In the latest effort by an anti-Israel activist to purport to speak on behalf of Canadians at large, Taha Ghayyur, the executive director of Justice for All Canada, a self-described “human rights advocacy organization” based in Mississauga, Ontario, wrote in a February 10 opinion column in The Hill Times entitled: “The next Liberal leader must do right by Palestinians,” that “most Canadians” want the federal government to take a stridently anti-Israel stance, and called upon the next federal Liberal leader to do just that.
Despite making those wide-ranging claims, Ghayyur offered zero evidence for his statement, which should come as little surprise given that polling has shown widespread Canadian opposition to Hamas and its proponents in Canada.
Ghayyur, who failed to mention Hamas even a single time in his commentary, nevertheless repeated Hamas disinformation and disingenuously presented it as fact, writing that “more than 45,000 Palestinians—largely infants, children, and women” have been killed in Gaza, evidently hoping that readers would not recognize that there is only one primary source of all casualty claims in Gaza: Hamas.
Even as he levelled these claims, he blatantly misrepresented the truth. Not only are Hamas’ total casualty claims entirely unverified, the terrorist group makes no distinction between civilians and combatants, as many as 20,000 Hamas fighters have been killed, and as a recent study found, Hamas’ roster includes thousands of people who died of natural causes, counted men as women, and adults as children.
Ghayyur was not satisfied to simply repeat Hamas casualty claims and present them as truth; he also accused Israel of carrying out a policy of starvation in Gaza, seemingly ignorant of the fact that enough food was entering Gaza during the war to feed every single person inside the territory, a reality that became obvious as Israeli hostages were paraded on stages in Gaza, when crowds of clearly well-fed – even sometimes obese – Gazans took to the streets, late-model iPhones in hand, to celebrate.
Ghayyur, who has penned a number of recent columns in The Hill Times and The Toronto Star playing fast and loose with the facts, called for Ottawa to recognize a Palestinian state, while making no mention of what that entails.
Not only would such a recognition be a clear diplomatic victory for Hamas, sending the message that terrorism absolutely works, but Ghayyur ignored exactly who would be the governing party of a future “Palestine.” Would it be Hamas, the genocidal Islamic terrorist group in charge of much of Gaza, which sees the violent destruction of Israel as its holy duty? Given that Hamas is the only game in town in the coastal territory, if Canada recognized a Palestinian state in that region, it is a tacit recognition of Hamas’ governance.
Ghayyur wrote that Canada ought to “affirm Palestinians’ right to self-determination,” apparently unaware that in 2005, Israel offered exactly that to the Palestinians, withdrawing every single Israeli from Gaza, and leaving it to the Palestinians to make a state of their own. But rather than make a state, Hamas converted Gaza into a terrorist haven. In essence, Gaza already was given independence, and they used it as a platform to murder Israelis, but Ghayyur is either unfamiliar with this history, or otherwise has decided that it is better not to tell readers about it.
As author George Orwell wrote in 1984, “the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” As pro-Hamas rallies dwindle in size, leaving just a small fanatical rump of extremists, if Taha Ghayyur’s column was any indication, anti-Israel detractors have evidently decided to redouble their efforts and continue to make their debunked accusations against Jerusalem, even as the unavoidable truth becomes harder to ignore.
