and disease—there will be a reckoning not just for the perpetrators, but also for the enablers. There will be little mercy for the Western governments that funnelled billions in bullets and bombs to Israel, neither for the United States which vetoed UN ceasefires on their behalf, nor for the universities that silenced pro-Palestinian voices while doing the bidding of Zionist donors.

However, one of the sharpest blade of justice will need to carve deepest into the heart of Western news media—the BBC, CNN, The New York Times, CBC, CTV, The Daily Mail, and their ilk. These so-called pillars of “free press” have devolved into shameless Israeli propagandists, laundering their lies, dehumanizing Palestinians, and fuelling the very mass murder on which they pretend to report. For decades, they have peddled Israeli anti-Palestinian propaganda and racism as objective journalism, but since October 7, 2023, their complicity has escalated into active participation in an ongoing genocide. Yes, a reckoning is coming—one that will drag media executives, producers, and editors into courtrooms, force their corporations to pay Holocaust-level reparations to survivors, and shatter the myth of Western media’s moral authority forever.

This isn’t hyperbole, it’s historical inevitability. As Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the United Nations, and over 800 genocide scholars have documented, Israel’s campaign in Gaza meets every criterion of genocide: intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group through killings, causing serious harm, and imposing conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction. Yet Western media didn’t just fail to report this truth—they buried it under an avalanche of Israeli hasbara (propaganda). From the genocide’s outset, news outlets like CNN and the BBC instructed their staff to avoid using terms like “genocide,” “occupation,” or “war crimes” in their reporting, opting instead for mealy-mouthed euphemisms that absolve Israel while vilifying Palestinians as “terrorists” or “Hamas sympathizers.” This isn’t sloppy journalism. It’s a deliberate editorial choice, rooted in decades of anti-Palestinian prejudice and racism that predates October 2023.

Consider the pattern, etched in stone long before the current slaughter. For over 75 years, Western media has framed Palestinians through a lens of Israeli victimhood and Palestinian villainy. During the 1948 Nakba—when Zionist militias forced 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and committed massacres butchering thousands, Western news outlets downplayed ethnic cleansing, portraying it as a “civil war” sparked by Arab aggression. Fast-forward to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, where Israeli forces enabled Christian militias to slaughter 3,500 Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, a tragedy where media coverage focused on Israeli “retaliation” against attacks by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, with scant mention of the victims’ humanity.

This historical amnesia isn’t accidental, it’s systemic. A 2023 analysis of news media coverage by the Arab Center Washington DC revealed that US media consistently omits the context of Israel’s brutal occupation, Jewish settlement expansion, dispossession of Palestinian lands, and Israeli apartheid, presenting their actions as defensive acts rather than colonial aggression. By 2023, this bias had metastasized to a point where there was a little sympathy shown for the victims of Israel’s genocide, with the vast majority of Western legacy news outlets favouring the Israeli narrative—the myth of “40 beheaded babies” or “Hamas rape epidemics” presented without evidence—even while social media was flooded with Palestinian testimonies of daily atrocities committed by Israel.

Now, amplify this to the Gaza genocide’s scale. Over 25 months, Israel has flattened 90% of Gaza’s buildings, poisoned its water, destroyed its hospitals, bulldozed agricultural lands, and engineered a famine that kills children by the hundreds weekly. What is the reaction of Western media? They platform Israeli officials to spew unchallenged falsehoods. Take CNN’s Jake Tapper, who in November 2023 reported on US intelligence claims that Al-Shifa Hospital was a “Hamas command center,” amplifying unverified Israeli assertions without immediate scrutiny or counter-evidence from Palestinian sources. In December 2023, BBC reporting allowed Israeli officials to suggest the Gaza death toll was inflated, with claims that one Hamas fighter was killed for every two civilians—figures later contradicted by UN data showing over 18,000 dead, including thousands of children. These aren’t isolated slips. They’re policy. Leaked internal memos from CNN reveal executives quashing stories on Palestinian suffering to avoid “inflaming” pro-Israel advertisers, while BBC guidelines mandate “balance” that equates one of the most powerful militaries in the world with a people who have neither an army, navy, nor air force.

Contrast this fawning deference to pro-Israel guests with the inquisition faced by pro-Palestinian voices. Palestinian analysts like Omar Baddar have appeared on CNN only to have their critiques framed amid accusations of one-sidedness, with segments often edited to emphasize Israeli perspectives over Palestinian context. Meanwhile, anti-genocide protesters—students, doctors, even Holocaust survivors—are branded as “terrorist sympathizers” in headlines from the US magazine The Atlantic to Canada’s National Post, their chants for ceasefires twisted into calls for Jewish extermination. This double standard isn’t bias. It’s a machine of suppression, mirroring the very propaganda tactics that enabled the Holocaust.

Yes, let’s confront the ugly parallel between what the Nazis did and what Israel is doing. Western media’s role in Gaza echoes the Nazi press’s complicity in the destruction of Jews and other minorities. In 1930s Germany, outlets like Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter didn’t just report; they incited. This fascist rags spewed caricatures of Jews as vermin, rapists, and economic saboteurs, dehumanizing them to justify Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass when the windows of Jewish businesses were destroyed—as well as the concentration camps. Editors faced no push back—indeed, they were rewarded—while Jewish voices were silenced, their pleas dismissed as “Bolshevik lies.” Sound familiar?

Fast-forward to 2023 and 2024 where The New York Times has run op-eds from current and former Israeli officials and their supporters in the US justifying the Israel’s criminal actions against Palestinians, and labelling Palestinian resistance and anti-genocide protests as “terrorism”. These commentaries go largely unchallenged by editors who challenge critiques of Zionism and Israel by labelling them as “hate speech.” A comprehensive analysis of over 14,000 news articles reveals systematic biases in Western media reports on Israel and Gaza, including the sanitization of Palestinian suffering through euphemisms like “collateral damage”, using terms like “died” rather than “killed”, and barring their journalists from using descriptors like “brutal” or “horrific”, that downplay or delegitimize Palestinian deaths.

The resemblance between the media during the Nazi era and today when we look at the promotion of racism. Nazi media normalized antisemitism by portraying Jews as an existential threat, their suffering as self-inflicted. Western coverage does the same for Palestinians. A report from Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative found that 2023-2024 coverage embedded anti-Palestinian racism through disproportionate focus on Israeli victims and minimization of Palestinian grief, implying inherent criminality in their deaths. Phrases like “human animals” (echoing Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s October 2023 statement) seep into TV news scripts without quotation marks, embedding anti-Palestinian hate as fact. An analysis by Vox has labelled this “anti-Palestinian racism” as a structural prejudice that erases Palestinian agency, history, and grief, rendering their genocide palatable to Western audiences steeped in colonial myths. Protests against this slaughter? They are labelled “riots”, “anti-Jewish hate demonstrations”, or “antisemitic mobs,” fuelling arrests from US campuses to Canadian streets, amid broader crackdowns on pro-Palestinian activism.

This racism isn’t abstract, it’s lethal. By dehumanizing Palestinians—calling Rafah and other parts of Gaza “evacuated” rather than “ethnically cleansed”—Western news media executives justify Israeli violence against a defenceless people. They bear as much responsibility for mass murder in Gaza as did Nazi newspaper and radio owners did for dehumanizing the millions killed in concentration camps. And like the post-World War Two Nuremberg trials which saw dozens of Nazi officials sitting in the docks, accountability for those media executives who enabled the Gaza atrocities through their media coverage must follow by charges being laid. This can be done at the International Criminal Court or in nations with uncompromised legal systems under the legal concept of “universal jurisdiction,” where international law allows national courts to prosecute individuals for the most serious international crimes—genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes—regardless of where the crimes were committed.

Media Watch International and Al-Shabaka Policy Center argue that under the Genocide Convention and Rome Statute, complicit propagandists can face war crimes charges. Will we see major media personalities from CNN or BBC or the CBC charged and tried? This remains to be seen. But if they chose political expediency and lies over truth, if they withheld footage sympathetic to Palestinians, or platformed pro-Israel voices while suppressing Palestinian narratives, to appease Zionist and Israeli interests, while Gaza’s journalists were murdered by the scores, then they need to stand trial.

The net must widen to catch all who were complicit. Producers who scripted so-called “balanced” segments equating occupier and occupied. Editors who buried or ignored UN reports on famine. Companies that supported Israel and ignored their crimes must pay a price, legally and financially. Once the trials are over the companies that employed them must be fined, and they must be forced to pay into a Palestinian Victims Fund, modelled on the Holocaust Claims Conference. In Canada, where CBC and CTV’s coverage rivals CNN’s or MSNBC’s in its unbalanced coverage of the Palestinian genocide, CRTC licenses should be reviews and executives hauled before the courts. This isn’t vengeance, it’s justice delayed by decades of Israeli impunity.

But the rot runs deeper, demanding a cultural purge. Western media’s failure isn’t mere negligence, it’s a betrayal of the ideals which they claim to uphold—truth, accountability, humanity. For years, they’ve normalized Israel’s apartheid regime, from the blockade of Gaza starting in 2007 to the 2014 onslaught that killed more than 2,200 Palestinian civilians. The coverage back then included sympathetic profiles of Israeli “fear,” while there were perfunctory tallies of Palestinian “casualties.” The same pattern persists today. A 2025 study in Third World Quarterly details how outlets like The Daily Mail, The New York Times and The Washington Post employ “ethical collapse” in silencing Gaza’s voices, prioritizing Israeli-friendly narratives over journalistic integrity. This isn’t journalism. It’s complicity in genocidal violence, a modern echo of the British Palestine Mandate press that greased the wheels for Zionist settlement.

Imagine the trials with media executives and editors in the docks, their memos banning the use of the words “genocide”, “occupation” or “Palestine” projected onto screens for the court to see, proving they chose complicity or silence over humanity. Paying reparations cannot be optional. There must be a global fund established, seeded by fines for those who were complicit and seized assets, to rebuild Gaza’s soul. This would be in addition to reparations paid to Palestinians by nations like the US, Canada, Germany and the UK.

One of the lessons from this is that media can’t be left free to push ugly and dehumanizing narratives. There must be a legal mechanism to ensure that the ideals of truth in news media are upheld, along with mandatory fact-checking, diverse sourcing, and penalties for stories that attack the very humanity of an oppressed and subjugated people. Until then, every broadcast, every news story is a potential bullet for vulnerable peoples like the Palestinians.

Western media’s facade of neutrality and balanced news coverage of this Palestinian Holocaust has crumbled in Gaza’s rubble. They didn’t report a genocide, they enabled one, their screens stained with Palestinian blood. When trials loom and reparations flow, let the producers, editors and executives tremble. The world watched as Western news media gave Israel a pass as it destroyed a society, deliberately killed tens of thousands, and demonstrated a level of evil not seen since World War Two. They streamed Gaza’s slaughter live, yet tuned out the screams. No more. The reckoning is coming, and it will be as merciless as the crimes it avenges.

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

How the Gaza genocide shattered the illusion of Western humanity

The nations that are complicit—the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, and others—aren't just bystanders, they are architects of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and have shown their inhumanity with their inaction to stop Gaza's horrors. 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

We have often heard political leaders talk about “Western humanity” over the decades. But the phrase is now a sick joke. A bedtime fable for adults who want to believe that their governments are the “good guys”. After more than two years of Israeli bombardment, engineered famine, and industrial-scale murder in Gaza, the fairy tale of Western governments being defenders of human rights or humanity is dead.

 

Over the last 25 months the self-anointed guardians of the so-called “rules-based international order” have proven they are nothing but a criminal cabal heading so-called “Christian” nations that weaponize international law against the powerless and suspend it for the powerful and their friends. They have shown that anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia runs deeper in Washington, London, Berlin, and other capitals in the Western alliance than any commitment to human life.

As children we are told that monsters live only in myths and fairy tales. As adults we learn the terrifying truth. Monsters live among us, they are always human, they wear suits and ties, and they lead nations like Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. What else but monstrous hatred explains the refusal to stop Israel's genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, even after every single Israeli hostage has been returned? What else explains a refusal to act when major human rights organizations, hundreds of genocide and Holocaust scholars, the United Nations and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has labelled Israel's actions as genocide?

Look at the timeline from the current bleak vantage point. The latest “ceasefire” was sold to the world as simple—if Hamas returned all Israeli hostages Israel would stop their military assault on Palestinians. The last living hostages were freed weeks ago. Even the bodies of the deceased have been repatriated. Yet Israel's murder spree continues. In the past month alone—during the so-called ceasefire—Israeli forces have murdered another 242 Palestinians, including 85 children, while injuring 619 more with live fire and tank shells. On November 19th, in Khan Younis, 33 civilians waiting for flour were shredded by an Israeli airstrike. This is not merely a breach of the ceasefire, but rather proof that the ceasefire was always a lie to allow Israel to rearm and continue its genocidal crimes.

The scale of the crimes are beyond comprehension. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, one of the few organizations still able to document on the ground, reports that as of October 2025 Israel has killed at least 75,190 Palestinians in Gaza—including 21,310 children and 13,987 women—with 173,200 wounded and tens of thousands facing lifelong disability. But these official figures are grotesque undercounts. Israeli academic Yaakov Garb, using satellite imagery and data from the Israeli military, published a report via Harvard Dataverse which estimates that between 377,000 and 400,000 Palestinians have simply “disappeared”—their bodies blown apart or buried beneath 51 million tons of rubble. Australian academics Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, factoring in direct killings plus deaths from starvation, disease, and the total collapse of Gaza's healthcare system, calculated over 680,000 excess deaths by April 2025 alone. A number that is likely to be far higher today.

This is the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) multiplied—a catastrophe not born in 2023, but forged in the fires of 1948, when Zionist militias unleashed a calculated campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing to carve out a Jewish state from the land of Palestine. Over 750,000 Palestinians—more than half the non-Jewish population—was violently expelled from their homes in what historians like Ilan Pappé have unflinchingly documented as the crime of ethnic cleansing. It began with a blueprint drafted in 1948 aimed at “clearing” Palestinian villages to secure strategic corridors for the nascent Israeli state. Massacres followed, like the infamous Deir Yassin slaughter on April 9, 1948 where Irgun and Lehi terrorists gunned down hundreds of villagers, including women and children. By war's end, 531 Palestinian villages were wiped from the map, their centuries old olive groves and orchards torched, wells poisoned, and inhabitants herded like cattle toward Gaza, the West Bank, or exile in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria—creating the world's longest unresolved refugee crisis, with 6.1 million descendants still denied the right of return today.

If the Nakba was the overture, Gaza's horrors are the crescendo—a genocide that not only echoes the Holocaust but indicts its solemn vow of “Never Again” as a hollow lie. The Holocaust, that meticulously documented abomination that claimed 11 million lives, including six million Jews, was a six-year frenzy of industrialized death, hidden from prying eyes until Allied boots kicked down the gates of Nazi concentration camps in 1945. Gaza's slaughter, by contrast, is a brazen spectacle, live-streamed in high-definition horror—drones assassinating aid-seekers, so-called “precision” bombs vaporizing hundreds in tents, emaciated toddlers crying as starvation ravages their bodies, and even Israeli soldiers flaunting their crimes on TikTok. Where Nazis shrouded the cattle cars filled with their victims in secrecy, Israel's genocidal killing machine operates under global spotlights, with impunity.

Israeli scholars like Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg and Omer Bartov decry Israel’s actions as settler-colonial genocide, a perversion where “Never Again” mutates into “Never Again to Us,” dooming brown and Muslim bodies. The perversity deepens with the duration of the criminal acts. Where the Holocaust's terror ended with the defeat of the Nazis, Gaza is a 77-year dirge of attrition, only lacking the moral outrage that toppled Hitler.

Ha’aretz polls reveal the depth of the rot and anti-Palestinian hate in Israeli society. More than 80% of Jewish Israelis back ethnically cleansing all Gazans, while 47% endorse the mass slaughter of every Palestinian, children included, echoing the Nazi dehumanization that once targeted Jews as “vermin.” This is an escalation which shows that Israeli society has sunk to lows last seen in Nazi Germany, and illustrates that Israel's actions have the social licence of almost half of Israeli Jews.

South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ is one of the few things that gives hope to Palestinians seeking justice. Armed with their own research and additional data from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and the UN, the ICJ case stands as a lone legal bulwark against Israel, yet faces US threats and sanctions on truth-tellers like UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Gaza surpasses the Holocaust not in raw numbers but in its “prolonged generational agony,” a structural evil sustained for decades by Israeli cruelty and Western support, where grandparents fled Zionist massacres in 1948 only for their grandchildren to perish during a two year long genocide. This moral hierarchy—Jewish suffering enshrined in memorials while Palestinian agony is dismissed as “tragic” and “collateral damage”—mirrors forgotten horrors like the Congo genocide of the early 20th Century under Belgium's King Leopold where 10 million were killed, or Winston Churchill's orchestrated Bengal Famine in 1943 where three million were starved.

Those nations that are complicit—the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, and others—aren't just bystanders, they are architects which, with their silence and inaction to stop Gaza's horrors, are no less criminal than those who wore Nazi uniforms as they slaughtered Jews. The West knew Gaza was a genocide from the very first weeks because the experts made it clear that it was. Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal called it a “textbook case of genocide” before October 2023 was even over. By the end of that month more than 800 genocide scholars and international-law experts issued a public warning that Israel was committing genocide in real time. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor branded it “the most transparent genocide in human history.” The ICJ called Israel's actions “plausible genocide,” and ordered them to prevent genocidal acts in January 2024. But none of it mattered. The US ignored the words of those who had studied the crime for decades, vetoed every meaningful UN resolution to halt the slaughter quickly, shipped billions more in military hardware to Israel as it committed atrocities, while Israel ignored the ICJ’s judicial orders, and global community’s condemnations.

There is no complexity here. This is anti-Palestinian hatred plain and simple, so deeply embedded in Western governments, media and civil society institutions that it's a part of their cultural and political DNA. It's clear that Palestinians are not seen as human in the corridors of Western power, the same way Jews weren't considered human in the halls of European power in centuries past. They are an obstacle, a demographic problem, “human animals” in the words of Israeli leaders, a term borrowed from European history once used to describe Jews. The same governments that weep crocodile tears over the Holocaust now fund, arm, and defend a 21st-century Holocaust in Gaza.

The West's failure to take action to halt the Gaza genocide has shown us that monsters are real and they walk among us, and they lead us. So let's never talk again about Western “humanity” nor Canada’s defence of “international rule of law” again. Let's see Western leaders for what they are—criminals and monsters. And those of us that have a moral compass, let's join together to build the just society that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau once spoke of more than half a century ago.

©  2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza is the pinnacle of evil in the world today

Without decisive action by the international community to halt the Gaza genocide, Israel’s impunity will cement its legacy as the 21st century’s exemplar of evil rivalling that of Nazi Germany. 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza stands as a stark monument to 21st-century barbarity and evil. As a deliberate campaign to annihilate a people it mirrors the darkest atrocities the 20th Century and will go down in history as the failure of the so-called “international rules based order” that Western nations like to invoke so often against their adversaries. Israel’s actions have convinced numerous respected voices that their crimes constitute the crime of genocide as defined under the Genocide Convention.

Among those who have come to this conclusion have been the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Israeli academics Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg, and Omer Bartov, hundreds of Jewish health care professionals, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, the United Nations, and many others. In public statements and letters all of these individuals and organizations have cited evidence of deliberate killings, starvation policies, and conditions aimed at destroying Palestinians as a people. This horror, which the world has watched on their social media feeds for more than two years, far from being an isolated eruption of Israeli violence, is the latest phase of a century-long Zionist colonial project, rooted in ethno-supremacist ideology akin to the 20th century’s worst genocides. It has positioned Israel as the Middle East’s gravest threat to peace and a prime example of modern evil no different than what the Nazis did during the Holocaust.

The Gaza genocide evokes the Holocaust’s horror, where Nazi Germany exterminated six million Jews alongside seven million Roma, disabled individuals, political dissidents and others in death camps like Auschwitz, driven by an ethno-supremacist ideology, and a dehumanizing rhetoric labelling victims as “vermin.” Gaza’s devastation parallels this with Israeli leader Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoking “Amalek”, a biblical call to exterminate an entire people and lay waste to their society. Similarly, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant branded Palestinians as “human animals,” justifying a siege to deny food, water, fuel, and other things necessary for human survival. Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested using nuclear weapons to annihilate the people of Gaza, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demanded Gaza’s erasure, echoing Nazi calls for a “final solution.” The UN’s 2025 report confirms violations of the Genocide Convention—mass killings, intentional harm, and life conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians, while Amnesty International’s 2024 report calls it a “live-streamed genocide,” with hospitals, schools, and UN shelters bombed, killing more than 75,000 directly and potentially more than 600,000 indirectly.

This brutality recalls the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1917, where 1.5 million people were killed through death marches and starvation, and the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two, where 13,000 Jews were killed and the 50,000 who remained were sent to Nazi death camps. Gaza’s blockade since 2007, tightened post-2023, mirrors these historic atrocities with Israel forcing Palestinians into so-called “safe zones” only to bomb those who had survived previous bombings. The population of Gaza numbered 2.3 million in October 2023, half of them children. Since the start of Israel’s genocidal assault they have been subjected to bullets, bombs, mortars, starvation, deprivation and disease, in a 365 square kilometre open air concentration camp, with over 90% of the hospitals, 95% of the schools and universities, and more than 80% of the homes and buildings damaged or destroyed.

The international community’s inaction—despite warnings by the UN and hundreds of genocide scholars—echoes the Allies’ indifference to Armenian pleas in World War One, and the pleas of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in the lead up to World War Two. The Rwandan Genocide of 1994, where 800,000 Tutsis were hacked to death in 100 days amid Hutu radio calls for extermination, finds its parallel in Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians. Israeli airstrikes replicates the Nazi’s orchestrated slaughter of 11 million during the Holocaust. The Bosnian Genocide’s Srebrenica massacre is echoed in the way that Palestinians were herded into Gaza’s so-called “safe zones,” and bombed while in flimsy tents just trying to survive.

B’Tselem’s 2025 report—“Our Genocide”—details the “coordinated destruction” of Gaza, with 80% of the territory’s infrastructure razed, making everything in what were once the major centres of the enclave look like Hiroshima did after the atomic bomb was dropped. Dresden’s firebombing (25,000+ dead), Tokyo’s incineration (100,000+ dead), and Hiroshima-Nagasaki’s atomic annihilation (200,000+ dead)—share Gaza’s disproportionate carnage. Israel’s use of 2,000-pound bombs in dense neighbourhoods, documented by Human Rights Watch as “extermination,” prioritizes destruction over precision. Japan’s Nanjing Massacre (300,000+ killed) parallels the rape of Gaza women by Israeli soldiers and summary executions, with IDF soldiers’ TikTok videos boasting of atrocities, echoing the confessions contained in the diaries of Japanese soldiers.

The Gaza genocide is not a post-October 7, 2023 anomaly but the apex of Zionism’s colonial violence that began with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which ignored 700,000 indigenous Palestinians in historic Palestine to promise a “national home” to European Jews. The slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land,” coined by Israel Zangwill was Zionist propaganda that erased Palestine’s vibrant Muslim, Christian, and Jewish society, rivalling Nazi propaganda’s erasure of Jewish humanity in Germany.

Historian Rashid Khalidi notes this myth was used as a justification of the British-backed dispossession, setting the stage for the Nakba in 1948. That event, burned into the souls of Palestinians, saw Zionist terrorist militias—Haganah, Irgun, Lehi—ethnically cleanse 750,000 Palestinians, destroy 500 villages via Plan Dalet, and murder thousands of Palestinians, to secure a Jewish-majority state. Massacres like Deir Yassin and Lydda mirrored Nazi massacres of entire towns, with Palestinian survivors denied the right of return under UN Resolution 194, a condition of Israel’s 1949 UN admission which it immediately violated. More than seven million refugees and their descendants remain stateless around the world, which is a crime of ongoing displacement.

Zionism’s ethno-supremacist ideology, equating Jews as “God’s chosen people” with divine land rights in historic Palestine and beyond, parallels the Nazi slogan of Aryans being the “master race. David Ben-Gurion’s 1937 call to “expel Arabs and take their places” and Golda Meir’s 1969 denial of Palestinian existence, despite documents showing she was born in “Palestine” and therefore was a Palestinian, are reminiscent of Nazi deputy fuehrer Heinrich Himmler’s dehumanization of Jews.

Israel’s history of aggression extends beyond Gaza, instigating nearly every conflict with its neighbours in the region since 1948. The 1956 Suez Crisis saw Israel invade Egypt’s Sinai, unprovoked, alongside Britain and France. The 1967 Six-Day War, a pre-emptive strike on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, led to the illegal occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Sinai, and Golan Heights, violating Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. The 1978 and 1982 Lebanon invasions, including the Sabra-Shatila massacre (3,500 dead, facilitated by eventual PM Ariel Sharon), and multiple wars in Gaza since 2008 reflect a clear pattern of instigating violence. This is also evident in Israel’s attacks against Lebanon, and bombings of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar since 2023—often without provocation—acts which breach sovereignty, international law, and the UN Charter. Israel’s criminality can also be seen in over 50 assassinations since 1948, in Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia and Syria—once again, all violations of international law.

The Zionist project’s colonial roots trace back to the late 19th century, when the founder of the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl envisioned a Jewish secular state in Palestine, disregarding its indigenous population. His disdain for the inhabitants of Palestine (Muslim, Christian and Jewish) was made clear in 1904 when he said, “The Zionist colony would form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” His vision was helped by the Balfour Declaration, which prioritized Zionist settlers over the territory’s 700,000 Palestinians, setting an ugly precedent for ethnic cleansing and exclusion.

This colonial framework, as Israeli historian Ilan Pappé argues in his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, mirrors settler-colonial genocides in Australia and the Americas, where indigenous peoples and societies were erased to make way for settler societies made up primarily of white Europeans. The Nakba’s ethnic cleansing was not a spontaneous event but one that was meticulously planned, with Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion (born in modern day Poland) explicitly advocating for “transfer” [ethnic cleansing] to ensure Jewish dominance in historic Palestine. In a letter to his son Amos in October 1937 he wrote, “We must expel the Arabs [Palestinians] and take their places . . . And, if we have to use force, not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places, then we have force at our disposal.” The ongoing Gaza genocide extends this logic, aiming to render the territory uninhabitable for Palestinians through systematic destruction of agriculture, water systems, cultural heritage, all manner of civilian infrastructure, and mass murder, as documented by UN reports. This calculated erasure aligns with Raphael Lemkin’s genocide definition—acts to destroy a group’s “essential foundations of life.”

Western complicity, particularly from the United States, amplifies Israel’s impunity. Beyond financial aid, the US provides diplomatic cover, and has vetoed multiple UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s actions, a pattern since 1972. This protection has emboldened Israel’s violations, from the 1967 occupations to Gaza’s siege, mirroring how Nazi Germany exploited the League of Nations’ weakness. Western media often sanitizes Israel’s atrocities, framing Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” while ignoring Israel’s state terror, as noted in critiques of news outlets like CNN and BBC. This double standard dehumanizes Palestinians, the same way Nazi propaganda vilified Jews, thereby enabling public indifference to Gaza’s suffering. The supply of American precision-guided munitions, used in Gaza’s indiscriminate bombings, implicates the US directly in war crimes, as stated by respected human rights organizations and legal scholars.

Since its creation Israel’s actions have destabilized the Middle East, leading to wider conflicts. Its unprovoked strikes on Iran and Syria, alongside proxy wars via US-backed militias, have inflamed regional tensions. The 2025 Qatar attack, targetting Hamas officials, underscores Israel’s disregard for international law, and territorial sovereignty, provoking responses from groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis. This recklessness, fuelled by Zionism’s expansionist zeal, threatens to draw the US and other Middle East nations into a wider war, echoing how unchecked aggression in the 1930s led to global conflict. The International Criminal Court’s 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes signal growing global concern, yet Western inaction to stop the genocide persists.

The Gaza genocide’s scale is compounded by Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, a tactic rooted in Zionist goals to erase Palestinian presence, and mimicking tactics the Nazis used in the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two. Hospitals have been bombed repeatedly while medical staff and patients have been targeted and killed, violating Geneva Convention protections for medical facilities. UN reports document the destruction of over 90% of Gaza’s healthcare system, leaving millions without access to care, a strategy to maximize civilian suffering and death. This mirrors the Nazi destruction of Warsaw’s infrastructure to crush resistance, prioritizing annihilation over military objectives. Such actions, as Segal notes, aim to “destroy the group as such,” fulfilling genocide’s legal definition.

Israel’s religious and political rhetoric further exposes its genocidal intent. Beyond Netanyahu’s Amalek invocation, religious leaders have called Palestinians “beasts” and “animals” unfit for coexistence, while Knesset member Avi Dichter described Gaza’s assault as “rolling out the Nakba.” These statements, combined with half of Israeli Jews supporting genocide, and policies like cutting off Gaza’s electricity and water, reflect a supremacist ideology that justifies extermination, akin to Nazi depictions of Jews as subhuman. The Balfour Declaration’s legacy, seeing Jews as humans while dehumanizing Palestinians, continues to shape this violence, with Western powers complicit in its perpetuation. American historian Norman Finkelstein (a child of Holocaust survivors) argues that Israel’s actions constitute a “public genocide,” conducted openly with Western-supplied weapons.

Global inaction mirrors historical failures, enabling Israel’s crimes. The UN’s inability to enforce resolutions, hampered by US vetoes, recalls the League of Nations’ collapse before Nazi aggression. The failure to act in Rwanda and Bosnia (also hampered by UNSC vetoes) allowed genocides to unfold, and Gaza faces a similar fate as Western leaders deflect accountability with claims of “Israel’s right to self-defence.” International law, including the Genocide Convention, is rendered toothless when powerful nations shield perpetrators, as seen with US support for Israel’s war crimes. Grassroots movements, like global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns, represent growing resistance, but political elites remain complicit as they ignore or willingly support Israeli actions.

The broader implications of Israel’s actions threaten global stability. Its attacks on multiple nations—Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Qatar—risk escalating into a regional war, potentially involving nuclear powers, reminiscent of pre-World War Two escalations. Unconditional support by the US, including sale of advanced weaponry, fuels this danger, implicating it in Gaza’s atrocities. The Zionist ideology’s expansionist vision, as articulated by Herzl and the current Zionist leadership of Israel aiming for a “Greater Israel,” drives this aggression, and threatens to destabilize the Middle East and beyond. The international community’s failure to hold Israel accountable risks normalizing genocidal violence, undermining global human rights frameworks and political stability.

Ending Israel’s apartheid, “de-Zionizing” Israeli society, enforcing Palestinian refugees’ right of return, and prosecuting war crimes demand urgent global resolve. The moral failures evident in the Gaza genocide, as in the Holocaust, Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, lies in the collective silence and inaction of most of the global community. The Zionist myth of a “land without a people” and Jews being “God’s chosen people” continues to justify ethnic cleansing, echoing colonial genocides worldwide. Without decisive action—sanctions, arms embargoes, and ICC enforcement—Israel’s impunity will cement its legacy as the 21st century’s exemplar of evil, a state whose supremacist ideology and Western-backed genocidal violence rivals that of Nazi Germany.

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Erosion of our rights is a betrayal of those Canadians who died to protect our freedoms

Remembrance transcends ritual commemoration; it demands active reclamation of the democratic legacy.

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

As the chill of November settles over Ottawa the solemn rituals of this week’s Remembrance Day ceremonies are now etched into our collective memory—a moment to salute the valour of those who ventured into the inferno of global conflicts. From the blood-soaked trenches of Europe, to the beaches of Normandy, the frozen hills of Korea, and the dusty trails of Afghanistan, Canadian service men and women laid down their lives not for glory, but for the sake of “freedom” and “democracy”, or so they were told.

In total since World War One, over 113,000 Canadians perished, their ultimate sacrifice helping to forge a Canada where citizens’ voices could speak out and dissent, where people could gather without fear of reprisal, and political leaders could be held accountable for their actions. These warriors did not storm foreign shores merely to repel invaders. They battled to enshrine a birthright of freedom from tyranny, equality under the law, and governance by the consent of the people, free from the shadows of authoritarianism.

However, as the wreaths are removed from cenotaphs and as the red poppies are put away for another year, a disquieting question lingers, what endures of their legacy when the very foundations freedom, democracy and human rights they bled to secure are being slowly dismantled bit by bit? In the years since those cataclysmic struggles, Canada has morphed into a nation where safeguards against governmental overreach now yield to the imperatives of “security”, and to ideological fervour.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the aspirational 1982 compact born from decades of constitutional struggles, now faces insidious encroachments. Nominally a society that embraces freedom and civil liberties, Canada now grapples with a creeping curtailment of personal freedoms, masked as bulwarks against terrorism, crime and societal harmony. If the ghosts of Vimy Ridge, Dieppe, or Kandahar could peer through the mist of time, they might recoil at the sight of a democracy seemingly adrift, where the clamour of protest is muffled because it bothers certai n communities, where expressions of dissent are branded as dangerous, and where elected official’s voices are reduced to mere echoes of their political masters.

Consider the legislation coming out of Parliament, cloaked in the garb of safety and security. The Strong Borders Act (Bill C-2), unveiled in June, promises to fortify our borders against shadowy transnational threats. At first glance, it evokes the steadfast resolve of those sent off to distant lands to defend Canadian values. Yet, within its pages lies a network of provisions that erode the bedrock of privacy and mobility enshrined in the Charter of Rights, ones that empower Canadian Border Service officials with sweeping authority to scrutinize digital footprints and personal data, often without judicial approval or oversight, under the flimsy veil of “reasonable suspicion. Critics from more than 300 advocacy organizations, representing refugee networks to digital rights sentinels, decry it as a Trojan horse for unchecked surveillance which could threaten human rights, refugee and migrant rights, and the privacy of all Canadians. This legislation is no mere bureaucratic tweak but rather a concession of the freedoms that Canadians fought to defend from the spectre of authoritarian ideologies.

No less alarming is Bill C-8, the Critical Cyber Systems Protection Act. Framed as a bulwark against threats to vulnerable infrastructure—from power grids, to telecommunications infrastructure, to financial institutions—it compels companies under federal jurisdiction to undertake exhaustive audits of their vulnerabilities, with regulators able to dictate the removal of suspect technologies or the overhaul of protocols. While the spectre of cyber incursions is a real threat, with this legislation the federal government tilts perilously close towards a scenario where the Charter’s protections against unreasonable searches and protections of personal security—Sections 7 and 8—are ignored in the name of advancing national priorities and strengthening Canada’s economic resilience. In an era where data and technology is critical to economic success, such overreach risks transforming the open and free spaces where Canadians live their lives into places of constant surveillance, much like it is in present day China.

This escalation of restrictions extends to municipal governance in several jurisdictions across Canada, where officials, reacting to persistent protests against the genocide in Gaza, have instituted “bubble zone” bylaws that impose spatial buffers around key civic institutions. In Toronto, a city characterized by its pluralism and diversity, the city council approved a regulation establishing 50-meter exclusion zones around places of worship, educational facilities, and childcare centres, prohibiting assemblies deemed “disruptive” on the basis of subjective reports of discomfort. Initially conceived as a protective measure for entities affected by intense demonstrations—many of which have condemned Israel for committing horrific atrocities—the policy has evolved into a broader mechanism of control, targeting non-violent gatherings under the rationale of “protecting” citizens. Violations incur penalties of up to $5,000, administered by municipal enforcement officers with police support, even though law enforcement authorities maintain that existing legislation is adequate.

Similar measures have emerged in the cities of Vaughan and Brampton, north of Toronto, and Ottawa is developing its own framework. This creates a fragmented landscape of censorship of political activism that undermines the Canadian Charter of Rights’ protections under Sections 2(b) and 2(c), which cover freedom of expression and assembly. Advocates for civil liberties caution that these bylaws impose a deterrent effect on legitimate and legal protest, especially among underrepresented groups advocating for global justice, thereby converting historically inclusive public spaces into government controlled no go zones.

Exacerbating these trends is the gradual institutional adoption of broadened criteria for identifying prejudice, specifically the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which has been integrated into governmental policy since its federal acceptance in 2019 and subsequent provincial implementations through 2025. Jurisdictions including Ontario, Alberta, and Quebec have codified the definition, presenting it as an instrument to combat rising intolerance. However, its non-binding examples—some of which equate specific criticisms of Israeli state policy with antisemitic intent—risk conflating political analysis and criticism with ethnic and racial animus, thereby capturing human-rights advocacy concerning the Levant within the scope of prohibited speech. Progressive Jewish organizations, like Independent Jewish Voices, and allied civil-society coalitions contend that the definition is being weaponized to suppress substantive and legitimate debate while insulating those who support the suppression of legal free speech contested from scrutiny, thus eroding the freedoms that Allied forces sought to secure during the Second World War. In a society that embraces multicultural integration, such instruments threaten to undermine social cohesion by elevating one interpretive framework above rights guaranteed under the Charter.

Provincial governments, ostensibly custodians of regional autonomy, have increasingly invoked the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause (Section 33) to suspend Charter protections for disadvantaged populations. Quebec’s 2019 secularism law, reaffirmed in 2024, prohibits public-sector employees from displaying religious symbols, thereby overriding guarantees of religious freedom and equality. Saskatchewan’s 2023 requirement for parental consent in cases of gender-identity disclosure by minors, alongside Alberta’s 2025 legislation enabling teacher dismissals during labour disputes, both deploy the clause to preempt Charter challenges. Ontario’s adjustments to electoral boundaries and New Brunswick’s language-policy directives similarly shield contentious measures from judicial review.

Originally conceived in 1982 as a limited override to be used only in the most extraordinary circumstances, to balance parliamentary sovereignty with rights adjudication, the clause has been activated six times by five provinces since 2019, diminishing the Charter’s normative authority and enabling majority governments to violate constitutional rights under the guise of democratic prerogative. The framers of Canada’s constitutional order, informed by the injustices of wartime internment and the use of the War Measures Act during the FLQ Crisis in Quebec, intended the mechanism as an exceptional safeguard. Its contemporary proliferation signals a regression toward discretionary governance in which fundamental rights are sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

At the core of this democratic deficit lies Parliament, the institution designed to translate popular sovereignty into accountable administration. In principle, it functions as the primary arena for executive oversight, where rank-and-file legislators interrogate policy, compel evidence, and, if necessary, withdraw confidence to precipitate governmental collapse. The 1873 Pacific Scandal, in which parliamentary censure over railway corruption toppled Sir John A. Macdonald’s administration, exemplifies an era when Members of Parliament were able to exercise independent judgment unconstrained by party directives. By contrast, the contemporary House of Commons, comprising 343 members following the 2025 redistribution, operates within a rigid disciplinary party structure that prioritizes caucus cohesion and party loyalty over constituent representation. Informal yet coercive party protocols brand nonconformists as outliers and even traitors, and consign them to irrelevance. In the recent federal election the prime minister sustained a narrow electoral plurality, retains exclusive authority over cabinet formation, committee placements, and ancillary benefits such as international travel or remunerated parliamentary roles. Policy direction largely originates not from elected colleagues but from an insulated “palace guard” within the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office—apparatchiks whose primary allegiance is to the executive. Empirical analyses reveals that members adhere to the party line in 99.6 percent of recorded votes, rendering their contributions perfunctory.

This structural weakness arises from the imperatives of minority or slim-majority governance and a leader-centred political approach, where the leader tolerates no internal dissent that might jeopardize legislative stability. Career advancement—parliamentary secretaryships, committee chairmanships, or cabinet portfolios—function as an incentive for compliance, while resistance invites sanction. Consequently, the House of Commons, intended to constrain executive overreach, has devolved into a compliant assembly where rigorous examination atrophies and democratic accountability is limited. Without a credible check on prime ministerial authority, the system ceases to embody representative democracy as was originally intended.

The Canadian combatants who fell at Juno Beach, Kapyong, or Panjwai did not sacrifice themselves for this faded silhouette of self-governance. They confronted totalitarian regimes to defend a society where freedom and democracy is the norm, where dissent is a catalyst for reform rather than repression, and where elected officials serve the public rather than entrenched elites. Their legacy is undermined not by external adversaries but by internal erosion—federal surveillance regimes that intrude upon personal autonomy, municipal ordinances that stifle public expression, provincial suspensions of constitutional rights, and legislatures shackled by partisan discipline.

Reforms of the inadequacies of society requires deliberate intervention. Legislation should mandate conscience votes on ethical issues and insulate committee assignments from leadership discretion. Judicial oversight of Section 33 invocations before they are implemented should become the norm, restricting its use to genuine existential emergencies. Bubble-zone bylaws and the IHRA definition’s overboard applications should be rescinded to restore unencumbered forums for critique. Border-security and cybersecurity initiatives must incorporate robust transparency and warrant requirements. Most critically, statutory reforms should affirm that Members of Parliament owe their primary duty to constituents, not party hierarchies.

Remembrance transcends ritual commemoration; it demands active reclamation of the democratic legacy. We honour the fallen not through ephemeral tributes but by reinvigorating the liberties they secured. Only through such renewal can their sacrifice resonate as the foundation of an enduring, resilient Canada. In their memory, we are compelled to act, before the principles they defended dissolve into oblivion.

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.