Mark Kersten, an assistant professor of criminology & criminal justice at the University of the Fraser Valley, one of Canada’s lowest-ranked universities, has previously made what we regard as heavy appeals to emotion in an effort to spread anti-Israel falsehoods, and is back with a new opinion column in The Globe and Mail where he treated unfounded charges by the controversial International Criminal Court (ICC) as inherently credible.

Kersten’s August 6 column entitled: “Failing to fulfill ICC warrants is also a failure to defend Canada’s sovereignty,” continued to amplify the concocted controversy first made by CBC News’ Evan Dyer about Israeli government overflights of Canadian airspace en route to the United States.

He told readers that Canada ought to repeat that it is “a proud and sovereign state” that respects the ICC and its warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claiming that it was based on “careful investigation,” and consequently, should not have permitted Israeli flights to fly over Canadian airspace.

Yet in his defence of the controversial criminal court, Kersten did not see fit to acknowledge that Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor under whom the warrants were issued, was allegedly encouraged by the oil-rich Hamas protectorate of Qatar, which promised Khan it would “look after” him if he targeted Israel, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.

The Guardian newspaper also released an investigation alleging that Qatari intelligence had targeted Khan’s alleged victim in a covert operation aimed at discrediting the accusations leveled against him by a colleague who had accused him of sexual abuse. These are serious charges that call into direct question the ICC’s entire motivation for targeting Israel. That they were completely ignored by Kersten is highly suspect in our view.

Nor did Kersten tell readers that, just days before his column was published, the same Khan was summarily fired from his job with a two-thirds majority of member countries because of the same accusations of sexual impropriety by that colleague, indicating that they may have been credible enough to terminate his employment. Critics of Khan, meanwhile, have long said that they see his targeting of Israel’s leaders as being related to his desire to distract from his own personal and legal issues.

The veritable mountain of evidence against the ICC raises serious questions about whether the world court has any credibility in its arrest warrants issued against Israeli leaders. But rather than address these concerns, and attempt to challenge them, Kersten simply saw fit to ignore them instead.

Kersten’s column would be highly problematic in its own right, but is particularly notable given that, just days earlier, an editorial in The Globe and Mail rightly pointed out that antizionism is at the core of contemporary anti-Jewish terrorism in Canada. The disconnect is striking: while acknowledging the dangers of anti-Jewish hatred in one editorial, the newspaper simultaneously published commentary that, in our view, uncritically advances one of the central narratives, namely demonizing Israel, that is driving that very same hostility.

Kersten’s column, like many of his others, takes on a circular reasoning which de facto assumes the credibility and legitimacy of the International Criminal Court and other accusations against Israel, without actually making the case.

That trial-by-media, where accusations against Israel are made so often that, even in the absence of proof, they become widely-accepted, is not indicative of a serious commentary, and should not be treated as such.