In a July 31 Toronto Star opinion column, writer Justin Ling took another swing at Israel—getting tangled up once again in perpetuating falsehoods along with Holocaust appropriation

In his commentary entitled: “Israel has been accused of genocide. This is how Canada should respond,” Ling argued that Canada has a responsibility to stand up against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Throughout the article, Ling repeatedly treated ICJ provisional rulings and South Africa’s unproven genocide charges as if they were confirmed legal findings.

That led him to a bald-faced falsehood when he stated that: “the ICJ has already ordered Israel to halt its military operation in Gaza.” To support this claim, Ling linked to an ICJ document, but that document only states that South Africa asked the court to demand that Israel “immediately suspend its military operations.”

Despite South Africa wishing it was so, the court ultimately did not grant this request in its provisional ruling.

In fact, the ICJ has not confirmed many of South Africa’s claims. It has only said that certain rights were plausible enough to merit a hearing. That provisional ruling has been widely misinterpreted and misrepresented in the media.

Ling had a journalistic responsibility to understand this complex issue. Instead, he compounded the falsehood with the accusation that “the Netanyahu government has defied [the ICJ] order.”

By framing accusations as if they are legal rulings and treating Israel’s objections as signs of guilt, Ling side-stepped the presumption of innocence and denied Israel due process.

Ling had harsh words for Canada as well, accusing the government of sitting “idly by” and not intervening at the ICJ. He justified this attack by saying it wasn’t just about Israel; Canada intervened to present a legal argument in Ukraine’s case against Russia.

Yet Ling eventually admitted his true aim: “Canada’s intervention would no doubt be interpreted as an endorsement of South Africa’s case, even though it is technically not. Fine.”

As Ling certainly knows, for Canada to get involved would indeed mean rubber-stamping South Africa’s baseless genocide charges.

Ireland is a case in point. As Ling noted, it has filed a Declaration of Intervention at the ICJ. That declaration came after a parliamentary process in which various Irish politicians stood up and attacked Israel. For example, Chris Andrews, who was once photographed with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, declared: “We must make the terror state of Israel an outcast among the international community” and called for an EU-wide ban on athletes and teams from “the apartheid state of Israel.”

Like Andrews, these Irish politicians had clearly made up their minds long before South Africa filed its claim at the ICJ.

Ottawa, on the other hand, has thus far been relatively cautious. That’s true even if individual Canadians like Ling might prefer that they jump into the ICJ case with both feet, based on zero evidence.

Finally, there is the way in which Ling chose to support his points. He appropriated the legacy of German Jewish historian Hannah Arendt, who fled the Nazis for an internment camp in France. Ling implied that Israel has become Arendt’s worst nightmare. “[I]t is Israel itself facing the charge of genocide, and it is rejecting that system of laws just as Arendt feared it would.”

It’s true that after World War II, Arendt opposed the establishment of a Jewish State. That’s because she believed that all nation-states—driven primarily by self-interest—were inherently dangerous. She dreamed of an international framework that could help shut down a situation like the Holocaust if it ever arose again.

But Arendt might well be horrified that those “neutral” mechanisms of international law—like the ICJ—have now been twisted to propagate ancient blood libels against the world’s only Jewish country.

It is a grotesque inversion of history to use a Jewish scholar’s warnings about mass murder to frame Israel as a violent aggressor. And Ling managed to do it with not even a nod to context, facts on the ground, or journalistic objectivity.

The missing context is that Israel is fighting a war of self-defense after a brutal attack by Hamas, the ignored facts on the ground are that Hamas has zero accountability to any international court and doesn’t follow any Geneva Conventions, and the missing journalistic objectivity is failing to questioning Hamas messaging about casualty figures and collateral damage rather than amplifying them.

By cloaking genocide accusations in Holocaust memory, Ling exploited Arendt’s legacy to lend credibility to a deeply contested and unproven legal accusation.

For Ling, it seems, there’s no such thing as “innocent until proven guilty,” at least not when it comes to Israel, as HonestReporting Canada’s documentation of his past columns demonstrate.

In April, 2025, for example, Ling claimed in The Star that “Nothing excuses attacks on hospitals, which is a war crime under international law.” In fact, when a hospital is used for military purposes—as Hamas does regularly—then it loses that protected status. After we pointed this out, The Star eventually corrected Ling’s falsehood and removed the “war crime” accusation.

Unfortunately, as the current column showed, Ling is back in full stride, flinging falsehoods at Israel just to see what sticks. Perhaps he hoped that readers wouldn’t call his bluff and point out his disinformation about the ICJ’s provisional ruling, or that readers wouldn’t notice the other outrageous charges he levies against Israel without a shred of evidence.