In his 1986 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Holocaust survivor and human rights activist Elie Wiesel condemned the tendency of many observers to refuse to take sides in the battle between good and evil. “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim,” he said.”

Those words could have been written today, with some commentators failing to note any material difference between genocidal Palestinian terrorists on one hand and Israel, a liberal democratic state, on the other, and positioning their moral blindness as being even-handed.

In an apparent effort to portray his commentary as exactly that, a January 6 newsletter from Winnipeg Free Press columnist Dan Lett claimed that “both Hamas and Israel are to some extent motivated by genocidal agendas.”

Hamas’ motivations are hardly in dispute. The group makes no qualms about its goal to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic State-style caliphate. But with Israel, Lett hyperlinked to an article that quoted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as comparing Hamas to the biblical Amalek, an evil entity that sought to annihilate the Jews.

If anything, Netanyahyu’s quote shows his focus was on Hamas, not Palestinians in general. And despite two years of war against Palestinian terrorists, Israel achieved a very low civilian casualty ratio, according to the world’s top scholar on urban warfare. By any standard, if Israel sought “genocide,” it could have achieved it, given its military capabilities. But there is zero evidence it ever sought anything of the sort, and in fact took extensive measures to protect Gazan civilians.

Lett’s letter asserted that “it is pro forma right now for younger people around the world to stake out a rigid position” on Gaza, but the solution to easy answers is not to present falsehoods, as Lett has done.

In his letter, he admits to having attended a concert by Kneecap, the Irish band accused of glorifying Islamist terrorism, which he blithely denies, saying “Kneecap is not promoting terrorism.” However, the truth is not so simple. Critics say a group’s singer not only held aloft a Hezbollah flag, but even chanted “up Hamas, up Hezbollah,” details ignored by Lett.

Lett also saves room to attack HonestReporting Canada in his letter, writing that it is “symbolic of the ‘must be for us or you’re against us’ mentality,” claiming that “its dispatches largely denounce all anti-Israel criticism.”

Criticism of Israeli governmental policy is entirely valid, but demonizing Israel and spreading falsehoods – including claiming that Israel is driven by genocidal goals – is entirely illegitimate. Moreover, Lett ignores how such anti-Israel propaganda is not simply intellectually false, but in fact helps pour gasoline on anti-Jewish hate crimes, which invariably rise during times of war in the Middle East.

This is hardly a coincidence. When Israel, the world’s sole Jewish State, is regularly demonized in the news media and targeted with blood libels like “genocide,” Jews around the world, including in Canada, become an easy and convenient target.

Consequently, columnists like Dan Lett have a duty to do more than mindlessly parrot anti-Israel propaganda and claim that Jerusalem is just as genocidally-driven as Hamas, when there is quite simply zero evidence for this scandalous claim, and that spreading such disinformation can carry serious consequences.