Evil in our time: The West is living the “banality of evil” (Part 2/2)

Violent oppression produces resistance. Brutality provokes retaliation. Violence creates more violence—not because the oppressed desire it, but because it is the only remaining path to survival when all peaceful avenues are blocked.

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

In her writings about the “banality of evil” Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that when evil becomes normalized, when it is rendered ordinary, carried out not by fanatics or monsters, but by professionals, government functionaries, and ordinary people, who see themselves as moral, and neutral executors of policy, that is when we have reached the peak of evil in a society. 

After almost three years of Israel committing genocide in Gaza, we must accept that this is what has happened in Israel, as well as in the Western nations that continue to support it and enable its genocidal crimes.

The cruelty visible in Israel’s actions in Gaza is not confined to the state or its military. It is reflected in the attitudes that have taken hold within significant parts of Israeli society. When a Haaretz poll in June 2025 reported that 47% of Israeli Jews supported exterminating all Palestinians in Gaza “down to the last child,” that is the normalization of evil. When 82% supported the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, that too is the normalization of evil. And when 56% supported expelling all Palestinians from territories under Israeli control, it reflected a society in which dehumanization of Palestinians has become routine. Each of these positions constitutes a violation of international law, yet they are expressed as ordinary political preferences.

 

This is what happens when cruelty becomes embedded in daily life. It is normalized, rationalized, and stripped of moral consequence. In such an environment, moral responsibility does not merely weaken — it dissolves.

Whatever one thinks about the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 the reality that followed exposed a deeper structural evil—not only in Israeli society but also in the West—where Palestinian dehumanization is accepted, and where Israel’s genocide has been enabled almost entirely by Western power. The United States under President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the United Kingdom under Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, Germany under Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz, France under Emmanuel Macron, and Canada under Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney all continued supplying weapons, ammunition, and military components to Israel throughout the most intense periods of Israel’s genocide— arming a state as it carried out what major human rights organizations, along with Holocaust and genocide scholars have described as the crime of genocide.

This is not a case of passive complicity. It is active participation in the crime of crimes.

The scale of destruction is staggering. According to a study by Ben Gurion University professor Yakov Garb, published through Harvard Dataverse, more than 377,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza by May 2025. And in July 2025, Australian academics Richard Hil and Gideon Polya published a study in Arena concluding that Israel had killed more than 680,000 Palestinians in Gaza, directly and indirectly.

These numbers are not abstract. They represent human beings—families, children, elders, entire communities—obliterated.

Israel, supported by Western governments, tried to lable their actions as “self‑defence.”  But self‑defence does not typically include starving a besieged population, bombing hospitals, destroying universities, mosques and churches, killing journalists, and sustaining mass killing over extended periods. The repeated use of the term is an attempt to prevent moral scrutiny—language functioning as a shield for inhumane policy.

Consider what Western support has meant in practice. Western governments supplied the weapons used to level neighbourhoods and destroy civilian life. They offered diplomatic cover that neutralized international accountability. They obstructed ceasefire efforts. They ignored rulings and warnings when those rulings threatened the continued flow of arms or the maintenance of strategic alliances. They treated genocide allegations raised by scholars and human rights organizations as politically inconvenient noise.

Where evil is concerned silence is not neutral. Silence is a form of governance and action. When Western institutions refused to name what is happening in Gaza as genocide even when credible experts and major human rights organizations did—the West communicated to Israel that it would tolerate mass murder, mass destruction, minimize it and eventually normalize it—the result is that violence on this scale becomes easier the next time, not harder.

Evil thrives on normalization. Once cruelty becomes routine—embedded in procedures, justified through euphemisms, and stripped of historical context—it clears a path for even greater evils, including war.

The Nuremberg Tribunal understood this with chilling clarity. In its final judgment, it declared: “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world... A war of aggression is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

War is horrific. Yet Western elites have increasingly treated war not as a moral failure but as a policy instrument—something to be managed, rationalized, and deployed when convenient. They speak of “precision,” “deterrence,” and “security imperatives,” as if technical language can erase the bodies floating in rivers of blood beneath it. This rhetorical distancing matters as it allows decision-makers, commentators, and bureaucrats to observe suffering from a safe distance while pretending that sanitized terminology absolves them of responsibility.

In this way, Arendt’s warning about the “banality of evil” becomes unmistakably relevant. When violence is normalized through language and procedure, when moral judgment is replaced by administrative habit, evil does not merely persist—it expands. And war becomes its most devastating expression.

Whether it’s in war or like what Israel has done in its decades-long occupation of the Palestinian people, oppressed people who resist are often condemned as “terrorists” or “extremists” without acknowledging what preceded them: occupation, dispossession, blockade, and systematic dehumanization. Meanwhile, the violence of those with state power is excused as strategic necessity.

Violence has a history. Oppression produces resistance. Brutality provokes retaliation. Violence generates more violence—not because the oppressed desire it, but because it becomes the only remaining path to survival when every peaceful avenue has been blocked and when their oppressor uses every legal, political, and military tool available to prevent justice. People cling to nonviolence as long as they can, but when survival itself is threatened, nonviolence becomes impossible as a practical matter. To ignore this context is not moral seriousness; it is moral evasion.

To confront evil properly, one must look at its genealogy. In the case of the Palestinian cause there is a history of betrayal stretching back over a century—British duplicity during World War 1, the Balfour Declaration, the suppression of uprisings, immigration policies the mass migration of Jews into Palestine, the UN partition granting Jews a majority of the land of historic Palestine despite being a minority of the population, and the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians.

After that came decades of apartheid-like practices, military occupation, land theft, settlement expansion, and systemic dehumanization. For generations, Palestinians have been treated not as human beings with rights but as demographic threats to be contained, controlled, displaced and ultimately exterminated. For people living under siege—whose homes are taken, whose movements are restricted, and whose lives are governed by violence—the ethical appeal to “use peaceful means” is not a legitimate moral argument. It is a refusal to acknowledge reality.

The Gaza genocide has shattered the illusion of Western moral superiority. It has exposed human rights discourse as selective—racialized, politicized, and contingent on geopolitical interests. It has revealed that Western empathy is not universal; it is filtered through alliances, strategic calculations, and narratives designed to protect power rather than people.

What has emerged is not merely hypocrisy but something more corrosive: a profound moral incapacity within Western institutions to see Palestinians as fully human. Their suffering is suppressed by major media outlets, minimized in elite discourse, and reframed or ignored by political leaders. Their voices are sidelined in academia and public life. Their persecution is met not with outrage by the elites but with diplomatic cover, continued arms shipments, and bureaucratic indifference.

This is why evil cannot be understood solely as the actions of one army or one government. It resides in the systems that enable those actions while shielding their architects from accountability. Genocide is never the work of a single individual. Hitler did not carry out the Holocaust alone; he set the direction, but thousands of bureaucrats, officers, industrialists, propagandists, and collaborators operated the machinery of death. Likewise, the Gaza genocide is not solely the responsibility of Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his cabinet, his advisers, or his military commanders—though they bear immense culpability. It is also the responsibility of the Western leaders who armed them, the diplomats who protected them, the media figures who sanitized their actions, and the bureaucrats who processed the shipments, approved the transfers, and maintained the infrastructure of destruction.

Evil becomes most powerful when it is distributed across institutions—when it is normalized, rationalized, and made routine. Gaza has revealed that this machinery exists throughout Western societies and certainly in Israel and the US.  It is embedded in the political, military, and bureaucratic systems that make atrocity possible and then shield those responsible from accountability.

It must be noted that this pattern is not unique to the West. The same institutional logic underlies Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine and the U.S.–Israeli military operations against Iran. These are not the actions of lone individuals but of entire systems of power, ideology, and obedience. Evil on this scale requires thousands of hands—politicians, generals, analysts, media figures, and administrators—each performing their role, each contributing to a larger architecture of violence.

And when systems of power operate this way, oppressed peoples eventually reach a point where surviving on their knees is worse than resisting and possibly dying on their feet. After decades of brutal oppression Palestinians reached that point long ago. The West—through its weapons, its propaganda, its indifference, and its diplomatic obstruction—has ensured that they had no path toward safety and survival other than through violent resistance. When institutions normalize injustice, armed resistance becomes not a choice but a last remaining means of survival.

Evil exists in Moscow and Beijing, yes. It exists wherever power dehumanizes the vulnerable. But it also exists in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Ottawa, Tel Aviv—and wherever Western institutions decide that some lives are less deserving of protection, less deserving of rights, and less deserving of international enforcement of the law. Evil is not confined to adversaries; it flourishes wherever systems of power treat human beings as expendable.

Until the West confronts its own role in perpetuating global violence—until it dismantles the incentives, narratives, and institutional mechanisms that make atrocity easy—it cannot claim the moral high ground. Where evil exists, it must be named and called out, without exception or euphemism. And where it is in recent decades—too often—it has been Western. Refusing to confront this reality is not neutrality, it is complicity. A society that will not face the evil it enables inevitably slides back toward barbarism and anarchy, because unacknowledged evil does not disappear—it grows.

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

Evil in our time: The West is living the “banality of evil” (Part 1/2)

Evil poses the greatest danger when it is rendered ordinary, when ordinary people see themselves as just living normally and doing jobs they were given that promote evil or inflict evil. 

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

Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt developed the idea of the “banality of evil” while observing the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the central administrators of the Holocaust. Her insight—that immense cruelty can be carried out by ordinary people performing routine tasks—has shaped how many of us understand evil today. From her writings, from the lessons of history, and from our own experiences, we have come to accept that evil is not abstract. It exists, and we recognize it long before we can explain it.

Most of us sensed this even as children. We learned about good and evil through stories—superhero cartoons, comic books, films. There was always a hero protecting the innocent and a villain bent on destruction, indifferent to the suffering they caused. Perhaps that is why hundreds of millions around the world have flocked to theatres to watch superhero films since the genre exploded in popularity in the early 2000s. People want to see good triumph over evil, because in the real world that victory feels increasingly rare.

The collapse of childhood morality

As we grew older, the simplicity of childhood morality gave way to a harsher truth. Evil was not an abstraction. It was not confined to fictional villains or imaginary worlds. It was a real force—systemic, organized, and embedded in institutions, policies, and individual acts that inflict pain and suffering on innocent people. Like many raised in the West, we were taught a comforting moral vocabulary, that democracy triumphs over tyranny, rule of law over brutality, human rights over barbarism. But the lessons of history tell a very different story.

History catalogued humanity’s depravity and the catastrophic capacity of states and individuals to degrade, dispossess, exterminate, with acts that are inherently evil. We learned about the genocide of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania, the evils of European colonial empires, the two world wars, the Holocaust, and the many other atrocities of the previous two centuries. We were taught how Cold War geopolitics led both blocs to support ruthless dictators, how propaganda laundered cruelty into necessity, and how the language of morality became political camouflage—allowing governments and leaders to commit acts that, at the level of individual conscience, most of us would find abhorrent and unacceptable.

The myth of Western innocence

In Canada, these lessons were never distant abstractions. We learned about the treatment of Indigenous peoples by colonial authorities and later by the Canadian state—how government policies, disease, displacement, and deliberate neglect produced a demographic collapse so severe that roughly 95% of Indigenous people died from the time of first contact with Europeans to the end of the 19th century. We learned how these policies were not accidental or peripheral, but central to the project of building Canada.  They included land seizure, forced starvation, residential schools, the pass system, and the suppression of Indigenous governance, and were all instruments of a state determined to eliminate Indigenous presence as a political and cultural force.

And the brutality did not end with the 19th century. Explicitly genocidal policies—child removal, cultural destruction, coerced assimilation, and systemic land dispossession—remained in place well into the late 20th century, with some saying they continue today. The history we inherited made clear that evil was not confined to foreign regimes or distant eras. It was woven into the institutions, laws, and administrative practices that shaped Canada, and it operated within living memory. This country’s national story is often told as one of peace, order, and good government, but the record shows a state willing to inflict organized suffering on a massive scale when Indigenous lives stood in the way of its political goals.

Despite this history most of us likely assumed—naively—that Western societies contained less evil than their rivals. These were the nations that defeated Hitler and ended World War 2, championed civil liberties, enshrined human rights, and built institutions, like the International Court of Justice, dedicated to accountability (at least on paper). We came to believe that the West was less compromised, less willing to inflict mass suffering as policy. We believed its leaders lived by a higher morality and were constrained by law, ethics, and democratic norms.

We were very wrong.

How Western institutions normalize cruelty

In recent years, many in the West have begun to understand that evil is not something that only happens “over there.” It can take root within Western political classes, media ecosystems, academic institutions, and corporate boardrooms. We have learned—sometimes gradually, sometimes through shocking events—that these institutions seek to profit from aggression and injustice, both politically and economically. Whether we want to accept it or not evil can manifest itself in our society among elites who decide what counts as truth, whose suffering is acknowledged, and what forms of violence can be justified or ignored. And once embedded within these structures, once normalized and reinforced by power, it becomes remarkably resilient.

What changed things for many was a single event—the way Western political, media, and corporate elites responded to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel—and the uncritical support they offered for the Israeli campaign of retribution that followed in Gaza. Rage and grief after the attack were expected, even without acknowledging the context in which it occurred—decades of oppression and mass killing of Palestinians, and the Israeli blockade and siege imposed on Gaza since 2007 that had turned the territory into the world’s largest concentration camp.

What was not expected was the speed and certainty with which Western political and media elites transformed one terror attack into a sweeping license for Israel to wage a campaign of genocide against Palestinians. The world witnessed not simply support for Israel’s right to defend itself, but an almost reflexive embrace of a war of vengeance—a refusal to de-escalate, and a demand that everyone accept the fiction that the Israel-Palestine “conflict” began on October 7th, as if decades of Israeli occupation, dispossession, and brutality toward Palestinians could be erased without consequence.

Western framing—and the deliberate elimination of history and context—did real work. As it shut down moral inquiry. By stripping away the historical conditions that preceded the Hamas attack and erasing the political reality in which Palestinian suffering has been sustained for generations, Western leaders and media outlets created a narrative in which only one side’s pain mattered. This framing implied that Western audiences need not consider proportionality, civilian harm, international law, or the ethical distinction between legitimate self-defence and collective punishment. When history can be dismissed so casually and so completely, almost any atrocity in the present becomes permissible.

Bureaucratic violence and the banality of atrocity

This instinct—violent aggression as the default moral position when Western interests or alliances are implicated—is not new. A clear look at the post‑9/11 era shows a consistent pattern, one where Western powers, especially the United States, have been responsible for some of the worst violence committed globally in the last quarter century. The “War on Terror” did not merely fight terrorism, it built a global war machine. Invasions, occupations, drone assassination campaigns, proxy wars, and sanctions regimes devastated entire societies. The stated rationales were variations of the same idea—catastrophic harm to innocent people is justified when done in the name of security, stability, and self‑defence.

The Brown University Costs of War project estimates that post‑9/11 wars have killed more than 4.5 million people, directly and indirectly—more than 90% of them Muslim. This is not an accident of geography. It is the outcome of deliberate decisions, where bombers and fighter jets are dispatched, where troops occupy civilian populations, where sanctions choke societies, where proxies are funded, and where legal constraints on government are treated as obstacles rather than safeguards.

The war in Afghanistan, launched under the justification of hunting Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, evolved into a two-decade-long occupation that ultimately killed up to 360,000 civilians. The war in Iraq—sold to the world through the lie of weapons of mass destruction—became a destabilizing catastrophe where an estimated 600,000 people were killed according to the British medical journal The Lancet. Libya, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, and other countries were pulled into the orbit of Western coercion through the language of counterterrorism and national security. American drone strikes killed thousands of innocent civilians with bureaucratic impunity, and US torture sites proliferated across the globe. International law was not shattered in one dramatic moment, but eroded through a steady stream of exceptions, reinterpretations, and executive decisions—the proverbial death by a thousand cuts.

What stands out is not only the brutality but the moral gymnastics utilized to rationalize what can only be called acts of depravity. The violence was framed as defensive rather than predatory—an effort to protect the innocent rather than an attempt to impose geopolitical order through devastation. But if the West can call mass destruction, the destruction of entire societies, and mass murder “self‑defence” often enough, then self‑defence becomes a loophole with no ethical limits.

Arendt’s insight into the banality of evil has become disturbingly relevant in our time. What stands out in the post-9/11 era is not only the scale of violence, but the way Western governments, institutions and leaders normalized it through bureaucratic language, administrative habit, and moral disengagement. Evil did not announce itself with grand declarations. It seeped into policy recommendations, security memos, public speeches, and the quiet decisions of officials who believed they were simply doing their jobs in trying to defend “Western values.”

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American drone assassination campaigns across the Middle East and Africa, and the network of torture sites that spread across the globe were all justified through technical vocabulary—“precision strikes,” “enhanced interrogation,” “collateral damage,” “security imperatives.” These terms sanitized brutality, turning mass death into a matter of procedure. The machinery of state violence became so routine that killing innocent civilians, destroying entire societies, and shredding international law were treated as administrative necessities rather than the moral catastrophes they were.

This is precisely what Arendt warned about.  Evil poses the greatest danger when it is rendered ordinary, when acts of evil are carried out not by fanatics or monsters, but by professionals, government functionaries, and ordinary people who see themselves as moral individuals just doing the job they were given. In this situation cruelty becomes a normal part of day to day tasks. Atrocity becomes a line item, and moral responsibility dissolves into the anonymity of institutional process where people are “just following orders.”

This is the true horror of the banality of evil. Not that monstrous acts are committed by monstrous people, but that they are committed calmly, without guilt and with little afterthought by people who see themselves as having a moral compass—the way an Israeli sniper shoots a Palestinian child in the head and then celebrates with his comrades over a meal afterwards at a job well done.  And unless we confront that fact directly—the normalization of evil—we risk living in a world where atrocity is not the exception, but the norm. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not hyperbole, its reality.

Bill Clinton: The quiet architect of catastrophe

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

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

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

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

George W. Bush is a war criminal shielded by power

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

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

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

Barrack Obama: The drone executioner

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

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

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

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

The destruction of Libya

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

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

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

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

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

Syria and Iran were targeted for supporting Palestinians

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

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

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

Iran is the ultimate target of US–Israeli aggression

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

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

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

The human toll: A region bleeding from US wars

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

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

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

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

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

Canada: The neighbour living beside a volcano

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

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

This is not speculation. It is history.

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

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

If the United States continues down its current path of militarism, economic coercion, and geopolitical recklessness, Canada will not simply feel the shockwaves—it will be struck by the full force of the blast. No other country on Earth is as exposed to American instability as Canada. Every major artery of Canadian prosperity—trade, energy, manufacturing, agriculture, finance, supply chains—runs directly through the US. When Washington shakes, Ottawa trembles. When Washington lashes out, Canada gets bruisedbleeds. And if Washington goes rogue, Canada will become the first and most vulnerable casualty.

Canada must recognize that the greatest threat to its future is not a distant authoritarian power—it is the increasingly unstable superpower next door. If the United States continues down its current trajectory—endless wars of aggression abroad, economic blackmail against allies, and a foreign policy that tries to control and dominate other nations—Canada will be the first nation to suffer the consequences. The question is no longer whether Canada is vulnerable. The question is whether Canada is prepared to confront the reality that its greatest existential threat comes not from across an ocean, but from across a border, and Canadian leaders have to ask themselves are we prepared for this scenario, and what is the price Canadians are willing to pay to defend ourselves.

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

We are living through a new age of evil

Israel’s actions in Gaza and its general brutality towards Palestinians is what evil looks like in the 21st century—a state committing mass atrocity crimes in full view of the world and nothing is done to stop them.

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

We are living through a new age of systemic evil—an era whose moral contours resemble the 1930s more than any period since. Then, as now, powerful states normalized cruelty, stripped entire populations of rights, and justified mass violence through the language of security, racial hierarchy, and national destiny.

Then, as now, the world’s so‑called democracies watched, equivocated, or actively enabled the perpetrators. However, the lesson humanity had learned from that history—”Never Again”—has been hollowed out, reduced to a slogan invoked selectively, applied to only one people, rather than applied as a universal moral principle.

Unlike the 1930s and World War Two where the Nazis tried to hide their genocidal crimes, today’s evil in Gaza is not hidden.

What distinguishes this moment is not only the scale of destruction unleashed on Palestinians, but the brazenness with which Western nations—the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France—the self‑appointed guardians of the post-World War Two order have chosen to enable, rationalize, and arm that destruction. The governments that claim to champion human rights and the sanctity of civilian life are now the primary suppliers of weapons, diplomatic cover, and political legitimacy to a state—Israel—that is accused by leading genocide and Holocaust scholars, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and UN bodies of committing genocide.

And yet, when most people are asked to describe “evil,” they do not think of these polished, articulate leaders of Western democracies. They think of serial killers, violent criminals, perpetrators of child exploitation, or historical tyrants like Hitler and Pol Pot. They might mention contemporary authoritarian figures such as Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un. But few would think to include Western presidents and prime ministers who deliver eloquent speeches about human rights while simultaneously providing arms and political protection to a state committing genocidal crimes.

This disconnect is itself a symptom of the age of evil we inhabit. Evil is imagined as something distant, monstrous, and obvious—not something carried out through bureaucratic memos, arms export permits, diplomatic vetoes, and press conferences delivered in calm, reassuring tones. But if this profound moral inversion does not qualify as an era of systemic evil unseen since the 1930s, then what would? When the machinery of the “rules‑based order” is deployed to protect the aggressor, while the victims’ suffering is minimized or ignored by the most powerful nations in the world, labelled a “complex issue,” the boundary between those who claim to defend “good” and those branded as “evil” dissolves.

A May 2025 survey conducted by the Israeli research firm Geocartography for Penn State University, and reported in Haaretz, revealed a stark reality— support for extreme policies is not confined to Israel’s political and military elites. According to the poll, 82% of Israeli Jews endorsed the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, while nearly half supported the Israeli military “killing all Palestinians in Gaza.” A majority—56%—favoured expelling every non‑Jew from all territories under Israeli control. These are not fringe views held by a radical minority of elites, they reflect attitudes that have become normalized across broad segments of Israeli society. Such findings underscore a critical truth, that systemic evil does not emerge solely from leaders. It is sustained, legitimized, and amplified by the public they represent that accepts, endorses, or demands it.

And this is not a matter of rhetorical exaggeration. In 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars—the preeminent professional body in the field, including numerous Israeli Holocaust specialists—ratified a resolution affirming that Israel’s policies and operations in Gaza meet the criteria of genocide under the 1948 Convention. The resolution passed with 86% support. This was not a fringe opinion. It was a deliberate, rigorous assessment by experts whose scholarship centres on mass atrocities, including the Holocaust itself.

A growing body of academics and jurists in genocide studies, Holocaust studies, historiography, and international law have reached similar conclusions. Their analyses are grounded in decades of research into the crime of genocide, codified into international law after the Second World War precisely to prevent the recurrence of the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. And it is not only scholars. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry, established by the Human Rights Council, has determined that Israel bears responsibility for genocide in Gaza since October 2023, and that high‑ranking Israeli officials have incited such acts.

In the 1930s, the world claimed it did not know what was happening. Today’s leaders lack this defence. Today, the world knows—and chooses not to act. The Gaza conflict has been termed “the most transparent genocide in human history” precisely because victims and perpetrators have live streamed its horrors. Israeli personnel have disseminated footage of devastation and mistreatment they have inflicted; Palestinians have chronicled the systematic erasure of homes, hospitals, schools, and entire neighbourhoods in real time. Global audiences, including Western officials, have witnessed this annihilation on their phones and screens, yet global leaders have done nothing to stop it.

To understand how we arrived here, we must confront the historical foundations of Palestinian dispossession. The Nakba of 1948 was not an unfortunate byproduct of war; it was a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in terror from the lands of historic Palestine, as Zionist terrorist militias and later the Israeli army ethnically cleansed over 400 towns and villages, murdering thousands, and then eventually erased the communities from the map, by planting forests in their place or building over them. This was not a spontaneous collapse of a society; it was the intentional creation of a new demographic reality, documented by Israeli historians and preserved in UN archives. The new state of Israel then barred these refugees from returning, despite UN Resolution 194 affirming their right to go home. The message was unmistakable: Palestinians were to be erased from their land, their history, and their future.

The dispossession did not end in 1948. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza (the second Nakba), launching what has become one of the longest and most brutal military occupations in modern history. Palestinians were subjected to land seizures, settlement expansion, home demolitions, checkpoints, curfews, and a dual legal system that privileges Jewish settlers while criminalizing Palestinian existence. The occupation was not a temporary security measure; it was a structural project of domination designed to fragment Palestinian territory and prevent the emergence of a viable, sovereign state.

Gaza became the laboratory for a new form of control. After Israel’s 2005 redeployment and withdrawal of settlers from that territory came the blockade, imposed in 2007, which transformed the strip into what human rights groups called “the world’s largest open‑air prison.” Israel controls the borders, the airspace, the sea, the population registry, and even the caloric intake of Gaza’s residents. The blockade is not about security, it was collective punishment aimed at breaking the will of a people. Generations of Palestinians have grown up under siege, deprived of basic rights and freedoms, economic opportunity, and the ability to imagine a life beyond confinement.

This is the architecture of Palestinian dispossession—ethnic cleansing, occupation, blockade—and it is the essential context for understanding the horrors of the present. The ongoing genocide in Gaza is not an aberration. It is the logical continuation of a system fed by an ideology of Zionism built on the domination and brutal oppression of Palestinians, with Western complicity.

Defenders of Israel’s actions invoke the familiar refrain: “Israel has a right to defend itself.” But this claim collapses under even minimal scrutiny when applied to an occupying power. Under international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, an occupying state does not possess a right of self‑defence against the population it occupies. It has obligations—to protect civilians, to refrain from collective punishment, and to ensure the welfare of the occupied population. Moreover, self‑defence cannot justify the levelling of entire neighbourhoods, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, the destruction of hospitals and universities, or the ethnic cleansing of an entire people. These are not acts of defence; they are acts of domination and control, and can be considered war crimes.

Once this rhetorical shield is stripped away, the reality becomes impossible to deny. Since October 2023, Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children. Entire neighbourhoods have been erased. Hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and cultural institutions have been bombed. UN experts warn that Gaza may soon become uninhabitable. And yet, instead of restraining Israel, Western governments—especially the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany—have continued weapons transfers, with the US blocking ceasefire resolutions, and defending Israel at every international forum.

This is not passive complicity. It is active participation. The US has shipped thousands of bombs, artillery shells, and precision‑guided munitions, even as its own officials privately acknowledge the likelihood of war crimes. The UK continues arms exports despite parliamentary warnings. Despite claiming to support international law Canada is still approving military export permits through a loophole despite a Parliamentary vote, supported by a large majority of MPs calling for the suspension of arms shipments. Germany frames its support as a moral obligation rooted in its own history, even as it arms a state committing atrocities against a defenceless people.

The horrors of what has taken place in Gaza are documented in a widely cited study, based on Israeli military data by Professor Yaakov Garb of Ben-Gurion University, published on Harvard University’s Dataverse. It estimates that more than 377,000 Palestinians are missing and presumed dead — roughly 17% of Gaza’s pre-war population. Around the same time, Australian academics Richard Hil and Gideon Polya concluded in their analysis that the actual death toll likely ranges between 680,000 and 700,000.

The consequences of Israeli actions extend far beyond Gaza. Israel’s military operations have expanded into Lebanon, displacing hundreds of thousands and destroying civilian infrastructure. In Iran, Israeli attacks have escalated regional tensions and risked a broader war. These are not isolated incidents; they are part of a coherent strategy of regional dominance, enabled by Western powers that refuse to impose consequences.

This is what systemic evil looks like in the 21st century. A powerful state commits mass atrocity crimes against civilians in full view of the world, and the nations that claim to uphold international law supply the weapons and political cover that make those atrocities possible.

The phrase “international rules‑based order” has become a hollow incantation. It is invoked by Western leaders selectively, applied inconsistently, and weaponized to justify geopolitical interests rather than universal principles.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Western leaders spoke passionately about violations of international law and the UN Charter, and the inviolability of civilian life. When Israel flattened Gaza, committing crimes no different than Russia’s, those same leaders spoke of “complexity,” “restraint,” and “Israel’s right to defend itself.” The double standard is not subtle; it is structural.

And so we return to the central question: Why are we here?

We are here because Western governments have treated Palestinian lives as expendable, and see Palestinians as sub-human. Because they have prioritized geopolitical alliances over human rights. Because they have allowed Israel to act with impunity for decades. Because they have refused to confront the root cause of the conflict: the ongoing denial of Palestinian self‑determination, and decades of obstructionism preventing the Palestinian people from having a free and independent state of their own.

The Nakba is not a historical footnote. It is an ongoing crime of ethnic cleansing and genocide which has been rolled out over 78 years. It is the moral and political origin of the present crisis. Every bomb dropped on Gaza, every home demolished in the West Bank, every refugee denied the right to return, every child killed in Lebanon, every escalation in Iran—these are all chapters in the same story.

But it is also a story of resistance. Palestinians have refused to disappear. They have insisted on their humanity, their history, and their right to live in freedom and dignity. And around the world, millions have joined them, demanding an end to the violence and an end to the complicity that sustains it.

The question is no longer whether we know what is happening.

We clearly do.

The central question is whether Western leaders can finally confront their entrenched anti-Palestinian racism, push back against the outsized influence of the pro-Israel and Zionist lobbies that have long dominated the West’s Middle East policy, and rediscover their moral compass. Only then can they muster the courage to halt a state whose act of evil—marked by decades of systematic violence, ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment—echo the gravest atrocities committed by Germany and Japan during World War Two.

History will harshly judge those leaders who continue with a business as usual attitude in their dealings with Israel. As the racist, apartheid, genocidal regime continues its assault against Gaza and Lebanon, as it continues to commit genocide and torture detainees, it is shredding the post-World War Two international order—the very framework built to prevent future horrors and honour the millions who perished in that war. The architects of that order, if they could see it today, would be outraged that the sort of evil they tried to prevent is happening again, and that the system they built is being deliberately destroyed by the actions of a single fascist state supported and shielded by powerful Western patrons.

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

US-Israeli aggression has destabilized the Middle East and turned it into a powder keg

Through their actions, the United States and Israel have transformed the Middle East into a far more dangerous place, and established themselves as the biggest destabilizing force in the region.

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

“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

These words, pronounced by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946, were meant to serve as an eternal indictment of aggressive war and a bulwark against the very atrocities it inevitably unleashes. They declared that the crime of starting an unprovoked conflict carries within it every subsequent horror—civilian slaughter, shattered societies, refugee crises, economic ruin, and the slow erosion of global order.

Today, in the wake of the collapse of the two-week ceasefire with Iran announced by President Donald Trump on April 7, 2026, Nuremberg’s verdict echoes with terrifying clarity. The agreement was precarious from the moment it was signed—a cynical pause designed not to end hostilities but to buy time for the continuation of a war of aggression launched by the United States and Israel on February 28. That original assault, and every violation of international law that has followed—including the breakdown of Pakistan-mediated peace talks in Islamabad over the weekend and the subsequent US threats to blockade the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping traffic—embodies the “accumulated evil” Nuremberg warned against. The ceasefire’s swift failure was not an unfortunate accident; it was the predictable consequence of a policy rooted in lawlessness, hubris, and an unshakable commitment to Israeli impunity.

Almost immediately after Trump’s announcement, Israeli forces expanded their strikes deep into Lebanon, hitting more than 100 targets in a single ten-minute barrage across commercial and residential districts of central Beirut. Lebanese health authorities now report civilian deaths climbing rapidly, with more than 280 killed over a 48 hour period alone—the highest single-day toll in the Israel-Hezbollah war—along with hundreds wounded and the overall displacement of more than 1.7 million Lebanese from the southern part of the country. In direct response, Iran once again closed the Strait of Hormuz and imposed tolls on shipping. The fragile truce, which Iranian officials explicitly insisted include an immediate end to the war in Lebanon, lies in ruins. However, Israel refuses to recognize that Lebanon was ever part of the agreement, exposing the selective and self-serving nature of the so-called peace deal.

This breach was not an aberration but the expected outcome of a pattern of bad faith negotiating that has defined Israeli and American policy in the region for years. Israel has violated every ceasefire it has ever agreed to—both in the recent past two and a half years and in the decades prior—including the so-called ceasefire with Hamas signed in October 2025, which it shattered with near-daily attacks, killing hundreds of Palestinians and racking up more than 2,000 documented violations by March 2026. The same pattern has played out repeatedly in Lebanon, where Israel stands accused of thousands of breaches of the 2024 ceasefire agreement. 

Netanyahu’s government and the Trump administration now claim the US-Iran truce “does not cover Lebanon,” but that self-serving caveat was never accepted by Tehran. The ceasefire was never meant to hold; it was merely a temporary pause in a war of aggression that Washington and Jerusalem launched—an operation that has already exacted a devastating human and strategic toll and that carries, in Nuremberg’s precise language, the accumulated evil of all the atrocities that have followed. 

The original assault on February 28 remains the root of the entire catastrophe. On that day, US and Israeli forces unleashed coordinated airstrikes across Iran in what was dubbed Operation Epic Fury. The attacks assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials, bombed nuclear and military sites, and indiscriminately killed civilians, including more than 165 girls and staff at an elementary school. There was no armed attack by Iran that could justify such action under Article 51 of the UN Charter, given that negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program were still active at the time. There was no imminent threat, no UN Security Council authorization, and no lawful claim of self-defence could be made by either the US or Israel. The strikes constituted a classic war of aggression—the “supreme international crime” condemned at Nuremberg as the crime that contains within itself the accumulated evil of all subsequent atrocities.

The legal violations are clear and damning. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter is unequivocal declaring that states must refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other state. The US-Israeli operation shattered that prohibition in the most flagrant manner. Legal scholars have repeatedly affirmed that pre-emptive wars of choice, launched while diplomacy was still underway, violate the post-1945 international order that was designed precisely to prevent such acts of naked aggression. The subsequent bombing of schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure only compounded the original crime. International humanitarian law—the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I—forbids attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival and demands strict distinction between military and civilian targets. Deliberate or reckless strikes on health centres and schools are war crimes under any reasonable interpretation of the law. 

Compounding the legal atrocities is the incendiary rhetoric from the White House itself. Trump’s own social-media rants have escalated the criminality into genocidal territory. He threatened to make Iran “live in Hell,” promised attacks on power plants and bridges, and declared that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Under Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention, such statements can be seen as telegraphing intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national or ethnic group by inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction. Threatening to annihilate an ancient civilization—its people, culture, and millennia-old heritage—meets that legal threshold. Experts have already labelled these declarations as potential incitement to genocide and war crimes. 

The fact is that the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz was entirely manufactured by the US-Israeli initial act of aggression. Before February 28, commercial shipping was moving normally through the waterway that carries one-fifth of global oil and gas. Only after the bombs began falling did Iran assert control, reduce shipping volume, and begin collecting toll from ships that were allowed to pass. The closure was defensive and in reaction to US-Israeli aggression, not provocative. Iran’s re-closure of the waterway this week is the predictable consequence of Israel’s violation of the ceasefire’s Lebanon provisions and the mounting civilian slaughter there. 

Each additional provocation only deepens global sympathy for Iran and erodes Washington’s moral authority. This latest escalation follows directly on the breakdown of Pakistan-mediated peace talks in Islamabad, which collapsed without agreement over the weekend despite offering a genuine path to de-escalation. In the wake of that failure, the United States has now threatened a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping traffic—an act of economic warfare that further militarizes the chokepoint and exposes the hollowness of any American commitment to peace. 

The human and strategic costs of this military aggression are already staggering beyond imagination. Civilian deaths inside Iran exceed 2,000. Power plants, bridges, and homes remain in the cross hairs, and the global economic costs are mounting, with a potential to plunge 32 million in to poverty, and create a global recession Additionally, the latest Lebanese massacres—more than 280 dead in just two days—demonstrates that Israel has no intention of honouring even the limited truce it signed. Should the conflict reignite fully, the “accumulated evil” of the initial aggression will metastasize. Hezbollah, Iraqi militias, and the broader “Axis of Resistance” will be drawn in. Refugee flows, oil-price shocks, direct retaliation against US bases, and proxy wars across multiple borders would follow. 

The Persian Gulf and the Levant could erupt into a conflagration dwarfing any recent Middle East conflict, pulling in surrounding nations—Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states—in a vortex of retaliation none of them sought. This avoidable war with Iran could easily lead to a wider regional war with some analysts predicting it could even lead to World War 3, as alliances are tested and superpowers are drawn into the fray through cascading proxy conflicts and economic desperation.

Through their actions, the United States and Israel have transformed the Middle East into a far more dangerous place, and established themselves as the biggest destabilizing force in the region. Rather than acting as forces for stability or sincerely committing to peace, their unprovoked aggression has fuelled cycles of violence, resentment, and instability that threaten to engulf the entire region and far beyond. The war with Iran was completely avoidable, yet Washington and Jerusalem opted for missiles and bombs over bargaining in a display of arrogance that has now destabilized multiple borders simultaneously. This choice has not only violated international law but has also sacrificed the safety and lives of tens of millions of innocents on the altar of America’s unequivocal support to its genocidal Israeli ally. 

The main victims of this unholy alliance have been Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, whose lives hold little value in the pursuit of Israeli security objectives and America’s goal of controlling Middle-East oil. From the relentless violations and civilian slaughter in Gaza to the carnage in Lebanon and the war against Iran, these populations have borne the brunt of the suffering, with their homes destroyed, families torn apart, and futures obliterated to appease a rogue terrorist nation that operates with impunity while the US provides diplomatic cover, arms, and political support at every turn.

The evils of war are not abstract concepts to be debated in think tanks. They are visceral, devastating realities that destroy lives, communities, and the fragile fabric of international trust. Wars bring indiscriminate death to children and civilians, widespread population displacements that creates generations of refugees, economic collapse that ripples across continents, and a legacy of hatred that poisons societies for decades. 

In the current scenario American and Israeli actions pose an existential global threat, undermining the very foundations of global peace and security that have held since 1945. By flouting the UN Charter, committing what amount to war crimes, and declaring genocidal intent (as Israel actually commits genocide), they have set a dangerous precedent that could encourage other nations to engage in similar acts of aggression to achieve their geopolitical goals, leading to a breakdown of the global order and the very real prospect of uncontrollable escalation. 

Additionally, the risk of a wider war is not hypothetical. It is imminent, with the potential to draw the world into a conflict of unprecedented scale involving energy chokepoints, proxy armies, and nuclear-armed states. There is also the reality that Trump’s words and actions have thoroughly destroyed America’s reputation on the world stage. Once seen as a leading proponent of diplomacy and the rule of law, the US under Trump is now seen as unreliable, impulsive, belligerent and dangerous. His threats and the childish rampage that characterized his approach to Iran have marked what many describe as the end of the American century, leaving even its closest allies questioning whether they can trust Washington anymore. The world will ultimately pay for Trump’s Iran mess, as global stability hangs in the balance due to his reckless policies and the resulting chaos. A nation that even its allies don’t trust any more is a nation adrift, its moral authority in tatters and its alliances fraying at the seams. 

Canada’s response has been characteristically timid, reflecting the broader erosion of trust among traditional partners. Prime Minister Mark Carney has issued vague calls for “respect for international law and human rights” but has offered no specific condemnation of either Trump’s genocidal threats or Israel’s criminal actions either in Gaza, Iran or Lebanon. Ottawa appears content with platitudes about “deep concern” and “calls for restraint,” prioritizing economic and security ties with Washington over moral leadership. History will judge whether such silence amounts to complicity in the face of clear violations. 

In the end, the shattered ceasefire changes nothing fundamental. The war of aggression began on February 28, and its criminality persists. Civilian infrastructure still lies in ruins; hospitals and schools still bear the scars of illegal attacks. Genocide still continues in Gaza, while additional genocidal rhetoric still emanates from the White House. 

The Strait of Hormuz remains a flash point of America’s own making. And the risk of a wider war—engulfing neighbouring states in uncontrollable escalation—looms larger than ever. If the international community allows this precedent to stand, the UN Charter and the UN itself become meaningless, and Nuremberg’s verdict becomes a historical footnote. The greater danger is that Israeli sabotage of the ceasefire—coupled with the rising tide of Lebanese civilian deaths—will now be used as pretext for renewed attacks while the architects of the original aggression face no reckoning.

Only by naming the February 28 strikes, and every subsequent violation—including the collapse of mediated diplomacy and the provocative U.S. blockade threats—for what they are—an illegal, unprovoked war that has already produced war crimes and follows the example of the atrocities committed in the Gaza genocide—can we hope to avert the regional eruption that still threatens us all. The fault lies squarely with the United States and Israel. Until that reality is confronted through concrete international action, including accountability mechanisms that ensure no impunity for these aggressor nations, peace in the Persian Gulf and the Levant will remain a fragile and ultimately illusory hope. The Nuremberg principles demand nothing less: aggressors must face justice, or the accumulated evil of war will continue to consume us all.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.