25th anniversary of 9/11 also marks 25 years of the West’s long war against Muslims

Since 9/11 Western wars have killed up to 4.7 million Muslims, and created over 38 million Muslim refugees—genocide level horrors that are never commemorated, or mourned the way 9/11 is.

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

This is Part I of a two part analysis about the decades long Western war on Muslims. Part II will be published tomorrow.

As the United States marks the twenty‑fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in a few days, it is also marking something far more tragic and dangerous—twenty‑five years of a Western war that has overwhelmingly targeted Muslims. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, between 4.5 million and 4.7 million Muslims have been killed in US-led wars since 2001, and 38 million have been displaced. These are staggering numbers—genocide‑scale numbers—that unlike 9/11 ceremonies, receive no annual commemoration, no solemn speeches, no national mourning. They exist in a political void, unacknowledged because acknowledging them would require admitting a truth Western governments have spent decades avoiding: the so‑called “War on Terror” has been, in practice, a war on Muslims.

 

This war has unfolded across continents—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, Yemen—and across Western societies themselves, where Muslim citizens and immigrants have been surveilled, stigmatized, detained, tortured, and treated as perpetual suspects. It is a war that did not begin on September 12, 2001. Its roots stretch back to the Cold War, when the United States first began constructing the ideological and military architecture that would later be weaponized after 9/11 against Muslim nations.

And Canada, despite its self‑image as a humanitarian nation, has been deeply complicit—politically, militarily, and ideologically. Islamophobia is not an aberration in Canadian politics. It is embedded in policy, normalized in (right wing) media, and expressed openly by certain political leaders.

The West’s war on Muslims is not metaphor. It is measurable, documented, it continues today, and has expanded under every US administration since 2001.

The Cold War origins of the war on Muslims

The official narrative claims the “War on Terror” began after 9/11, as a defensive response to an unprecedented attack. But the historical record tells a different story.

Beginning in the 1980s, the United States waged a cold war against Iran in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the January 1981 release of American embassy staff held hostage by Iranian radicals. Washington was also quick to align itself with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein after he launched the invasion of Iran in September 1980, initiating the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War. Throughout the conflict the US provided Iraq with billions of dollars in economic assistance, dual‑use technology, non‑US weaponry, military intelligence, and specialized training. The conflict—marked by trench warfare and mass civilian casualties reminiscent of World War I—killed more than a million people. Throughout the war, the US also offered diplomatic cover as Iraq deployed chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians. This was not counterterrorism. It was geopolitical engineering, and Muslims on both sides paid the price.

In the 1990s, after the Persian Gulf War, the United States imposed crushing sanctions on Iraq that restricted everything from medicines to basic humanitarian supplies. The result was catastrophic—an estimated half‑million Iraqi children died prematurely as a direct consequence of these sanctions. When confronted with this reality during a 1996 60 Minutes interview, President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright infamously declared that the deaths were “worth it” to achieve Washington’s geopolitical goal of containing Saddam Hussein. Her remarks exposed the underlying logic and anti-Muslim bigotry of America’s Middle East policy, a policy where Muslim suffering on an unimaginable scale was acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of Western dominance.

These pre‑9/11 policies were not isolated. They were part of a broader pattern of bigoted policy, propaganda, and racialized paranoia that had already taken shape. The modern war on Muslims began to take shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s following the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, when that nation became the West’s primary military outpost in the Middle East and Western governments panicked over the economic impact of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The crisis instigated by the actions of the Arab oil producing nations revealed a terrifying truth for Western elites—that a handful of Muslim-majority countries had the power to disrupt the West’s capitalist ambitions.

The response in subsequent years was swift—coups, occupations, sanctions, propaganda, and alliances with dictatorships and authoritarian leaders. The ideological groundwork for justifying post-9/11 wars was laid long before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The expansion of a pre‑existing project

After 9/11, the US did not suddenly invent a new Middle East policy, it simply widened and intensified one that had been decades in the making. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were presented as defensive wars, necessary to protect Americans from future terrorist attacks, conveniently ignoring the fact that the citizens of those nations had been abused and manipulated by the US and its allies for years. But these wars rested on a much older ideological foundation—a long‑standing Western narrative that cast Muslim societies as inherently violent, irrational, and barbaric. That narrative made it easy for Washington to sell the Iraq War to Americans on the basis of lies and fabrications about weapons of mass destruction—claims that were later proven false but had already served their purpose. By the time the first bombs fell on Kabul and Baghdad, the emotional and political groundwork had been laid. A worldview had taken hold within the West where Muslim-majority societies were portrayed as perpetual sources of danger, instability, and civilizational threat. Within that worldview, military intervention did not need to be justified with evidence, it only needed to be framed as the next logical step in containing an imagined Islamic menace that threatened Western civilization.

For generations, Western publics were conditioned to absorb and accept whatever anti‑Muslim narratives that came their way. Long before 9/11, the cultural groundwork had already been laid. Since the earliest days of Hollywood, Western popular culture churned out hundreds of films that caricatured and dehumanized Arabs and Muslims, teaching audiences to see Muslim societies as violent, backward, and alien. As documented by scholar Jack Shaheen in Reel Bad Arabs, these portrayals were never mere entertainment—they functioned as cultural indoctrination, normalizing the idea that Muslims were foreign, dangerous, inherently unstable, and barbaric.

By the time the War on Terror began in the fall of 2001, Western publics had already been desensitized to decades of Muslim suffering at the hands of Western nations. They had been trained—through movies, news coverage, political rhetoric, and academic discourse—to view more than 1.6 billion people as a civilizational threat against whom mass violence was not only permissible but necessary. In that climate, even the blatant lies used to justify the Iraq War were readily believed, because they fit seamlessly into a narrative that had been cultivated for years. This cultural conditioning made it easy for Western publics to accept the slaughter of Muslims abroad and the mass surveillance of law‑abiding Muslims at home, leaving a legacy of distrust and fear.

The consequences of that conditioning are evident in both the scale and the character of the violence that followed. In the twenty‑five years since 9/11, US-led wars have killed up to 4.7 million Muslims and made refugees of more than 38 million, a level of destruction, chaos and human suffering that would have been politically unacceptable without Western publics already primed to see Muslim lives as expendable. What happened was not an unforeseen tragedy but the predictable outcome of a worldview in which Muslim societies had long been portrayed as backward, disposable, and merely providers of critical resources or geopolitical assets whose governments could be manipulated to the advantage of the West.

The devastation of entire nations across the Middle East and North Africa was not an accident. It was the direct result of policies pursued with full knowledge of their outcomes. Washington and its allies understood that invading, occupying, and destabilizing multiple Muslim‑majority countries would shatter political systems, collapse economies, and tear apart social fabrics. They knew it would turn vast regions into permanent refugee corridors, but they simply did not care. Countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen were not merely attacked—they were pushed into such profound instability that their pollitical and social institutions destabilized, their infrastructures disintegrated, creating openings for extremist groups like ISIS, and their populations were left to navigate Western inflicted chaos that continues to weaken their societies to this day.

At the same time, new forms of warfare were normalized. Drone strikes—marketed as precise tools for eliminating “suspected terrorists”—became routine, even though the overwhelming majority of those killed were civilians, and they operated outside any meaningful legal framework. Torture, once universally condemned, was openly justified as a necessary instrument of national security. Secret prisons were established across multiple continents, places where innocent people were detained, brutalized, and denied due process. And while Muslims abroad were subjected to military violence, Muslims in Western countries faced their own form of warfare—mass surveillance, entrapment operations, discriminatory policing, and the constant presumption of guilt.

None of this emerged spontaneously after 9/11. The War on Terror was not just a sudden response to an unprecedented attack—it was the continuation and expansion of a project that had been decades in the making. The cultural narratives that dehumanized Muslims, the political ideologies that framed Islam as a civilizational threat, and the foreign policies that treated Muslim‑majority nations as disposable had all been firmly in place long before the Twin Towers fell. The 9/11 attacks did not create the war on Muslims, they merely provided the pretext for accelerating it and making it state policy in many Western nations. What changed after 9/11 was not the underlying ideology, but the speed, scale, and brutality with which it was finally unleashed on Muslims around the world.

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

The West’s performative condemnation of Israel’s crimes is another sign of the death of the international order

Western hypocrisy exposed the racial, geopolitical, and ideological biases behind the so called “international rules based order” which has allowed Israel to commit horrific crimes with impunity.

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can also be found on Substack.

The joint statement issued on August 20, 2026, by the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom condemning Israel’s decision to publish construction tenders for a new settlement project is yet another example of Western performativity masquerading as moral outrage. It is a carefully calibrated piece of public relations designed to signal “concern” while ensuring that nothing changes on the ground. After decades of Israeli settlement expansion, apartheid policies, ethnic cleansing, and — since October 2023 — the genocide in Gaza, this statement is not only hollow; it is an indictment of Western complicity.

The statement declares that Israel’s decision is “unacceptable,” that settlements are “illegal,” and that the project threatens the “territorial contiguity” of the West Bank — something which is already the case. It notes “unprecedented levels of violence by settlers against civilians” and warns domestic businesses in each country which might submit proposals to be part of the project of “legal and reputational consequences.” And yet, despite the gravity of these words, the governments issuing them have done nothing — absolutely nothing — to penalize Israel politically, economically, or militarily for its decades-long criminality. They have watched Israel build hundreds of thousands of Jewish‑only housing units, now home to more than 750,000 settlers, many of whom have terrorized Palestinians with impunity by stealing land, destroying homes, burning orchards, killing livestock, and murdering unarmed civilians.

This is not new. Western governments have perfected the art of expressing “grave concern” while enabling Israel’s crimes through military aid, diplomatic protection, and economic partnerships. Their statements are not expressions of moral courage, they are examples of geopolitical cowardice.

The collapse of Western credibility

Since October 2023, Israel has carried out what dozens of international legal bodies, human rights organizations, genocide scholars, and even former Israeli officials have explicitly called genocide. This is not rhetorical exaggeration. It is a legal and scholarly determination made by: the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry; the UN Special Committee; the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights; the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; Israeli human rights group B’Tselem; Physicians for Human Rights Israel; Doctors Without Borders; Oxfam; Save the Children; the International Federation of Human Rights; the International Association of Genocide Scholars; Leading Israeli Holocaust scholars Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, Daniel Blatman, Raz Segal, and Shmuel Lederman; as well as the 30 nations supporting South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, among others.

When genocide is unfolding in real time, and when the perpetrators are openly declaring their intent to destroy a people, statements like the August 20 joint communiqué are inadequate and laughable.

Settler violence enabled by the Israeli state

The joint statement acknowledges “unprecedented levels of violence by settlers against civilians.” This is an understatement. Settler violence is not episodic, it is systemic, organized, and often coordinated with the Israeli military. Human Rights Watch has documented settlers burning homes, destroying olive groves, killing livestock, and attacking Palestinian villages with firearms. Amnesty International has reported multiple incidents where settlers murdered Palestinians, including the killing of 19‑year‑old Qusai Matan in 2023 and the torching of homes in Turmus Ayya. B’Tselem has recorded settlers shooting unarmed Palestinians, burning orchards, and carrying out pogroms in towns like Huwara.

These crimes are not committed by “extremists.” They are committed by settlers who enjoy full legal, military, and political protection from the Israeli state. And Western governments know this. They have known it for decades. Yet they have done nothing to stop it.

Western complicity has enabled decades of Israeli crimes

The response to the Israeli announcement is part of a long pattern of Western governments issuing sternly worded condemnations while continuing to arm, fund, and diplomatically shield Israel. Western apathy is not passive—it is active complicity.

Consider the facts: Canada continues to export weapons and components to Israel, even as Israel commits genocide; the United States provides billions in military aid annually, including weapons used in Gaza; the UK, Germany, Italy, and France maintain defense contracts and intelligence cooperation with Israel; the EU refuses to suspend its Association Agreement with Israel, despite clear violations of human rights clauses; and no Western government has imposed sanctions on Israel for settlement construction, apartheid policies, or genocide.

These governments and their western allies have watched Israel violate: UN Security Council resolutions; the Fourth Geneva Convention; the Hague Conventions; the Genocide Convention; and the UN Charter, repeatedly for decades. And their response has been to issue statements like the one on August 20 — statements that are designed to create the illusion of action while ensuring that nothing changes.

The galling hypocrisy of the West

The most galling aspect of this performative outrage is the stark contrast with the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Within days of that attack, Western governments unleashed sweeping sanctions, froze assets, expelled diplomats, mobilized international institutions, and poured massive military aid into Ukraine. They acted decisively and forcefully — and they were right to do so.

But when Israel commits genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and apartheid, those same governments retreat into the familiar language of “grave concern” while continuing business as usual. No sanctions. No arms embargoes. No diplomatic isolation. No meaningful consequences of any kind.

This hypocrisy exposes the racial, geopolitical, and ideological biases at the core of the so‑called “international rules‑based order.” The West’s selective application of international law has shattered its credibility and effectively destroyed the post‑World War II international system. And it is not Russia or China that killed it. It is Western governments — led by the United States — through their unwavering complicity in Israel’s crimes.

Public relations, not policy

The August 20 statement is a textbook example of Western PR. It contains all the familiar elements: condemnation of settlement expansion; affirmation of international law; expressions of concern about violence; calls for Israel to “retract” its plans; warnings to domestic businesses; and the tired refrain of their commitment to a “two‑state solution.” But it lacks the only thing that matters, which is a commitment to taking action against Israel.

There is no threat of sanctions, suspension of arms sales, diplomatic consequences or economic penalties. There is also no mention of international legal action, support for ICC or ICJ prosecutions, or mention of any consequences.

Israel knows this and has known it for decades. That is why it continues its violations of every international law, convention or treaty to which it is a party.  It knows that the West will do nothing.

The only solution is coercive international action

If Western governments are unwilling to take meaningful action against a state that has repeatedly demonstrated contempt for the international laws that bind all nations — if they refuse to stop the commission of war crimes and genocide through economic sanctions, arms embargoes, diplomatic isolation, and yes, if necessary, military intervention — then their statements expressing outrage are worthless. Words without consequences are not diplomacy, they are complicity.

Unless the world confronts Israel with real coercive force, the coming decades will descend into international anarchy. Other states with territorial ambitions or internal ethnic hierarchies will look to Israel as a model for how to behave toward their neighbours or toward minorities under their control. They will violate international law, commit atrocities, ignore UN resolutions, and rely on international paralysis to shield them from accountability. The international order cannot survive if genocide is tolerated. And right now, it is being tolerated openly, brazenly, and with full knowledge of those nations that have the power to stop it.

The joint statement is not a sign of moral leadership. It is a sign of moral collapse — the collapse of Western credibility, the collapse of the post‑war legal order, and the collapse of any claim these governments have to defending human rights or international law. It is the diplomatic equivalent of watching a house burn and issuing a press release about the importance of fire safety.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trudeau’s legacy of weakness and denial

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

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

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

Choosing not to see genocide in Gaza

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

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

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

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

Canada is violating its international legal obligations

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

Instead, Canada continues to:

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

This is not neutrality. It is complicity.

Carney’s Hypocrisy Is Impossible to Ignore

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

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

He has done none of these things.

Historically, Canada avoided pursuing war criminals

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

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

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

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

The rare exception of Rwandan génocidaires

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

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

Canada’s support for Israel is built on lies

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

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

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

What is truly “unacceptable”

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

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

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

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

Israel is a supremacist colonial project founded on Theodore Herzl’s fascist Zionist ideology

Confronting the architecture of Zionist supremacy is not an attack against Jews. It is a defence of the belief that no people’s freedom can be built on the subjugation of another.

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

 

From its earliest formulations in late‑19th‑century Europe, Zionism imagined a political order in historic Palestine built around the primacy of one ethnonational group—Jews. Over the decades, that vision hardened into a state structure that leading human rights organizations now describe as a regime of systematic domination and subjugation. Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Amnesty International, and numerous scholars of genocide and settler colonialism have concluded that Israeli governance from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea constitutes apartheid, persecution, and—in the eyes of many genocide scholars—an unfolding genocidal process.

Crucially, this critique is not new, nor is it limited to Palestinians or contemporary human rights organizations. Some of the most influential Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century—Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Asimov, and Sigmund Freud (among others)—warned explicitly against the creation of a Jewish state built on ethnonational exclusivity. They feared that a state founded on Jewish supremacy would betray Jewish ethical traditions, ignite endless conflict, and reproduce the very forms of chauvinism and racial hierarchy that had oppressed Jews in Europe for centuries.

Einstein denounced the early Zionist leaders and their militias as “fascist.” Arendt warned that a Jewish state would become “a Sparta”—a hyper-militarized, society obsessed with defence to the detriment of democratic values, and peaceful coexistence. Freud rejected the idea of a nationalist project in Palestine because he viewed religious and ethnic nationalism as a form of neurosis, and believed it would provoke Arab resentment, alienate the Islamic and Christian worlds, and fail to solve global antisemitism. And Asimov rejected the idea of Israel and ethnic nationalism, including Zionism, because he was a staunch humanist who believed humanity’s survival depended on moving past tribal divisions.

Their warnings were prophetic. They foresaw that a state built on privileging one group over another would inevitably become a machinery of subjugation that would irreparably damage Jewish society and culture, and inflict immense suffering.

This is not a claim about Judaism or Jewish identity. It is a claim about state power, ideology, and structures of supremacy—and it is a claim increasingly made by Israelis themselves.

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

Sfard’s question is not rhetorical. It is a diagnosis of a society shaped by decades of brutal occupation, illegal settlements on Palestinian land, and ethnonational fear—one in which Jewish supremacy has become normalized, even valued. His words echo the earlier warnings of Einstein, Arendt, Asimov, and Freud, that a political project rooted in ethnonational dominance and subjugation of indigenous Palestinians would inevitably deform the society that built it, corrode its moral foundations, and reproduce the very patterns of exclusion and dehumanization that Jews themselves had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

The tragedy is not only that these warnings were ignored, but that the consequences have unfolded exactly as these thinkers predicted. A state built on the premise of supremacy has produced a political culture in which domination is seen as security, inequality of peoples as natural, and brutal violence as necessary for the Zionist project to succeed. The intellectual giants who opposed Zionism did so not out of hostility to Jewish survival, but out of a profound understanding of what happens when any people—especially a historically persecuted one—embraces the logic of ethnonational power.

Zionism’s racialized and fascist foundations

Zionism emerged in the same intellectual climate that produced European colonialism, concepts of racial hierarchy, and the ethnonationalism that would later culminate in fascist movements. Theodor Herzl, the movement’s founder, envisioned a Jews only state in Palestine as a “civilizing” outpost of Europe, seeing the indigenous inhabitants—Muslims, Christians and Jews—as inferior. In Der Judenstaat (The Jew State) and Altneuland (The Old New Land), Herzl described the future Jewish society as modern, rational, and European, one that would be implicitly superior to the “backward” and “barbaric” native population.

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

Critics and scholars have argued that Herzl’s political imagination contained fascist elements including: a belief in demographic engineering (ethnic cleansing); a vision of a homogenous ethnonational state; a hierarchical worldview that placed European Jews at the apex of humanity; and a willingness to subordinate or remove indigenous populations by force. These elements place Herzl within the intellectual genealogy of European racial nationalism and fascism. If one removes his Jewish identity he would very easily have found a home in Europe’s fascist movements.

This is not an accusation of personal malevolence but rather a recognition that Herzl’s political philosophy was shaped by the dominant ideologies of his time—settler colonialism, racialized nationalism, and ethnonational exclusivity. These ideas later crystallized into Israeli state policies that privileged Jews over native Palestinians and forceful control over their territory and their rights.
 
The making of a supremacist regime
 
The Nakba of 1948—marked by mass ethnic cleansing, massacres, eradication of Palestinian towns and villages, and the permanent exclusion of refugees—was not an aberration but a foundational moment for the new Israeli state built on the blood and bones of historic Palestine’s indigenous people. Additionally, Laws such as the Absentee Property Law ensured that Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes could never return, while their lands and property was transferred to Jewish ownership. 

After 1967, the occupation entrenched a dual legal system. One where Israeli settlers in the West Bank lived under Israeli civil law, enjoying full political rights, and receiving state protection, and a second where Palestinians lived under military law, faced movement restrictions, home demolitions, land theft, and arbitrary detention and torture. B’Tselem concluded in 2021 that this constitutes “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” 

Human Rights Watch’s A Threshold Crossed reached the same conclusion, documenting policies designed to maintain Jewish demographic and political supremacy through land control, movement restrictions, and discriminatory laws. These are not fringe interpretations. They are the assessments of leading human rights institutions.

Palestinian dehumanization as policy and culture

Supremacy is sustained not only through laws but through language. Israeli political leaders have repeatedly used debasing rhetoric that strips Palestinians of humanity. Former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked notoriously referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes,” calling for the killing of Palestinian mothers to prevent future generations. At the start of the Gaza genocide Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called all Palestinians “human animals,” advocated for a complete siege of Gaza after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. Israeli political, military and religious leaders have variously described Palestinians as a “cancer” and "vermin"  to be exterminated.

Such language is not merely hateful—it is functional. It prepares the public to accept policies of collective punishment, siege, brutality, and large‑scale military assault. The Israeli-American historian of the Holocaust Omer Bartov, who did his PhD on the indoctrination of Nazi German soldiers has argued that young Israeli soldiers who have fought inside the Gaza Strip in the ongoing during the Gaza genocide display attitudes towards their enemies similar to those of Nazi troops and Hitler Youth in the Second World War in that they have internalized the view that Hamas militants are “human animals.” Settler violence, often carried out with impunity, reinforces this logic. Sfard’s comparison of extremist settlers to the Ku Klux Klan is not hyperbole but a reflection of vigilante terror used to enforce ethnic hierarchy.

This dehumanization has intensified during Israel’s repeated assaults on Gaza since the mid-2000s to today. By mid‑November 2023, Holocaust and genocide scholars—including Raz Segal, Omer Bartov, and Barry Trachtenberg—warned that Israel’s actions risked or constituted genocide. Their warnings were grounded in patterns familiar from other cases: forced displacement; destruction of civilian infrastructure; mass killing; and rhetoric invoking biblical annihilation narratives.

Holocaust survivors and their descendants have echoed these warnings with a moral authority that cannot be dismissed. Drawing on memories of Jewish ghettos, forced displacement, starvation, and the systematic stripping away of human dignity, they argue that the dehumanization of Palestinians mirrors patterns they recognize from their own histories under Nazi rule. These are not casual comparisons or rhetorical flourishes; they are the reflections of people who have spent a lifetime with memories of how atrocity begins—in language, in policy, and in the gradual normalization of cruelty. Their testimony carries a weight that is both personal and scholarly, a lived experience intertwined with decades of reflection on the mechanisms of genocide. Their testimonies cannot be dismissed, and should be seen as a clarion call to recognize the universal dangers of dehumanization before it hardens into something even more catastrophic.

Impunity as Israeli policy

For decades, Israel benefited from near‑total impunity in the international legal system for actions dating back to its founding—ethnic cleansing, mass killing, wars of aggression, military occupation, and the annexation of conquered land. However, that shield is finally beginning to crack, given that the world has awakened to the scale and visibility of Israeli state violence. The old narratives that once insulated Israel from accountability no longer hold. Proceedings before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have forced an unprecedented global reckoning with the legal and moral consequences of prolonged occupation, systemic discrimination, and the routine use of force against an entire civilian population.

Some Holocaust scholars who initially defended Israel’s actions in Gaza have since fallen silent. Their early endorsements of Israel’s violence—rather than of universal human rights—exposed a troubling readiness to subordinate anti‑racist principles to personal ethnonational loyalty. That scholars such as Dean Barbara Krauthamer of Emory University—a historian of African American life and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor—along with Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, the influential dean of Berkeley Law, and Professor Deborah Lipstadt, Emory’s renowned Holocaust scholar and the US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, have all remained conspicuously silent as the death toll in Gaza has soared—and despite genocide declarations from their own colleagues, as well as findings from the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other respected human rights bodies—reveals a profound betrayal of the very lessons the field of genocide studies was created to uphold.

Zionism is the cousin of white supremacy

Zionism and white supremacy share structural parallels that are evident in the ways they operate within the societies where they are present. Both Zionism (as practiced by Israel) and white supremacy in certain Western countries share the following: they construct a superior in‑group entitled to land and sovereignty; they justify dispossession of an indigenous population; they rely on demographic engineering (i.e. ethnic cleansing); they use narratives of civilizational superiority over other peoples; and they normalize segregation and unequal citizenship.

In the United States, “manifest destiny” justified the displacement and slaughter of millions of Indigenous peoples. In Israel, the Law of Return grants automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide while denying Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes. Academic work in Holy Land Studies and other journals describes Zionism as a racial regime that reproduces whiteness through land control and exclusion of Palestinian and non‑European Jews. This is not metaphor. It is the lived, legal, and political structure under which millions of Palestinians are forced to exist.

A society shaped by supremacy

The internal consequences of supremacy are not confined to the Palestinians who live under its control, they reverberate through Israeli society itself. Haaretz has documented in painstaking detail how the normalization of Jewish supremacy has fractured Israel from within, empowering extremist settler factions and far‑right movements that now sit at the centre of national political life. What was once dismissed as the ideological fringe has become the gravitational core of Israeli politics. The settlers who torch Palestinian homes, uproot olive groves, and assault children now shape cabinet portfolios, dictate coalition terms, and define the boundaries of acceptable public discourse. Supremacy, once a tool of domination over Palestinians, has metastasized like a cancer into a governing ethos in Israel.

The depth of this transformation is starkly reflected in Israeli public opinion. A Haaretz poll published on June 3, 2025, revealed findings that lay bare the mainstreaming of exterminationist ideology within Israeli society. According to the survey, 47% of Israeli Jews supported “killing all Palestinians in Gaza," including infants; 82% supported the complete ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza; and 56% supported expelling all non‑Jews from every territory under Israeli control—all of which are crimes under international law. These numbers, reported directly by Haaretz, do not represent fringe extremism but a chilling portrait of a society in which supremacist ideology has penetrated deeply into the public consciousness. They expose a political culture in which mass expulsion and even mass killing are no longer unthinkable but openly endorsed by large segments of the dominant ethnonational group.

It appears that the post-Oslo era did not moderate these supremacist forces but instead entrenched them. After the world celebrated handshakes on the White House lawn in September 1993, Israel accelerated its political, with the promise of a negotiated peace masking a deeper structural transformation—the consolidation of a system designed to ensure permanent Jewish political and territorial dominance over the Palestinian people and the land that was meant to be their nation.

Critics writing in Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, and Al Jazeera argue that what is described as “Jewish self‑determination” has, in practice, evolved into a system of Jewish supremacy that denies Palestinians any equivalent political, civil, or human rights. They point out that a state cannot claim to be both democratic and permanently structured around the dominance of one ethnonational group. The contradiction is not theoretical; it is lived daily by millions of Palestinians who experience military law, checkpoints, home demolitions, land theft, and the denial of basic freedoms, while Jewish settlers living beside them enjoy full civil rights, state protection, and political representation. 

This critique is not limited to journalists or activists. It is increasingly echoed by scholars of settler colonialism, apartheid, and ethnonationalism, who argue that Israel’s political order exhibits the defining characteristics of a supremacy-based regime not unlike Apartheid South Africa, where differential citizenship, territorial fragmentation, demographic engineering, and the systematic devaluation of the rights of the indigenous population was the norm. Far from being a fringe interpretation, this analysis has become the emerging consensus across multiple academic fields. 

In this sense, the crisis facing Israeli society is inseparable from the crisis it has imposed on Palestinians. Supremacy is an unstable organizing principle that demands constant enforcement, constant fear, constant mobilization against an imagined demographic threat. It produces a politics of paranoia, a culture of dehumanization, and a public sphere in which violence becomes not only permissible but inevitable. To understand contemporary Israel, then, is to understand a society shaped—indeed warped—by the structures of supremacy it has built. And to understand the Palestinian condition is to recognize that these structures are not temporary distortions but the defining architecture of the state.

Toward a future beyond supremacy  

Recognizing the supremacist structures embedded in Israeli governance does not diminish the reality of Jewish suffering, nor does it erase the profound and enduring trauma of antisemitism. It does not question the legitimacy of Jewish collective identity, cultural continuity, or the aspiration for safety in a world where Jews have historically faced persecution. What it does is insist on a truth that should be self‑evident—the memory of historical trauma cannot be used to justify the infliction of trauma on another people.

To confront the architecture of supremacy is not an attack against Jews. It is a defence of the universal principle that no people’s liberation can be built on the subjugation of another. History shows, again and again, that domination is not a path to security but a guarantee of perpetual conflict. A political order that relies on the permanent disenfranchisement of millions cannot produce lasting safety for anyone, including the group it claims to protect.

Ending the occupation, dismantling apartheid structures, and recognizing Palestinian political and human rights are not acts of hostility toward Jews or threats to Jewish survival. They are acts of fidelity to the very principles that many Jewish thinkers, activists, and Holocaust survivors have championed for generations: justice, equality, and the recognition of people’s humanity. A political order grounded in equality is not a danger to Jews—it is the only durable guarantee of their safety.

Michael Sfard’s haunting question—How did we produce replicas of our persecutors?—demands an answer that goes beyond individual prejudice or political miscalculation. The answer lies in the corrosive power of ethnonational supremacy itself. Any ideology that elevates one group’s rights above another’s, will inevitably reproduce the very patterns of domination it claims to reject. Supremacy is not a shield; it is a poison.

A future beyond supremacy requires more than policy reform. It requires a dismantling of the structures that created it and a transformation similar to what took place after World War Two in Germany and Japan. It demands the courage to envision a shared future rather than a zero‑sum struggle, to replace domination with equality, and to recognize that the humanity of Palestinians is not a threat to Jewish existence but a precondition for a just and lasting peace. The path forward is not easy, but it is clear that only by dismantling the structures of supremacy can Israelis and Palestinians alike reclaim their full humanity. 

The task now is to build an Israeli political and societal culture that is grounded not in the ideology of Zionism—the domination of Jews over Palestinians—but one founded on the principles of human rights, equality of peoples, inclusion and co-existence.

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