On many contentious topics, reasonable people may hold differing opinions and varying views, as long as they are based on reality.

However, the relentless fixation with half-truths and overt falsehoods parroted by anti-Israel detractors demonstrates the utter emptiness of their claims.

A recent example of this was a September 16 opinion column in The Hill Times entitled: “Canada has failed to implement a meaningful arms embargo on Israel,” written by Taya Ghayyur, executive director of Justice for All Canada, a self-proclaimed “human rights” organization, and Rachel Small from an organization called World BEYOND War.

In their column, the pair demanded that Ottawa take “immediate and decisive action to stop the flow of arms to and from Israel,” claiming that Jerusalem is committing a host of crimes. However, instead of actually presenting evidence to support their allegations, the pair resorted to a hodgepodge of drive-by smears, outlandish accusations, and a gross misrepresentation of facts.

They attempted to convince readers that the Hamas war has caused “40,000 Palestinian lives, most of them women and children,” a claim that comes entirely from Hamas, a bona fide genocidal Islamic terrorist organization which cannot be considered reputable and whose figures make no attempt to differentiate between combatants and civilians. Such “statistics” also ignores Israelis claims that it killed close to 18,000 terrorists.

Moreover, in recent months, the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Activities drastically slashed its earlier casualty estimates, though unsurprisingly Ghayyur and Small chose to hide that fact from readers.

At no point in their diatribe did the pair ever point out that Israel did not launch this war, but that on October 7, Hamas, the Islamic terrorist organization, carried out the largest massacre against Jews since the Holocaust, in a bloody campaign of rape, torture, murder, and kidnappings. Nor did Ghayyur and Small ever dare to be truthful with readers about the extraordinary steps Israel has taken to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza, which have been lauded by actual experts in urban warfare, and not professional anti-Israel activists.

Even as the writers claimed Israel “bomb(s) schools, hospitals, and refugee camps,” they hid the unavoidable fact that Hamas actively converted huge swathes of Gaza, including buildings formerly used as schools, into bases, command centres, and more, making them entirely legitimate targets in war.

In fact, Ghayyur and Small’s column erased Hamas from the picture entirely, refusing to mention them even a single time, falsely and disingenuously presenting Israel as a villain seemingly bombing targets in Gaza for no particular reason.

More specifically, the pair trotted out the widely-debunked claim that “In January 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that there is a plausible’ case that Israel is committing acts of genocide in Gaza, and that Palestinians face a ‘real and imminent risk’ of genocide.”

That is a bald misrepresentation of the court’s actual claims, and were summarily rejected by the court’s then-president, Joan Donoghue, who said in a later interview, “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.”

In their zeal to demonize Israel and call for Canada to do its part to ensure that the country is left entirely defenceless from genocidal terrorist groups, Ghayyur and Small resorted to blatant misrepresentation and dishonest whitewashing, as Ghayyur has done previously in The Hill Times on numerous occasions and in the Toronto Star.

If Ghayyur and Small have their way, Israel would be entirely bereft of the means to defend itself, making it completely vulnerable to genocidal massacres from terrorist groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Hezbollah, and ultimately, their patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Then again, perhaps that is exactly the point.