An online magazine of a Canadian charitable organization that receives funding from the Government of Canada, recently published an inflammatory screed that falsely accused Israel of genocide, and attempted to portray criticism of that disinformation as nothing more than anti-Palestinian ‘racism.’

The April 15 opinion column published in Open Canada, a publication produced by the charity Canadian International Council entitled: “Free Expression Under Attack,” was written by lawyer and activist Amanda Ghahremani, who has taken to sympathetic Canadian media to accuse Israel of genocide, and who signed an open letter in late 2023 which could be reasonably seen as justifying Hamas terrorism, as well as Alex Neve, an anti-Israel campaigner and former head of Amnesty International Canada who has defended anti-Israel mobs and called on Ottawa to reward Palestinian terrorism by recognizing it as a state.

The column criticized a recent move by a legal body to disinvite a small-town chocolatier for repeatedly accusing Israel of “genocide” while failing to even once condemn Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacres. It is the right of every organization to platform any voices they wish, and refusing to host such radical speakers does not constitute censorship, as the authors allege, given that organizations can host whomever they want. That did not stop the authors from stating that the speaker was held to a standard that “cannot be seen as anything but racist.”

That was just the beginning of the column’s embrace of anti-Israel disinformation. Elsewhere, the authors stated matter-of-factly that “since October 2023, Israel has killed more than 50,000 Gazans.” The authors did not share that this death toll is not an established fact, but an allegation coming from none other than Hamas, the Islamic terrorist group that controls much of Gaza. Hamas’ figures are widely criticized as manipulated, and do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, nor those killed by Israel or killed by errant Palestinian rockets, points that Ghahremani and Neve are either ignorant of, or simply choose to avoid mentioning.

Eager to accuse Israel of genocide, as the authors have done ad nauseam over the last 18 months, they rattled off a litany of alleged Israel crimes: “denying access to adequate food, water, medical care, and humanitarian aid.”

This is factually wrong on multiple levels.

Not only has Gaza enjoyed sufficient humanitarian aid for the last 18 months, despite protests to the contrary, it is not Israel’s legal obligation to provide aid to an enemy combatant. Given that Hamas steals humanitarian aid to fund its terrorism, Israel faces no requirement under international law to permit aid to be sent to the terrorist group that continues to hold dozens of Israelis hostage.

The war can be over near-instantaneously when Hamas decides to lay down its weapons and release the hostages. That Hamas refuses to do so is the choice of Hamas, not Israel.

Ghahremani and Neve’s disinformation-laden column continued further, claiming that “in January 2024, the International Court of Justice determined that a genocide was plausible.” The court never made any such pronouncement, a point that the body’s then-president, Joan Donoghue, said in a BBC News interview, when she said “the court did not decide, and this something where I’m correcting what’s often said by the media, that the claim of genocide was plausible.”

There are two possible reasons that these two supposed experts ignored this: either they were simply unaware of what the president of the court – the one they are using as a linchpin in their argument – actually said, or that they did not want to share it with readers.

The authors claimed that Israel has engaged in genocide, defending their allegation, and stating that “this is not a controversial, inflammatory, or offensive position, nor is it a personal opinion. It is now a legal conclusion.” However, repeating baseless disinformation does not constitute “a legal conclusion,” instead reflecting tautology – repeating the same argument in many different ways, even if it remains without merit.

Genocide refers to the attempted extermination of a people, a definition that by literally no metric applies to Israel, which has taken unprecedented steps to avoid civilian casualties, despite efforts by Hamas to use its own civilian base as human shields. This unavoidable conclusion is precisely why anti-Israel agitators like Amnesty International was forced to redefine genocide in order to make Israel’s counter-terrorism operations fit. This is not a sign of a strong argument, but of desperation.

This reckless column, funded in part by Canadian taxpayers, is a defence of anti-Israel radicalism masquerading as legal analysis. Ghahremani and Neve’s opinion column attempts to mainstream Hamas propaganda through the language of human rights.