How Western media manufactured consent for genocide in Gaza

Western media do not simply reflect reality they produce . . . In the context of Israel-Palestinian story telling they shape public consciousness and manufacture consent for state violence. 

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

In his seminal work Covering Islam, one of his books on the subject of “Orientalism”, Palestinian-American academic Edward Said discussed how Western news media constructs, distorts, and weaponizes narratives about Muslims, Arabs, and the Middle East. Said demonstrated that Western media do not simply misrepresent Islam and Arab societies, they also produce an entire worldview in which Muslims, and specifically Middle-Eastern societies, are rendered suspect, irrational, violent, and culturally inferior.

In his book Said showed that news media in the West through the lens of Orientalism depicts “Islam as a monolithic force”, a view shaped by ignorance, racism, bigotry, and geopolitical interests. His analysis exposed the machinery through which Western media manufacture fear, justify domination, oppression, and erase the humanity of those living under Western-backed violence. Nowhere is this structure more visible — or more lethal — than in Western coverage of Palestinian issues over the decades, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The Gaza Genocide through a biased Western media lens

Said warned that Western media portray Islam and Muslims through a “hostile and belligerent” lens, reviving “discredited Orientalist views” whenever geopolitical interests demand it. That lens is now the default through which the Gaza genocide is covered. Palestinians are framed not as human beings with rights, histories, agency, and suffering, but as abstractions — “human shields,” “Hamas sympathizers,” “terrorist-adjacent populations.” Meanwhile Israeli lives are individualized, named, and mourned while Palestinian lives are recognized only through death tolls, and their narratives doubted, minimized, or erased.

This is not accidental, and has been happening for decades whenever Palestine and Israel have been discussed in the West, and more so over the past three years.  The news media have fuelled Israel’s genocide by uncritically repeating Israeli claims, suppressing Palestinian testimony, and framing Israel’s brutal violence as “self-defence” even when it has targeted hospitals, schools, journalists, and entire families. This provides credence to Said’s argument that Orientalism functions by privileging Western voices and those of its Israeli ally over those of Middle Eastern Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. For decades since its creation the Israeli narrative has been treated as authoritative and trustworthy, while Palestinian voices are treated as emotional, biased, suspect, and dangerous.

Canadian media’s coverage of Palestinians is no exception. A study by The Review of Journalism found that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) flagship program The National featured more Israeli voices than Palestinian ones in its Gaza coverage, giving disproportionate weight to Israeli perspectives and marginalizing those of Palestinians. This is Orientalism in practice, where the colonizer’s voice is legitimized, and the colonized are not spoken to as people with agency, but spoken about as if they have none.

Said emphasized that Orientalism is not only about what is said, but how it is said. Language constructs reality, and Western media’s linguistic choices when talking about Palestinians or Muslims reveals a hierarchy of human worth, with Palestinians and Muslims sitting near the bottom.

Israeli deaths are described with emotional and graphic specificity — “slaughtered,” “massacred,” “butchered.” Whereas Palestinian deaths — even when numbering in the tens of thousands — are described with passive, distancing language — “died,” “were killed,” “perished,” or the most dehumanizing of all, “casualties.”

As the independent news outlet The Maple reported in 2020, there is a “devastating” pro-Israel bias in Canadian media. Stories on mainstream Canadian news outlets have repeatedly used an active voice to describe Israeli deaths while consistently using a passive voice for Palestinian deaths, subtly implying agency when Israelis are harmed and inevitability when Palestinians are deliberately killed by Israeli forces even when they are peacefully resisting occupation. This linguistic asymmetry is not neutral but rather a moral ranking mechanism. When Israel kills Palestinians, the media ask: What did Hamas do to cause this? When Israelis are killed by Palestinians the media ask: Why did Palestinians murder Israelis for no apparent reason?

This is precisely the Orientalist logic Said identified, one where the West (and its allies) act and those in the Middle East are acted upon. Israeli violence is contextualized while almost eight decades of Palestinian dispossession, oppression, suffering and death are not.

Silencing pro-Palestinian voices is the new McCarthyism

Said wrote that Western media relies on “experts” to reinforce dominant colonial and imperialist narratives — well-known and credentialed voices who reproduce the Western worldview of power while masquerading as neutral analysts. These experts, he argued, are selected not for their insight but for their ideological reliability. That is, they tell the public the Israeli and pro-Western narrative in favourable terms, reinforcing already established Orientalist narratives. Today, this dynamic has intensified to the point of open intimidation. Journalists who are sympathetic to Palestinian narratives — especially those who report honestly on Israeli atrocities — are not merely marginalized, they are disciplined or fired. Newsrooms that once claimed to value independence and fairness in coverage now enforce ideological conformity in how Israel and the story of Palestinians are portrayed, with the rigidity of a security apparatus.

Reporters who attempt to humanize Palestinians, verify Israeli claims, or document Israeli war crimes, face investigations, suspensions, and removal from their jobs, as editors spike stories that contradict Israeli talking points. Freelance reporters lose contracts for expressing grief or sympathy over the suffering of Palestinian children or posting social media comments, and entire careers are destroyed for refusing to participate in the dehumanization of a people living under a brutal occupation for almost eight decades. This is not a marketplace of free speech as much as it is a system of control, with prejudiced and racist editors and producers controlling how Palestinian humanity is represented in stories. It is the modern incarnation of what Said identified decades ago — a media environment in which dissenting news stories are treated as threats to the dominant narrative, and truth-tellers are disciplined into silence to reinforce Israel’s anti-Palestinian propaganda.

Across Canada, journalists have been suspended, fired, or censured for expressing even mild sympathy for Palestinians or for criticizing Israeli war crimes. The Maple documents how Canadian journalists who attempted to report on the scale of Palestinian suffering were reprimanded or removed from assignments. Breach Media reports that Canadian op-ed pages have overwhelmingly published pro-Israel commentary while rejecting Palestinian perspectives long before the start of the Gaza genocide. Middle East Eye shows how Western media have “manufactured consent” for Israel’s killing of hundreds of Palestinian journalists by downplaying or ignoring these targeted assassinations.

This is not merely media bias, it is repression and censorship. It is the policing of acceptable speech by media gatekeepers, and the enforcement of a narrative that protects Israeli power and erases Palestinian humanity. Said warned that Orientalism is not merely an academic discourse but also a political weapon that promotes oppression. And that is evident today, as this weapon is being used against journalists who refuse to participate in the sanitization of Israel’s horrific crimes and the vilification of Palestinians.

The long history of Anti-Palestinian racism

Anti-Palestinian prejudice did not begin on October 8, 2023. It has been embedded in Western media and society for decades. As Rabble.ca notes, Western media have a long history of ignoring or minimizing atrocities committed by Israel, from the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982 to the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019 — a weekly peaceful protest in which Palestinians in Gaza demonstrated for their right of return to the homes from which they were ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948, 1967 and the decades since then. It is clear from the history of Palestinians since before Israel came into being that Western media portrayal of the Middle East is conducted through a lens shaped by “geopolitics and economic interests,” not by truth.

What has changed in how Western media portrays Palestinians over the past few years is not the scope of anti-Palestinian prejudice but its visibility. The Gaza genocide has exposed the depth of Western news media’s structural anti-Palestinian racism, particularly in major broadcasters and newspapers like CNN, BBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Mail, and others. It has revealed how deeply Orientalist assumptions are woven into Western newsroom culture, editorial decision-making, and journalistic norms. In Canada, newsrooms cling to “flawed notions of objectivity” that unquestioningly treat Israeli state narratives as authentic and truthful while Palestinian narratives are questioned and seen as biased. This is Orientalism masquerading as professionalism — a veneer of journalistic neutrality that conceals a racialized hierarchy of credibility. The result is a media environment where Palestinian suffering is filtered through skepticism and prejudice, Israeli claims are granted automatic legitimacy, and the very idea of Palestinian humanity becomes negotiable within the offices of Western news editors and producers.

Western media do not simply reflect reality they produce it claimed Said. In the context of Israel-Palestinian story telling they shape public consciousness and manufacture consent for state violence. If one looks closely at news stories in Western media about the Gaza genocide, they have played a role that is structurally analogous to the role the tabloid Der Stürmer played in Nazi Germany, not in ideology, but in function.

Der Stürmer dehumanized Jews, justified state violence, and normalized atrocity. Western media today dehumanizes Palestinians, legitimizes Israeli violence, and normalizes genocide. Western media have become a weapon in the Gaza genocide, shaping public opinion to enable mass killing, and have systematically suppressed images, testimonies, and evidence of Israeli atrocities.

When media systems consistently dehumanize a people, erase their suffering, and amplify the narratives of their oppressors, they are not neutral observers. They are participants and criminally complicit.

There needs to be accountability

If international law is to have any meaning, then institutions that materially contribute to atrocity crimes must face scrutiny and be held legally accountable. This includes media institutions whose coverage enables, rationalizes, or sanitizes genocide. While media systems — as institutions — can be complicit in mass violence, such complicity does not arise spontaneously. It is shaped and enforced by people — executives, editors, and senior decision‑makers — who determine which narratives are amplified and which are suppressed. The precedent is clear. At the Nuremberg Tribunals, Nazi propagandists were tried and convicted because their media apparatus played a structural role in enabling the Holocaust. Similarly Western media executives have played a significant role in the atrocities carried out by Israel in Gaza. The principle established at Nuremberg — that propaganda and disinformation can constitute participation in atrocity — remains relevant today. Western media have spent three years repeating Israeli talking points, reiterating its claims without verification ignoring Palestinian testimony, and denying that genocide is taking place. In effect, Western outlets have adopted Israeli military language, framing mass killing as “precision strikes” and ethnic cleansing as “evacuations,” thereby laundering and legitimizing Israeli state violence through their framing of genocidal acts.

Said taught that knowledge is never neutral and that media power always constitutes political power. When that power is mobilized to facilitate or obscure genocide, the question becomes unavoidable: what forms of accountability are necessary for institutions that help enable mass atrocity? His critique of Western media bias, once dismissed by some as academic overreach, now reads as prophetic. The analytical framework he developed is not merely relevant to the present moment, it is indispensable in understanding how the Gaza genocide has been narrated, justified, and normalized in the West.

The atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza have revealed the true nature of Western media, not as watchdogs of power, but as instruments of it, not as defenders of truth, but as manufacturers of consent, not as neutral observers, but as structural participants in atrocity. The patterns Said identified decades ago — the privileging of colonial narratives, the erasure of Indigenous voices, the racialized hierarchy of credibility — have all re-emerged with devastating clarity. They shape which deaths are to be mourned, which claims are to be believed, and which atrocities are to be rendered invisible.

Said warned that Orientalism was not a relic of the past but an active system of thought that would continue to shape Western perceptions of the Middle East unless confronted directly. The world did not listen and for the past three years, a genocide has unfolded in real time, with Western media helping to make it possible — through distortion, through silence, through selective empathy, and through the steady reproduction of the narratives that justify the dehumanization of Palestinians.

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

Three years of the Gaza genocide, Zionist supremacy, and the global struggle for justice

The genocide is the culmination of decades of policies designed to erase Palestinian culture and history, and ensure that they remain vulnerable, powerless, and stateless.

 
By Fareed Khan
A version of this article is available on Substack.

As we enter the fourth year of genocide in Gaza, it becomes impossible to understand the present without confronting the deeper ideological and historical forces that made such a crime possible. The genocide did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the culmination of a century‑long political project rooted in Zionist ethnonational supremacy, colonial conquest, anti-Palestinian hate, and the dehumanization of an indigenous population. To grasp the full magnitude of what has unfolded, we must look at the ideological foundations of the Israeli state, the historical arc of Palestinian dispossession, and the global structures that have enabled Israel’s violence for generations.

Zionism’s racialized foundations

Zionism emerged in late‑19th‑century Europe, shaped by the same intellectual climate that produced colonialism, racial hierarchy, and ethnonationalist ideologies. It was born in an era when European powers carved up continents, justified conquest through pseudo‑scientific theories of racial superiority, and viewed indigenous populations as impediments to their imperial ambitions. Theodor Herzl, often described as the father of modern Zionism, envisioned a Jewish state in Palestine as a European outpost—modern, rational, and superior to the “barbaric” indigenous population. His writings framed Palestinians not as a people with agency, political rights, history, or sovereignty, but as obstacles to be managed, displaced, or subordinated.

This worldview contained structural similarities to other European ethnonationalist movements of the era. It embraced ethnic cleansing, territorial exclusivity, and a racial hierarchical vision of society in which Jewish supremacy was seen as natural and necessary. These ideas later crystallized into policies within the Zionist movement that prioritized Jewish demographic dominance over Palestinians and a goal to control the territory of historic Palestine.

Zionism’s anti-Palestinian, racialized logic was not merely theoretical. It shaped the strategies of early Zionist militias, informed the political decisions of Israel’s founding leaders, and laid the groundwork for a state built on exclusion, displacement, and mass murder. The seeds of apartheid, segregation, and ethnic cleansing were planted long before 1948 since they were embedded in the ideological DNA of the movement itself.

The Nakba and the architecture of Zionist supremacy

The Nakba of 1948—the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians, the massacre of thousands, and the complete erasure of more than 500 Palestinian villages—was not an aberration. It was the foundational moment in the creation of the Israeli supremacist regime. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was deliberate, systematic, and essential to establishing a state with a Jewish demographic majority. It was carried out through massacres, forced expulsions, destruction of towns and villages, and psychological terror designed to empty the land of its indigenous inhabitants.

After the expulsions, Israel enacted laws to ensure that Palestinians could never return. The Absentee Property Law confiscated the homes, farms, orchards, and businesses of those who had fled or been expelled, transferring their land to Jews arriving from Europe, and entrenching a system of dispossession. The Nakba was not simply a historical event. It was the beginning of a political and social order built on Jewish ethnosupremacy, Jewish exceptionalism, Palestinian exclusion, and the start of a campaign to permanently erase Palestinian presence, culture and history in the land where they and their ancestors had lived for millennia..

Following the 1967 war, Israel extended this architecture of domination into the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. The occupation entrenched a dual legal system, one where illegal Israeli settlers lived under Israeli civil law, enjoyed full political rights, and received state protection, while Palestinians lived under military law, faced movement restrictions, home demolitions, land seizures, arbitrary detention, and torture. Human rights organizations—including Israeli rights group B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International—have concluded that this constitutes a regime of apartheid, “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

This system is not incidental. It is the architecture of an ethnosupremacist state, designed to maintain demographic dominance, territorial control, and political power at the expense of an indigenous population whose rights are systematically denied at every turn.

Dehumanization as policy and culture

Supremacy is sustained not only through laws but through language. Israeli political leaders have repeatedly used rhetoric that erases Palestinian identity and strips Palestinians of humanity. Palestinians are often referred to not as Palestinians but as “Arabs,” a linguistic move that denies how they identify themselves and frames them as a generic, undifferentiated mass. Senior officials have used dehumanizing language that casts Palestinians as inherently threatening—for example, statements describing Palestinian children as “little snakes” that needed to be exterminated. This supremacist thinking is not restricted to the political class but has become common within Israeli society. A year ago Israeli model Sarai Givati justified the killing of Palestinian children “because they will grow up to be terrorists. While Israeli TV producer Elad Barashi posted on social media in May 2025, "I can't understand the people here in the State of Israel who don't want to fill Gaza with gas showers . . . or train cars . . . and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza."

This rhetoric is not accidental. It is part of the indoctrination process that Jewish youth in Israel and the diaspora are put through during their school years where they are programmed to see Palestinians as subhuman.  This prepares them defend Israeli atrocities against Palestinians, and prepares Zionist Jews to accept policies of collective punishment, siege, and brutal large‑scale military assaults against a defenceless population, normalizing violence and making atrocity acceptable and justifiable. When a population is consistently portrayed as subhuman, dangerous, or undeserving of rights, the moral guardrails to mass killing are eroded. Dehumanization becomes a cultural norm that shapes public opinion, political discourse, and military strategy. The result is a society in which cruelty is tolerated and justified, and in which the suffering of Palestinians is viewed as either irrelevant and normal. This cultural environment is essential to sustaining a system of domination, because without it the machinery of occupation and genocide would not function.

The Gaza Genocide as a continuation of history

The ongoing genocide in Gaza—which has killed more than 80,000 Palestinians, destroyed hospitals, universities, mosques, churches, cemeteries, and civilian infrastructure, and weaponized starvation—is the latest chapter in a long history of Israeli depravity. It reflects the same logic that drove the Nakba, the occupation, the illegal settlement enterprise, and decades of military assaults on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and beyond.

Israel’s actions in Gaza are not a deviation from their decades-long racist policy, they are the fulfillment of it. The siege imposed on Gaza since 2007, the repeated bombardments, the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, and the use of starvation as a weapon all stem from the same ideological foundation—Palestinians are a population to be controlled, contained, and eliminated when necessary to fulfill the Zionist agenda.  The genocide is the culmination of decades of policies designed to make Palestinian life unbearable, to fragment Palestinian society, erase their culture and history, and to ensure that Palestinians remain stateless, powerless, and vulnerable. It is the logical endpoint of a system built on Zionist supremacy and sustained through violence.

Western complicity and the collapse of international law

Western powers have enabled this system for generations. The United States has provided more than $150 billion in military aid to Israel since 1948, supplying the weapons, intelligence, and diplomatic cover that make Israel’s crimes possible. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Canada have supplied arms, defended Israel at the UN, and undermined efforts to hold Israeli officials accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This complicity has destroyed the credibility of the post‑war international legal order. The Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were designed to prevent atrocities like those unfolding in Gaza. Yet Western governments have ignored ICJ rulings, opposed ICC investigations, and only enforced international law selectively—condemning adversaries while excusing allies. The message couldn’t be more clear—international law applies only when it is politically convenient, Human rights are conditional and racialized, justice is selective, and geopolitical interests override moral and legal obligations.

Media complicity and the Palestinian exception

Western media has reinforced this system through biased coverage that marginalizes Palestinian suffering and amplifies Israeli narratives. Studies show that Palestinian deaths are reported as statistics, stripped of humanity, while Israeli deaths are described with emotive language that evokes sympathy and outrage. Palestinian voices are marginalized, Israeli claims are amplified without verification, and historical context is erased.

In addition, Palestinian resistance is almost reflexively framed as terrorism, while Israeli state violence—no matter how indiscriminate—is framed as “self‑defence.” This asymmetry mirrors propaganda tactics used by the Nazis to dehumanize Jews and other targeted populations. It desensitizes audiences to Palestinian suffering and normalizes their slaughter.

The result is a media landscape that manufactures consent for genocide, shaping public opinion in ways that protect Israel from accountability and obscure the reality of Palestinian oppression.

The global struggle for justice

Despite Western complicity, global momentum for Palestinian justice and freedom is growing. More than 149 countries recognize Palestinian statehood. Millions have marched in the streets around the world demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza. Scholars, activists, and human rights organizations have demanded accountability. The International Court of Justice has issued provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent genocide, and the International Criminal Court has sought arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

This global movement reflects a deeper truth which shows that justice for Palestinians is inseparable from the struggle to rebuild the international legal order. It requires dismantling the structures of supremacy, ending Western military and diplomatic support for Israel, and confronting the anti-Palestinian racialized biases that shape Western foreign policy.

The post‑war human rights system was created because those who witnessed the horrors of World War II understood that nothing less than an entirely new moral architecture was needed to prevent humanity from descending again into barbarism. It was built by people who had seen genocide with their own eyes, who understood the cost of indifference, and who believed that universal human rights must be protected through binding international law. But those architects of the post‑war order—along with the generation that carried their memory forward—are now gone. With their passing, the moral clarity that animated the system has faded, and the institutions they built have been left in the hands of leaders who neither share their historical experience nor uphold their ethical commitments.

In the absence of those witnesses, the system they created is now collapsing, if it has not already collapsed. The principles forged in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Nuremberg have been hollowed out by decades of selective enforcement, geopolitical self‑interest, and the willingness of powerful states to ignore international law when it constrains their geopolitical ambitions. Gaza has made this collapse undeniable. The very nations that once championed “Never Again” have tolerated, enabled, and rationalized a genocide in real time. The moral architecture built to prevent atrocity has been abandoned, not because it failed, but because those entrusted with preserving it chose convenience over conscience.

Rebuilding it requires ending Western support for states like Israel that commit genocide, reconstructing international institutions capable of enforcing human rights, holding media corporations accountable for promoting dehumanizing narratives, supporting global movements for justice, recognizing Palestinian humanity and rights, and dismantling structures of ethnosupremacy wherever they exist.

The crossroads

As the fourth year of the Gaza genocide begins humanity stands at a crossroads. One path leads back to the barbarism of the mid-20th century, where human life is expendable and genocide is accepted. The other leads back toward justice, where human rights are universal and protected. The genocide in Gaza has become the moral crisis of our time. It has exposed the collapse of Western moral authority, the failure of international law, and the absolute fragility of human rights. It has shown that the preservation of human dignity requires not neutrality but courage—the courage to confront injustice, to speak truth to power, and to demand accountability from those that consider themselves as above the law.

As American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead reminded us, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Her words tell us that the future will not be shaped by presidents or prime ministers but by ordinary people who refuse to be neutral, who refuse to accept a world where genocide is normalized and human dignity is negotiable.

The choice is ours on which path we take, and history will remember whether we forced out leaders to meet this moment with courage or allowed them to watch a world slide, once again, into darkness.

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

Three years of the Gaza genocide and the West’s moral collapse

The normalization of atrocity, failure of the “rules based” international order, and complicity of the West in Israel’s criminality reveal a deep crisis at the heart of contemporary global politics. 

By Fareed Khan  
A version of this article is available on Substack.

Tomorrow, October 7th, Israel will mark the third anniversary of the Hamas attack in 2023, and they along with their Western allies will hold ceremonies, vigils, moments of silence, and speeches to mark the sombre occasion. They will mourn 1,200 Israelis—including more than 300 killed by Israeli forces under the controversial “Hannibal Directive”—and they will do so with solemnity, candles, and carefully crafted political language about tragedy and resilience, and resisting terrorism. But nowhere on that day or the days that follow will they mourn or hold similar ceremonies for the 80,000 to 100,000 Palestinians murdered since October 2023. They will not acknowledge that Israel’s response was not self‑defence but a campaign of mass killing, mass starvation, and mass destruction that the world’s leading human rights institutions, Holocaust scholars, and international legal bodies have labeled as genocide.

This silence will not be accidental, just as it was not accidental on the first or second anniversaries of the October 7 attack—moments when Western leaders mourned Israeli lives with solemn ceremony while ignoring the staggering Palestinian death toll, which had already reached approximately 50,000 in 2024 and then 74,000 in 2025. The refusal to acknowledge Palestinian suffering has become a defining feature of Western political culture. It is not a lapse or an oversight, it is the predictable outcome of a decades‑long collapse of Western moral authority. Year after year, Western governments have demonstrated that their professed commitment to human rights is shallow, conditional and deeply racialized. Their silence in the face of mass murder by Israel reflects a deeply embedded structural racism and bigotry toward Palestinians, a belief—often unspoken but consistently acted upon—that Palestinian lives are less valuable, less grievable, and less worthy of protection. This prejudice has shaped foreign policy, media narratives, and public discourse, creating an environment in which atrocities committed by Israel are tolerated, rationalized, or simply ignored.

The genocide in Gaza has stripped away whatever remained of the West’s moral façade. It has exposed Western human rights rhetoric as performative, its commitment to international law as meaningless, and its political leadership as morally bankrupt. The same governments that invoke international law to condemn Russia or China for their human rights abuses have spent years shielding Israel from accountability, supplying it with weapons, providing it with diplomatic cover over the decades, and especially since October 2023, as tens of thousands of Palestinians—mostly children and women—were killed, starved, displaced, and buried beneath the rubble of their own homes. The same leaders who speak of a “rules‑based international order” have watched genocide unfold in real time and chosen complicity over courage or basic humanity, in effect endorsing Israeli criminality.

The meaning of “standing with Israel”

And this endorsement is precisely what is meant when Western leaders declare that they “stand with Israel.” When they use those words they are not making an abstract geopolitical statement. They are validating a record of Israel’s genocidal acts extensively documented by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Oxfam, Save the Children, the International Federation for Human Rights, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars.

By “standing with Israel” they are endorsing the killing of children and babies, and the bombing of hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and UN shelters. They are supporting the starvation of more than two million people, alongside the destruction of universities, mosques, churches, and cemeteries. They are saying they have no issue with the execution of civilians, the torture of detainees, and the burning of families in tents. They are sanctioning the assassination of journalists, the deliberate targeting of aid workers, and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure. And they are endorsing the use of dehumanizing rhetoric that meets the legal definition of genocidal intent.

These are not unverified allegations. They are documented facts.

When someone says they “stand with Israel,” they are standing with a state whose actions have been identified as genocidal by leading Holocaust and Jewish genocide scholars, including noted Jewish academics Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, Daniel Blatman, Raz Segal, Shmuel Lederman, Marion Kaplan, and Barry Trachtenberg. They are standing with a state whose leaders have repeatedly incited genocide by declaring their intent to “erase” Gaza, “eliminate” Palestinians, and “destroy” entire neighborhoods since atrocities began in 2023. They are standing with a state whose military has killed almost eight times more women and children in Gaza  than the Russians have killed in Ukraine since February 2022, with one estimate based on calculations by Ben Gurion University academic Yaakov Garb putting the number of women and children killed closer to 190,000.

The banality of atrocity

Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that evil becomes most dangerous not when it is committed by obvious fanatics, but when it is normalized—when it is carried out by ordinary people performing routine tasks, following procedures, and obeying orders without moral reflection. The genocide in Gaza has made her insight painfully and unmistakably relevant. What is unfolding is not only the visible brutality of bombs and bullets, but the vast, bureaucratic machinery that makes such brutality possible—the drafting of military orders, the logistical planning that determines which neighborhoods will be razed, the procurement and manufacture of weapons, the equipping of Israeli jets with missiles and bombs, the intelligence gathered and relayed to troops on the ground, the administrative systems that coordinate troop movements, fuel supplies, targeting protocols, and paying the soldiers and pilots committing mass murder. All of these seemingly mundane actions—performed by soldiers, analysts, engineers, administrators, and political officials—are integral components of Israel’s machinery of genocide.

This is precisely what Arendt meant by the “banality of evil”—the way mass atrocity becomes operational through ordinary tasks carried out by individuals who see themselves as neutral professionals simply doing their jobs. And it is why the parallel to the Nazi Holocaust machine is not rhetorical but structural. The genocide of European Jews was not carried out only by the men who pulled triggers or opened the doors of gas chambers. It depended on the clerks who processed transport lists, the railway workers who scheduled trains to the concentration and death camps, the engineers who designed the crematoria, the bureaucrats who coordinated deportations, and the administrators who ensured that every logistical detail was executed with precision. In Gaza today, the same logic is at work, not with death factories but with a military apparatus that is a mobile death factory. The genocide happens not when someone from a targeted group is deliberately killed, it is in the entire system that makes genocidal crimes possible, efficient, and sustained.

Arendt’s warning becomes even more chilling when we look beyond the machinery of genocide itself and confront the society that enables it. Bureaucratic systems do not operate in a vacuum. They require a public willing to tolerate, rationalize, or even celebrate the suffering of another people. The normalization of atrocity depends on a moral environment in which cruelty is not merely permitted but justified, defended, and woven into national identity. In Israel today, that environment is not marginal—it is mainstream.

This reality was laid bare in a June 2025 Haaretz poll that revealed the depth of the moral collapse inside Israeli society. Nearly half of Israeli Jews—47%—expressed support for exterminating all Palestinians in Gaza “down to the last child,” a phrase that evokes the most explicit form of genocidal intent. An even larger majority—82%—supported the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, endorsing the removal of an entire population from its homeland. And 56% supported ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from territories under Israeli control, effectively erasing Palestinian presence from the lands of historic Palestine altogether.

These are not fringe opinions held by extremists on the margins of Israeli society. They are mainstream political preferences, expressed openly and without shame, in a society shaped by decades of racist indoctrination, occupation, settlement expansion, militarization, and dehumanizing rhetoric. They reflect a worldview in which Israelis do not see Palestinians as human beings with rights, families, histories, or futures, but as obstacles to be removed, threats to be neutralized, or demographic problems to be solved. They reveal a society in which the machinery of genocide does not operate against the grain of public sentiment—it operates with its consent, and is fully embraced by and overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews.

And it is precisely this convergence—between bureaucratic efficiency and popular endorsement—that makes Arendt’s insight so painfully relevant today. The genocide in Gaza is not only the work of generals, politicians, and military planners. It is the product of a society that has been conditioned, over generations, to see domination over Palestinians as security, Jewish supremacy as identity, and Palestinian death as an acceptable, even necessary, feature of existence.

This normalization of unreserved cruelty is mirrored in Western political classes, media institutions, and corporate elites. The speed with which Western leaders transformed the October 7th Hamas attack into a license for genocide—ignoring decades of Israel’s brutal occupation, blockade, and mass killing—revealed a deeper structural prejudice. Palestinian suffering was stripped of context, history, and humanity. Western leaders demanded that audiences accept a fiction that the “conflict” began on October 7th, and that Israel’s actions were legitimate self‑defence rather than revenge or collective punishment.

This framing immediately foreclosed any serious moral inquiry into why a people subjected to decades of military occupation, siege, dispossession, and systematic denial of political rights might ultimately resort to violent resistance. By presenting the events of October 7th as if they occurred in a historical vacuum, Western leaders erased the long record of blocked diplomatic pathways, shattered peace processes, and deliberate prevention of Palestinian statehood. They refused to acknowledge that a population brutalized for generations, deprived of freedom, dignity, the means to shape its own future, and subjected to the longest and most brutal occupation in modern history, may reach a point where violent resistance—however tragic in its results—becomes the only remaining expression of political agency. In doing so, Western political leaders and news media transformed a complex history of oppression into a simplistic morality tale that absolved Israel of responsibility and cast Palestinians as inexplicable aggressors rather than a people responding to conditions no society could endure indefinitely.

This narrative collapse allowed Western governments to ignore proportionality, international law, and the ethical distinction between legitimate self‑defence and mass atrocity. It enabled them to treat Palestinian deaths as unfortunate but acceptable, a grim arithmetic in which erasing tens of thousands of civilian lives could be rationalized. This moral calculus echoes the ambivalence Western nations showed toward Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s—an era when political convenience, racial prejudice, and geopolitical interests outweighed the imperative to protect human life. Today, the same dynamic is at work, and Palestinian suffering is acknowledged only insofar as it does not disrupt Western alliances, strategic priorities, or domestic political narratives.

The collapse of the post‑war human rights system

The post‑World War II human rights system—built on the ashes of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Nanjing, and Hiroshima—was designed to prevent states from committing mass atrocities with impunity. The UN Charter (1945), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Genocide Convention (1948), and the Geneva Conventions (1949) were meant to restrain state violence and protect vulnerable populations.

What the Gaza genocide has revealed is that Western powers—the very architects of the post‑war order—no longer believe in the principles they created. They have abandoned the Genocide Convention’s obligation to prevent and punish genocide. They have ignored and failed to enforce the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza. They have dismissed the findings of the UN Special Rapporteur, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry’s that Israel is committing genocide.

Instead, over the past three years they have armed Israel, funded Israel, and provided diplomatic cover for a genocidal state. They have shielded Israel from accountability at the UN Security Council. They have attacked and even jailed human rights advocates who have spoken out in defence of Palestinian rights. They have refused to join South Africa’s genocide case at the ICJ, and in the case of Canada and the US attacked that nation for launching the case. And they have continued business as usual with Israel while Gaza has been turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

This selective application of international law exposes the racial, religious and geopolitical biases at the core of the so‑called “rules‑based order.” It reveals that Western governments do not oppose genocide as a principle—they oppose genocide only when committed by their enemies. When committed by an ally, they tolerate it, excuse it, and enable it.

Canada’s moral collapse

Canada’s response to the Gaza genocide has been a case study in moral collapse. Despite repeatedly claiming to champion human rights and the rule of law, the Canadian government has continued selling weapons and weapons components to Israel—despite a parliamentary resolution calling for a halt to such sales—even as the death toll in Gaza climbed into the tens of thousands. It has provided diplomatic cover for Israeli actions at the United Nations, has refused to impose sanctions on Israel’s top tier of political and military leadership for grave breaches of international law and crimes against humanity, choosing instead to maintain normal relations with officials implicated in mass atrocities. Canada has also opposed or undermined investigations by the International Criminal Court and the ICJ into Israeli crimes, dismissing or downplaying the findings of genocide scholars, human rights organizations, and UN bodies that have documented the scale and intent of Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians.

Perhaps most egregiously, the Canada’s government under Mark Carney allowed Benjamin Netanyahu’s official aircraft to pass through Canadian airspace on six separate occasions while he traveled to New York City, despite publicly claiming that it was committed to enforcing ICC arrest warrants. This contradiction—professing support for international justice while quietly facilitating the travel of an individual facing allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity—captures the profound moral hypocrisy of Canada’s position.

Canada’s record on genocide is one of consistent failure. It failed to act during the Rwandan genocide and Balkans genocide in the 1990s, the Darfur genocide in the 2000s, the Rohingya genocide, and the Uyghur genocide in the 2010s. And now it is failing again in Gaza. Each of these failures reveals a pattern. Canada expresses concern, issues statements, and invokes the language of human rights, but when confronted with the need for concrete action, it retreats into political expediency with its leaders behaving like cowards.

Western media and the Palestinian exception

Western media has also played a central role in enabling—and manufacturing public consent for—the Gaza genocide. The “Palestinian exception,” the systematic marginalization of Palestinian suffering, has shaped public perception for decades. Studies by The Intercept, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, and the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring show a consistent pattern—Israeli deaths are described with emotive, humanizing language, while Palestinian deaths are reported in clinical, detached terms that strip away context and empathy. Coverage routinely erases the reality of occupation and brutality, presenting violence as if it occurs in a vacuum rather than within a decades‑long system of military domination.

Israeli government narratives are frequently amplified without verification, even when later proven to be propaganda, while Israeli crimes against Palestinians are downplayed, softened, or ignored altogether. Palestinian voices receive only a fraction of the airtime or column space afforded to Israeli officials, reinforcing a hierarchy of whose suffering matters and whose does not. Palestinian resistance is almost reflexively framed as terrorism, while Israeli state violence—no matter how indiscriminate or devastating—is framed as “self‑defence.” This asymmetry is not accidental, it is structural, embedded in editorial decisions, racist newsroom culture, and the geopolitical assumptions that shape Western journalism.

The result is a media landscape that mirrors the same tactics used by Nazi Germany to dehumanize Jews, the Roma, and other targeted populations. By consistently portraying Palestinians as either faceless victims or violent aggressors, and by sanitizing or obscuring the scale of Israeli violence, Western media desensitizes audiences to Palestinian suffering and normalizes their mass murder. It creates a moral distance that allows genocide to unfold in real time while much of the world watches passively, conditioned to see Palestinian death as inevitable, justified, or simply unworthy of outrage.

As we mark the beginning of the fourth year of genocide in Gaza, the collapse of Western moral authority, normalization of atrocity, failure of the post‑war human rights system, and complicity of Western nations in Israel’s criminality reveal a deeper crisis at the heart of contemporary global politics. What is unfolding in Gaza is not an isolated event, but the culmination of long‑standing ideological currents, historical injustices, and entrenched systems of supremacy that have shaped the international order.

To understand how a genocide of this scale became possible—and why so many powerful nations have enabled it—we must confront the deeper ideological foundations of Israel’s actions, the historical arc of Palestinian dispossession, and the structural parallels between Zionism and other supremacist movements. Only by doing this can we grasp the full magnitude of the injustice unfolding today and accept that nothing less than a fundamental transformation of international politics and the world’s moral conscience is what is required to bring justice to the most persecuted and oppressed minority in the world today.

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

By declaring that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, Mark Carney is criminalizing those protesting the Gaza genocide

Canada’s criminalization of anti-Zionism is an act of political obedience to Israel — a nation with a decades-long history of violating international laws and the basic tenets of humanity.
 
By Fareed Khan
A version of this article is available on Substack.

Last week, the Canadian government quietly crossed a political and moral Rubicon. In its latest report on antisemitism, Public Safety Canada explicitly declared that anti‑Zionism is a form of antisemitism. With one sentence, the Mark Carney government told millions of Canadians — Palestinians, Jews, Muslims, Christians, human rights advocates, academics, and ordinary citizens — that their opposition to Israel’s three‑year‑long genocide in Gaza is not political speech, but criminalized hate.

This is not simply a dispute about the definition of a word or phrase. It is a state‑engineered distortion with profound consequences that will endanger people. By equating anti‑Zionism with antisemitism, the federal government is doing three things simultaneously:

• Criminalizing legitimate political criticism of a foreign state;
  
• Demonstrating ideological obedience to the Israeli government; and
  
• Making life more dangerous for Jews in Canada by erasing the distinction between a political ideology and Jewish identity.

This is not exaggeration. It is a sober assessment of what will happen as a government transforms legitimate political critique into racial hatred — and does so in the middle of an internationally documented genocide which is now entering its fourth year.

Anti‑Zionism is not hatred of Jews

Zionism is a supremacist political ideology developed in the late 19th century — roughly 125 years old — advocating for the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine in order to create a Jewish state. Like any political ideology, it is subject to debate, criticism, and rejection. Anti‑Zionism is precisely that — opposition to a political ideology not hostility toward a people.

To oppose Zionism is no different than opposing communism, fascism, white supremacy, or any other ethno‑nationalist ideology. Political ideologies are not sacred, and they are not immune from critique.

Jewish scholars, rabbis, and activists have said this for decades. In the present day groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, Independent Jewish Voices Canada, and countless academics have repeatedly affirmed that anti‑Zionism is not antisemitism, and that conflating the two is both intellectually dishonest and politically dangerous. 

Historically, some of the most influential Jewish thinkers, writers, rabbis, Holocaust survivors, and resistance fighters have opposed Zionism. Their objections were not rooted in self‑hatred or denial of Jewish identity, but in a profound ethical conviction that nationalism built on exclusion, displacement, or religious exceptionalism would endanger both Jews and Palestinians. Sigmund Freud condemned the “baseless fanaticism” driving Zionist claims in Palestine; Albert Einstein rejected the very idea of a Jewish state; Erich Fromm argued that ancient territorial claims could never justify modern political sovereignty; Primo Levi warned that similar to Nazi attitudes towards Jews, Israel was creating its own oppressed class in Palestinians; Marek Edelman, hero of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, wrote directly to Palestinian resistance fighters in solidarity; and political philosopher Hannah Arendt cautioned that Zionism relied on antisemitism as its political engine. These were not marginal voices — they were among the most important Jewish intellectuals of the 20th  century, united in their belief that Zionism was a political ideology, not a religious destiny, and that its implementation would produce endless violence.

Their warnings continued into the modern era. I.F. Stone argued that Israel’s ethnonationalism created “moral schizophrenia” for Jews worldwide; Noam Chomsky described Israel’s occupation as worse than apartheid; Isaac Asimov rejected Zionism as a form of ethnic exceptionalism; and British actress Miriam Margolyes, Israeli activist Uri Avnery, American historian Gabriel Kolko, and Rabbi Michael Lerner all publicly denounced Zionism or Israel’s policies as morally indefensible. These figures demonstrated a simple truth: Zionism has always been outside of Judaism and was a danger to Jewish safety.

Even the Israeli government itself acknowledges that Zionism is a political ideology — not a religious identity — when it describes Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state” founded on Zionist principles. If Zionism is a political ideology, then opposing it is political speech. Full stop.

Canada is doing Israel’s bidding

One thing must be clearly understood. This redefinition did not emerge organically from Canadian civil society. It is the result of years of lobbying by agents of the Israeli government whose efforts have resulted in the Canadian government mirroring Israel’s long‑standing strategy of weaponizing accusations of antisemitism to silence criticism of its policies, especially its brutal decades-long oppression of Palestinians.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism — aggressively promoted by Israel and its lobby organizations in the West — has been widely criticized by scholars, civil liberties groups, and even the definition’s own drafters for chilling free expression and conflating political critique with hate speech.

Public Safety Canada’s adoption of the most extreme interpretation of IHRA is not a neutral act. It is an act of political obedience to a foreign power that has a decades-long history of violating international laws and the basic tenets of humanity. It is the Canadian government aligning itself with the Israeli government’s propaganda framework at the precise moment Israel is committing mass atrocities documented by the United Nations, and confirmed by 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.

When a government adopts the ideological framing of a foreign state and uses it to police domestic political dissent, it ceases to be an independent actor. It becomes a vassal — a subordinate power executing the political will of another nation.

That is what the Carney government has done.

Redefinition makes life more dangerous for Jews

Conflating anti‑Zionism with antisemitism does not protect Jewish Canadians. It endangers them.

Real antisemitism — the kind that fuels white supremacist violence, neo‑Nazi organizing, and far‑right extremism — is rising across North America. Jewish communities need clarity, precision, and vigilance to confront this threat. But when the government declares that opposing a political ideology is equivalent to hating Jews, it blurs the line between legitimate political critique and actual antisemitism. This confusion makes it harder to identify real threats, and reinforces the dangerous lie that all Jews are responsible for Israel’s actions — a core antisemitic trope.

Progressive Jewish organizations have warned repeatedly that weaponizing antisemitism for political ends increases hostility toward Jews by making them appear as agents of a foreign government. By adopting Israel’s preferred framing, the Canadian government has made Jewish Canadians less safe, not more.

Criminalizing anti‑Zionism criminalizes criticism of Israel

Israel is a state founded on Zionist ideology, something the it’s government has proclaimed for years. If anti‑Zionism is antisemitism, then criticizing Israel’s policies — its military actions, its occupation, its apartheid system, its brutality towards Palestinians — becomes suspect, and potentially criminal. This is not theoretical. Public Safety Canada’s report is intended to shape policing, surveillance, and security policy. It is a directive to law enforcement.

The Carney government’s approach to antisemitism means that:

• Protesting Israel’s genocide could be treated as hate speech;
• Calling for sanctions on Israel could be labeled antisemitic;
• Advocating for Palestinian human rights could be investigated as extremism;
• Jewish anti‑Zionists could be targeted as dangerous;
• Palestinian Canadians could be criminalized for expressing their own history.

This is the architecture of authoritarianism and fascism — redefine legitimate dissent as a crime, then police it, and prosecute those whose words and actions don’t align with political agendas.

Mark Carney is violating the Charter of Rights

Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees freedom of expression, conscience, assembly, and political belief. Equating anti‑Zionism — a political protest movement — with antisemitism violates all of these rights and shows how little Mark Carney’s government cares about defending human rights. Legal scholars have already warned that adopting IHRA’s conflation of anti‑Zionism with hate speech would breach Canadians’ Charter protections, and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has called the definition “overbroad, vague, and open to abuse.”

By embracing the most extreme interpretation of IHRA, the Carney government is not merely chilling political speech — it is weaponizing state power to suppress it. The Supreme Court of Canada has repeatedly affirmed that political expression lies at the core of Charter protection, yet Ottawa is now treating dissent as extremism and criticism of a foreign government as hate. This is the kind of state behaviour seen in Russia or China, where governments collapse political disagreement into criminalized disloyalty. The fact that it is happening in Canada signals a dangerous authoritarian drift, one where constitutional rights become expendable whenever they inconvenience those in power. When a government knowingly violates constitutional rights, it is not making a policy error — it is committing an abuse of power.

Carney cares little about Canadians’ rights or Palestinian lives

Mark Carney’s government has demonstrated that it does not give a damn about the fundamental rights of millions of Canadians. It does not care about the Palestinians being slaughtered in Gaza. It does not care about the crimes against humanity being committed by Israel with Canadian complicity — through arms exports, diplomatic cover, and political obedience.

Instead, Canada has chosen to criminalize dissent at home, redefine antisemitism to serve a foreign government’s interests, and endanger both Palestinians and Jews in Canada. This is not leadership. It is capitulation to a foreign power. It is moral cowardice. It is complicity in genocide.

And Canadians must reject it — loudly, unapologetically, and relentlessly.

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