Into the second year of Israeli genocide in Gaza:

The collective West’s complicity reflects moral bankruptcy, as in that of Canada

“We are angry, we are broken. This would have been the time of joy, instead we are mourning. We are fearful. More than 20,000 children – thousands are still under the rubble. Close to 9,000 children killed in the most brutal ways day after day, 1.9 million displaced, hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed… Gaza as we know it no longer exists. This is an annihilation. This is genocide. The world is watching. Churches are watching. The people of Gaza are sending live images of their own execution. Maybe the world cares. But it goes on.”

—Rev. Munther Isaac in Bethlehem, West Bank (Occupied Palestine), on Christmas Eve 2023.[1]

“Bethlehem is besieged. Jerusalem is wounded. And Gaza is being annihilated. This year we say, Christ is still under the rubble in Gaza… He [Jesus] was born among those under occupation, to stand in solidarity with the oppressed and the repressed. In his childhood, he became a refugee, to stand in solidarity with the displaced and the exiled. He was a victim of the occupier and the extremist. He came to save us from our selfishness, greed, desires, and our pursuit of power and arrogance. He is Jesus, born in Bethlehem, to him we give love and worship.”

—Rev. Munther Isaac in Bethlehem, West Bank (Occupied Palestine), on Christmas Eve 2024.[2]

i]

Bethlehem has been delivered a mortal wound that now runs through the ancient city where, as both the Gospels of the New Testament Bible and the Qur’an narrate, Virgin Mary brought forth into the world the child Jesus (Yehoshua in Hebrew, and Isa in Arabic). It is the wound that now divides the world in the first quarter of the twentyfirst century, and the beginning of the third millennium, into two unequal parts, the Global North and the Global South. This division is not natural brought about by some feature of geography; it is a division designed and imposed by men of war, plunder and pillage, from the Global North as were once the Crusaders a millennium ago, mortally wounding the township of Jesus’s nativity whose birth symbolized heavenly peace for all people and who later announced, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.”

Israeli genocide into its second year and continuing has exposed the “collective West” represented by the G7 countries, six of the seven belonging to the Global North – Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and the United States – except for Japan, complicit in the genocide, especially the United States and Britain with their ample material and diplomatic support for Israel and its genocidal war-mongering government led by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Without the primary support of the Biden administration in Washington, the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza very likely would have ended as soon as it began. But apart from the “collective West,” countries of the Global North, except for a few such as Ireland and Spain, by not speaking out forcefully against the Israeli genocide and taking adequate measures to compel its ending and hold the Israeli leaders accountable, are no less complicit. As Professor John Mearsheimer, co-author with Stephen Walt of The Israel Lobby, recently wrote,

Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks.

Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide.[3]

At the United Nations the repeated veto by the United States of Security Council resolutions calling for ceasefire in Gaza, a prerequisite for stopping the genocide and enforcing UN resolutions on Palestine, has left the UN bereft of its power in performing its primary responsibility of maintaining peace and security among member-states and justice for people under occupation. When the pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was engaged in examining the request of the Prosecutor made on May 20, 2024 to issue arrest warrants for the Israeli leaders, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant,[4] American lawmakers in the Congress issued threats against the Prosecutor and the Court, though the United States had rescinded its signature in May 2002 from the Rome Statute, the founding document of the ICC. The Prosecutor also requested arrest warrants for the Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, and Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri; they were killed by Israeli military actions in the weeks after the requests made, though the death of Mohammed Diab remains unconfirmed and, therefore, the ICC’s arrest warrant issued for him has not yet been withdrawn.

Lindsey Graham, Republican Senator from South Carolina, denounced the ICC once the pre-trial chamber’s panel of three judges issued the arrest warrants on November 21, 2024 for Netanyahu and Gallant,[5] and speaking few days later on November 27 at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem declared, “The Rome Statute doesn’t apply to Israel, or the United States, or France, or Germany, or Great Britain. Because it wasn’t conceived to come after us.”[6] Into the second year of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Lindsey Graham confirmed what many suspected by announcing from a podium in Jerusalem that the UN system with the International Court of Justice, the ICC, conventions, and treaties taken together representing international law as the guarantor for peace, security, and justice among states and nations (peoples) in the world was meant only for the Global South and, hence, since its founding in 1945 was a scam perpetrated by the Global North to perpetuate its colonialist-imperialist interests by other means.

Senator Graham’s remark about the ICC, along side those of President Biden and former President now President-elect Trump denouncing the ICC in issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, have left little room to doubt that the Global South has been hoodwinked by the “collective West”, if not the entire Global North, into believing that international relations/politics within the UN system was based on the principle of equality under the rule of international law and not, as in the odiously concocted phrase “rules based order” pushed by Americans and their partners in the “collective West” since the end of the Cold War with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. If the UN remains a feeble witness of Israeli genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the rest of Occupied Palestinian Territories, and unable or prevented by the “collective West” from stopping Israel of making the former Palestine Mandate into an exclusive and expansionist Jewish State as Greater Israel, it will be a replay of the League of Nations that floundered and collapsed in the lead up to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Israel was established by the UN with partitioning of the Palestine Mandate, and yet the persistent violation with impunity by Israel as a UN member of the Principles contained in the organization’s Charter provides sufficient proof of how impotent the UN is or has become. Israel has effectively rendered fatuous the promise and hope of mankind in the aftermath of the Second World War, as stated in the Preamble of its Charter —

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,…

to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained,… (etcetera)

… have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.

Since Israeli genocide has not been stopped, international law is in abeyance, the collective West remains complicit in the genocide, the regional conflict ignited by the Israeli genocide is at the threshold of escalating into potentially a wider war going global, and this is all because, as in the case of Canada, the “collective West” and by extension the Global North, is morally bankrupt.

ii]

The Global North is made up of the western peninsula (Europe) of the Eurasian land mass, the North American continent north of the river Rio Grande, and the once British colonial outposts in the southern hemisphere of Australia and New Zealand with about twenty percent of the global population. The Global South is practically the rest of the world, which means almost the entire continent of South America, the continent of Africa, the entirety, minus Europe, of the Eurasian landmass – including, West Asia and South Asia, the land bridge on China’s southern boundary into Southeast Asian archipelagoes (Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and the Pacific islands) and Japan with eighty percent of the global population.

The physical divide between the Global North and the Global South is geographical primarily, and in terms of population divided “racially” (a term that was once commonly used to distinguish people in terms of their ethnic origins) between European being “Caucasian” and “white”, and non-European meaning “non-Caucasian” and “non-white” or “coloured race(s)”.

But in terms of the mortal wound that runs through Bethlehem, because of Israeli genocide continuing into its second year in Gaza and the rest of Occupied Palestine, and what this birth city of Jesus symbolizes for Christians, Muslims, and people of other faith traditions who revere Jesus, the division between the Global North and the Global South has become ominous and hideous.

In the Global North radical secularism over the past 20-plus decades hollowed out Christianity and the theological foundation of its belief system. Europe not too long ago in modern history was known as Christendom and, accordingly, Europe’s self-identity culturally and civilizationally was distinct from others. But the hollowing out of Christianity in Europe in the decades after the 1789 French revolution, and the effects of so-called “scientific” ideas of Marx, Darwin, Freud and others that came later and worked their way into the higher criticism of the Bible deconstructed Christianity in Christendom. About such hollowing out of Christianity in Europe, the late Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI while he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (1927-2022) said in a 2004 lecture and later published in Without Roots the following:

The final element of the European identity is religion. I do not wish to enter into the complex discussion of recent years, but to highlight one issue that is fundamental to all cultures: respect for that which another group holds sacred, especially respect for the sacred in the highest sense, for God, which one can reasonably expect to find even among those who are not willing to believe in God. When this respect is violated in a society, something essential is lost. In our contemporary society, thank goodness, anyone who dishonors the faith of Israel, its image of God, or its great figures must pay a fine. The same holds true for anyone who dishonors the Koran and the convictions of Islam. But when it comes to Jesus Christ and that which is sacred to Christians, instead, freedom of speech becomes the supreme good. The argument has been made that restricting freedom of speech would jeopardize or even abolish tolerance and freedom overall. There is one major restriction on freedom of speech, however; it cannot destroy the honor and the dignity of another person. Lying or denying human rights is not freedom.

This case illustrates a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological (emphasis added).[7]

A recent extreme example of the disrespect and mocking of Christianity’s core belief that Cardinal Ratzinger spoke about was the tableau of the Last Supper of Jesus presented in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games; another earlier example was that of the American artist Andres Serrano immersing a crucifix with Jesus on the cross in a bottle filled with his urine. This sacrilegious artwork titled “Immersion” (or Piss Christ) was the winner of an art’s competition in 1988 sponsored by an agency of the United States government, the National Endowment for the Arts, and, perhaps shockingly as a sign of approving Serrano’s irreverent artwork, Pope Francis invited him among other artists for a gathering in 2023 at the Vatican to celebrate art.[8] Some western art critic, mimicking John Stuart Mill’s argument on free speech, might state that unless art as satire is “pushed to an extreme” in public testing freedom of expression, as are these two examples of mocking Jesus, and if found limiting in extreme cases would therefore be limiting in all cases.

But in whichever side of such controversy surrounding the hollowing out of Christianity resulting from radical secularism people – Christians and non-Christians – in the Global North adopts, as did Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Pope Francis respectively, it is incontrovertible that the view of Christians in the Global North is at variance with that of Christians in the Global South. The roots of this variance lies in the history of Christianity as it was spread to new lands and continents inhabited by different “races”, when discovered by Europeans in the period referred to in European history as the Age of Discovery and Explorations beginning in the mid-fifteenth century. The Cross was planted by the Sword across much of the Global South by European adventurers and explorers financed by the crowned heads, both Catholic and Protestant, of kingdoms in Europe.

European settlers colonized the “new world” and converted indigenous populations, for example as in the archipelago named Philippines after King Philip II of Castile in 1543 by a Spanish explorer, Ruy López de Villalobos. In this process over several centuries Christianity in the Global South, outside of its birthplace and immediate surrounding territory of West Asia, Greece, Italy, and adjacent lands of Africa during the 1st and 2nd centuries of the Christian Era, carried the imprimatur of Europe. Jesus was Europeanized. His iconic figure in art and sculpture became that of a “white” man of Caucasian origin. This representation of Jesus, later in cinema as a blonde-haired and blue-eyed divinity, became so deeply embedded in the minds of European colonizers and those colonized that race bigotry or racism, as human failing, unavoidably seeped into the theology and practice of Christianity brought by Europeans to non-Europeans in the Global South.

When Europe as Christendom split into two, Catholics and Protestants, in the sixteenth century the latent race bigotry seeded within European Christianity gained energy as sectarianism became a feature of Protestant churches. Sectarianism gave the impetus for theological justifications needed by Protestants in providing legitimacy to their respective national churches, since their renunciation of the ecclesiastical authority of the Pope and the Vatican at the head of the Roman Catholic Church resulted in the ferocity of Rome’s response in the beginning of the Reformation and its religious wars. This schism within Christianity became irreconcilable and the flame that ignited its spread splitting asunder the Roman Church was the contention over ecclesiastical authority, which ultimately meant for reformers the authority of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, took precedence over and above the authority of the Pope and the Roman Church, and how the Bible was read, interpreted, believed in as inspired by God, or was taken literally as His word. Protestant reformation succeeded in the northwest corner of Europe, got entrenched in England with the Puritans in the seventeenth century, and through them imported to the North American continent. It was, as Barbara Tuchman astutely observed, the “Puritans’ mania for the Old Testament developed directly out of their experience of persecution by the Established Church”,[9] and this mania was the seedling that took form in the aberrant theology of Christian Zionism. Puritans were Calvinists, and according to Donald M. Lewis,

At the center of their theological understanding was an emphasis upon God’s freedom to choose both nations and individuals to perform his will. Thus divine election of the Jews was not something set aside by God in spite of their unwillingness to embrace Jesus of Nazerath as Messiah. They were convinced that just as the Jews were an “elect” nation, so too other nations were called and elected by God and for the Puritans it was clear that Protestant Britain (and for many, subsequently, a Protestant America) was an elect nation with special responsibility to seek the conversion of the Jews to Christianity.[10]

Herein is found the story of how Calvinism imported into North America by Puritans seized the minds of a large segment of Americans, and some of their counterpart in Canada, who saw themselves as people of the “new Israel” in the “new world.” Conrad Cherry, a distinguished professor of religious studies and founder of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, described the American Revolution and the Civil War as “revelatory” building blocks of the republic and what this meant in his book God’s New Israel, as follows:

The first was a moment when God delivered the colonies from Pharaoh Britain and the ‘evils’ of the Old World, revealed the purposes of the nation, and adopted the Young Republic as an example and instrument of freedom and republican government for the rest of the world. The Civil War was the nation’s first real ‘time of testing’ when God tried the permanence of the Union or, in some interpretations, brought judgment upon his wayward people.[11]

And furthermore,

Beheld from the angle of governing mythology, the history of the American civil religion is a history of the conviction that the American people are God’s New Israel, his newly chosen people. The belief that America has been elected by God for a special destiny in the world has been the focus of American sacred ceremonies, the inaugural addresses of our presidents, the sacred scriptures of the civil religion. It has been so persuasive a motif in the national life that the word ‘belief’ does not really capture the dynamic role that it has played for the American people, for it passed into the ‘realm of motivational myths.’[12]

It was in the Global North, principally in the English-speaking countries where Puritan-Calvinism took roots among Protestant Christians and among them was birthed the aberrant theology of Christian Zionism.[13] Christian Zionism became the parent, then the guardian, and then the bulwark of the Zionist ideology of a colonial-settler state, Israel, for European Jews in Palestine. The entire Zionist project from Theodor Herzl onward was built upon and sustained by lies, as I explained in “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”;[14] it was tantamount to inverting Protestant “evangelicalism” into its opposite, not merely into a misguided heresy but the work of antichrist.[15]

In his groundbreaking study of American politics and making of the new Republican party with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 brought about by his bold “southern strategy” of winning states in the South, also known as the “Bible belt”, which had formed the Confederacy during the Civil War, Kevin Phillips in American Theocracy discussed what he saw in making was “a twenty-first-century American disenlightenment”. In the “Bible belt” are tens of millions of Protestant evangelicals, who are also ardent Christian Zionists, and they have been courted frantically by Republicans in the post-Nixon era since without their votes, money, and activism no presidential candidate can hope winning the majority of Electoral College votes to gain the presidency. And the strategic importance of Christian Zionist votes in the Bible belt and beyond in American politics is the making of American theocracy. Kevin Phillips noted how the work of stalwart evangelical preachers, such as Tim LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, John Hagee, through books, sermons in churches, and “televangelicalism” relentlessly spread the Biblical interpretation “of a defrocked Anglican priest, John Nelson Darby, who visited the United States eight times during the 1860s and 1870s, and ultimately gained far more adherents in the New World than he ever did in his native British Isles.”[16] Phillips wrote,

In a nutshell, what Darby proclaimed—and what spread like wildfire through the hugely successful books of Cyrus Scofield (the 1909 Scofield Reference Bible), Hal Lindsey (The Late Great Planet Earth, fifteen million sales through many editions since the 1960s), and Tim LaHaye (the Left Behind series, with multimedia sales in the sixty million range)—is a world of turmoil now in the last of seven periods (dispensations) that will end with the rapture of true believers suddenly pulled into the sky to be with Christ. Next follows the seven-year tribulation, when the satanic antichrist will arise in Europe and seize world power. At its end Christ and his armies will triumph in a great battle in Har-Megiddo, near Haifa in what is now Israel. From Jerusalem Christ will proclaim the start of a one-thousand-year reign of peace.[17]

Christian Zionists want to hurry the return of Christ and for this to occur, according to their aberrant theology of “dispensationalism” propounded by Darby and spread by Scofield, Jews scattered in their diaspora are required to in gather in the holy land in hastening Christ’s second-coming. This version of Jesus as Christ in Puritan-Calvinism has no antecedent in pre-Reformation Christianity of the Roman Catholic Church, nor in Orthodox Christianity of the Eastern rites. Here one might take note, as I described in “Theodor Herzl and Pope Pius X”, when Herzl went to Rome for an audience with the Pope in January 1904, Pius X met with the leader of the World Zionist Organization he founded in 1897 and politely dismissed his request for the Vatican support for the Zionist project in Palestine, which was then a part of the Ottoman Caliphate and Empire.[18] Roman Catholic Church, despite changes brought about by Vatican II in its official doctrinal view respecting Jews post-Holocaust and since, remains circumspect about Christian Zionism and the politics of Israel bent upon ethnic cleansing and unconcerned about committing war crimes and genocide with impunity.

As Christendom extended its power, influence, and possessions over the Global South, one of the most troubling problems that gnawed at the heart of its faith and theology was that of slavery and trade in coloured people as slaves. The residual effects of this centuries old problem remained despite its abolition. It surfaced memorably during the final decades of the last century as the majority black population struggled in South Africa against the “apartheid” system of white minority rule. The South African “racist” or minority-“race” based rule was until its end supported by the Dutch Reformed Church of Calvinist origin. Bishop Desmond Tutu of the Anglican Church in South Africa, on the contrary, became one of the staunchest Christian opponents of the “apartheid” regime. Britain and the United States were the last hold outs in support of the South African white minority rule. The inherent racism of the Dutch Reformed Church during the struggle of South African blacks for equal rights could not be masked by its Calvinist theology of “predestination” and of the “elect.”

In the complicity with Israeli genocide there is more than latent racism at play in the “Puritan-Calvinism” embedded in Christian Zionism; there is the history of politics of racial violence in colonialism and imperialism of the white Caucasian race in the “collective West” that converge with the Old Testament’s genocidal commands – for example, in Exodus 17:14 Yahweh, the God of Israel, declares “I will erase the memory of Amalek from under heaven”, and other similar blood-chilling commands and edicts from the bronze age abound in the Torah, or the Books of Moses – that are in use to commit ethnic cleansing and extermination of Palestinians, Christians and Muslims, in modern Israel. In the global setting of the General Assembly countries of the Global North, with less than a third of the total number of member-states in the UN, stand unabashedly exposed defending Israel’s persistent violations of international humanitarian laws and convention on genocide when abstaining or voting against draft motions calling for ceasefire in Gaza and enforcement of past UN resolutions pertaining to Israel’s unlawful conduct in the territories of Occupied Palestine.

The frontier of the horrific divide now between the Global North and the Global South that runs through Bethlehem is lacerated once again metaphorically-speaking by the blood of the child Jesus born there and crucified in Jerusalem. Here is the frontier where Jesus is to be found in the rubble of human parts and building materials generated by Israelis re-enacting their three millennium old genocidal history in the twentyfirst century with the complicity of a majority of Christians in the Global North against the people of the Global South. Here through the land where Jesus walked and preached runs the frontier of the Global divide, as we might recall the words of Reverend Munther Isaac, a Palestinian-Christian, spoken at his church in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve 2023:

Here in Palestine the Bible is weaponized against us… Here we confront the Theology of the Empire, a disguise for superiority, supremacy, chosenness and entitlement… The Theology of the Empire becomes a powerful tool to mask oppression under the cloak of divine sanction. It speaks of land without people, it divides people into Us and Them, it dehumanizes and demonizes the concept of the land without people again, even though they knew too well that the land had people and not just any people but a very special people. Theology of the Empire calls for emptying Gaza just like it called for the ethnic cleansing in 1948 a miracle or a Divine Miracle as they called it. It calls for us Palestinians now to go to Egypt, maybe Jordan. Why not just the sea?[19]

iii]

What good has it been to say “never again” for the past eight decades since the Holocaust by people in the Global North, when they watch in real time the victims of the Holocaust perpetrate the same to another people not responsible for what was done to their people in another continent? This is the haunting question the Palestinians, as victims of Israeli genocide, and people of the Global South ask to which there is no answer.

It did not have to be this way. What was needed was a voice representing a people, a country, a member-state of the UN from the collective West, preferably one among the G7 countries representing the Global North, to break rank, to speak truth to power, to redeem the promise of the UN system and international law and covenants, to stand with the people of Palestine under occupation and faced with genocide. Canada could have been that voice, that people, that country, with a record of faithful service to the UN since its inauguration in October 1945.

Canada was a founding member of the UN. John Peters Humphrey, a Canadian, was responsible for the first draft of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Justice Ivan Rand of the Supreme Court of Canada was the Canadian delegate nominated by prime minister Mackenzie King in May 1947 to represent Canada in the 11-member UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP); Justice Rand’s vote turned out to be crucial in the passage of the majority report in the Special Committee recommending partition of Palestine Mandate and put into effect by UN Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947.[20] Lester Pearson, as Minister for External Affairs, and with full support of prime minister Louis St Laurent, was responsible for negotiating an end to the Suez war of 1956 and improvising UN’s role in peacekeeping and peacemaking for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. General E.L.M Burns of the Canadian army and later a diplomat, served as the first commander of the UN peacekeeping forces in the Middle East in 1956 following the Suez war. George Ignatieff, diplomat and later Chancellor of the University of Toronto, was Canada’s permanent representative at the UN under prime minister Pearson during the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war; he cast Canada’s vote for the unanimous adoption of the Security Council Resolution 242 in November 1967, which remains the basis for the final and permanent settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, though it has been mauled by the series of veto of the United States to shield Israel from UN’s accountability and now trashed by Israeli genocide.

This effort of serving the UN to deepen and widen respect for international law and bring the UN promise of peace and security within reach of more people globally despite the violent history of mankind, which distinguished the career of Lester Pearson during his tenure as external affairs minister and prime minister, became the hallmark of Canadian foreign policy and a source of pride for Canadians and their commitment to the UN principles as described in the Charter. Indeed, the architecture of Canadian foreign policy rested upon a moral foundation that was firmly rooted in Christian faith and values of the majority of Canadians. This tradition in turn continued in the immediate decade when the Cold War formally ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the final days of 1991.

Jean Chretien cut his teeth in politics as a parliamentary assistant to Pearson, and as prime minister (1993-2003) was responsible in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwanda genocide and the Balkan crisis in responding to the challenge made to the international community by Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, to build a consensus in preventing and protecting people faced with massive violations of human rights and humanitarian laws. Chretien announced during the UN Millennium Assembly in September 2000 that his government would assist in launching an Independent Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) to meet the Secretary-General’s challenge, and authorized his foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy to direct the work of the commission. Axworthy nominated the distinguished public intellectual Michael Ignatieff as the Canadian representative in the commission that in December 2001 presented to Kofi Annan report of the ICISS, which became the basis of the UN principle “Responsibility to Protect” or R2P. Similarly, during Chretien’s tenure the Canadian government stepped in with support and resources under the direction of foreign minister Axworthy to successfully finalize the draft of the Rome Statute and have it adopted by the required two-third votes of UN member states. The task was handed to a senior member in Axworthy’s department, Philippe Kirsch, an international lawyer and diplomat with prior assignments at the UN. The eventual vote ratifying the Rome treaty of 1998 gave birth to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the long sought permanent successor to the Nuremberg court that tried German war criminals in 1945-46, and Kirsch nominated by Canada to be a judge of the ICC was appointed by a majority votes of the Assembly of State Parties to the Rome treaty as the first president of the 18-member panel of judges with which the court was launched in March 2003.

But the most outstanding legacy of Chretien as prime minister, a legacy of courage and statesmanship, was his decision not to make Canada join the “coalition of the willing” assembled by the American president George W. Bush and the British prime minister Tony Blair on fraudulent claims of Iraq under Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction, and that it was urgently necessary to bring about regime change in Baghdad through “shock and awe” of an overwhelming military force. Lloyd Axworthy recalled the high drama in early 2003 over Iraq’s disarmament,

In the walk-up to the military invasion of Iraq, the UN was at global centre stage. The debates at the Security Council were the stuff of great drama, as contending views on how to achieve disarmament in Iraq were duked out by foreign ministers… The U.S hurled about charges of irrelevancy, countered by claims for the legitimacy that only the UN can endow to any use of force.

Our UN ambassador Paul Heinbrecker, was a regular feature on Canadian newscasts in his role as the carrier of a compromise solution to the permanent-five divide, and our prime minister took a principled stand against Canadian participation in the invading military force because of the lack of a UN resolution—a position endorsed by the majority of Canadians but severely attacked by various editorialists, politicians and certain business community representatives, a debate that again revealed the ongoing tensions inherent in trying to travel a distinctive Canadian path.[21]

“A distinctive Canadian path” was a morally right path in a world in which great powers, minor state and transnational actors trafficked in unlawful activities, regularly engaged in variations of nineteenth century gunboat diplomacy, threatened and engaged in wars regardless of the perils of escalation toward nuclear confrontation while tearing down the fragile fabric of international and humanitarian laws. Chretien set the precedent that Canada would not, and need not, comply with any call for military action by its traditional great power allies – Britain, France, the United States – unless and only when such a call was made under UN authorization. The genesis of this tradition indeed began with Louis St Laurent and Lester Pearson when they opposed in the UN the collusion of Britain, France, and Israel and their use of force in the 1956 Suez war with the likely calculus of the colluding leaders that it might trigger regime change in Cairo with the overthrow of the Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel Nasser.

But second year into the Israeli genocide in Gaza, a far diminished Canada since the retirement of former Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien in December 2003, could only be found to state what amounts to a tepid pablum of inanities as Canadian policy on “key issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” adhered to by the present Liberal government of prime minister Justin Trudeau.[22] This insipid banal word salad is a cruel example of platitude as policy that Israeli leaders contemptuously dismiss, while doubling-down in their own policy of plowing ahead with genocide in Gaza. The Canadian policy on Israeli-Palestinian conflict devoid of any reference to “genocide”, “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” is proof of Canada’s diminished status as a vassal state of once the British empire and now the American empire. And yes, Canada could not find its voice through her elected leaders, the prime minister and leader of the opposition, during this past fifteen months to utter the prohibited word “genocide” and denounce it as it continues, for reasons Reverend Munther Isaac, the Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem, mentioned once again in addressing the Global North from the wreckage of Occupied Palestine in his 2024 Christmas Eve message, as follows:

They tell us, “never again.”

“Never again,” to us is only a slogan. It’s actually empty words, honestly. Because “never again” should mean “never again to all peoples.” “Never again” has become “yet again.”

“Yet again” to supremacy. “Yet again” to racism. And “yet again” to genocide.

And sadly, “never again” has become “yet again” for the weaponization of the Bible and the silence and complicity of the Western church. “Yet again” for the church siding with power, the church siding with the empire…

It says a lot, when you deny and ignore and refrain from using the language of genocide. This says a lot. It actually reveals hypocrisy. For you lectured us for years on international law and human rights. It reveals your hypocrisy. It says a lot on how you look at us Palestinians. It says a lot about your moral and ethical standards. It says everything about who you are when you turn away from the truth, when you refuse to name oppression for what it is.

Or could it be—that they’re not calling it a genocide—could it be that if reality was acknowledged for what it is—that it is a genocide—that it would be an acknowledgment of your guilt? For this war was a war that so many defended as just and self-defense. And now you can’t even bring yourself to apologize.[23]

Canada is no longer a member-state in the UN that it once was until lately, respected by just about all other member-states regardless of political differences between countries of the Global North and the Global South. Since retirement of Chretien in December 2003, Canada’s reputation in the UN began to soften. This softening accelerated during the tenure of the current Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau. The sad and troubling reality is the world is in transition, in an epochal shift in the relationship between the Global North and the Global South that has been put to an overdrive by the US-led EU/NATO proxy-war in Ukraine against Russia since February 2022, and the crisis in West Asia that erupted with the Israeli genocide in Gaza in October 2023.

The precedent Chretien set during the lead up to the Iraq war in 2003 was most needed to be followed in the lead up to proxy-war against Russian in Ukraine. Canada should not have become a party in the war against Russia, a nuclear power, regardless of being a NATO member. There was not an Article 5 situation of a NATO member faced with aggression, since Ukraine is not a NATO member, and the claim of defending Ukrainian democracy was a flat out lie since an elected president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in a coup d’etat orchestrated by the United States in February 2014 to bring about regime change. The position adopted by Trudeau’s minority government re-elected in 2021 and supported by Conservative party as the official opposition was full throated support for the proxy war in Ukraine and its government infested with members from the extremist right with their historic links to Germany under Hitler through the legacy of Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian fascist allied with the Nazis. This has placed Canada in a shamefully awkward situation in the UN where the majority of member-states from the Global South are favourably disposed to Russia in this war. The great embarrassment for the country, witnessed by rest of the world, was when the Canadian parliament greeted a nonagenerian Canadian-Ukrainian, Yaroslav Hunka, who had served as an active duty soldier in the Waffen-SS during the last World War, with a standing ovation of all the 338 members in the presence of prime minister Trudeau and Zelensky, the visiting Ukrainian president, in September 2023. Subsequently, the speaker of the parliament Anthony Rota, resigned in embarrassment for introducing Hunka as a Canadian war hero fighting against Russia (then the Soviet Union), an attempt by the parliament to whip up support among the people for the proxy war in Ukraine and fuel Russophobia, which turned out to be an illustration of how grossly historical illiterates are the elected representatives of Canadians in their parliament.

There has been only a feeble muted display of dissent in the parliament over the position adopted by the government with the official opposition in agreement avoiding any criticism of Israel since the genocide in Gaza was launched by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. The Canadian commander of the peacekeeping forces in Rwanda during the Rwandan genocide and former Senator, retired General Romeo Dallaire, went on public record when asked if what is occurring in Gaza is a genocide, he replied emphatically, “yes it is a genocide in Gaza.”[24] And on the floor of the Canadian Senate, an Independent and lonely Senator Yuen Pau Woo from British Columbia spoke somberly in the time allotted to him by the Speaker against the ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied territories, and his words spoken in the red chamber of the Canadian parliament went unreported in the mainstream national media.[25]

The dead, the mutilated, the orphaned, the starving children of Gaza and the people faced with genocide in Occupied Palestine are testimony to the moral bankruptcy of the Global North. The mortal wound that runs through Bethlehem and with Christ abandoned in the rubble also testify how an aberrant theology of Puritan-Calvinist Zionism has made of Christian Zionists in Canada, as in the United States, caricatures of the abominable Pharisees Jesus denounced during his ministry in the holy land. There is no mourning in most Christian churches for victims of Israeli genocide, while Christian Zionist pastors richly paid for by Zionist lobbyists fill their churches with propaganda to hasten the second-coming of Christ in the holy land now swollen with the remains of the dead and dying of his people genocided by Israelis. Framed by the agony of Palestinians the moral foundation of Canadian foreign policy, and it might be said also of her domestic policy, lies shattered. It will take a long time for repair, if at all.

_________________

Notes:

[1] See “Christ under the rubble: A Liturgy of Lament,” transcript of Rev. Munther Isaac’s sermon in the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve 2023: https://salimmansur.substack.com/p/christ-under-the-rubble

[2] See Rev. Munther Isaac’s Christmas message from Bethlehem in Occupied Palestine on Christmas Eve 2024: https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2024/12/25/739698/christ-still-under-rubble-gaza-palestinian-pastor-christmas-message

[3] John J. Mearsheimer, “The Moral Bankruptcy of the West” : https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/the-moral-bankruptcy-of-the-west

[4] Statement of ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan: https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-karim-aa-khan-kc-applications-arrest-warrants-situation-state

[5] See the ICC press release: https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-pre-trial-chamber-i-rejects-state-israels-challenges

[6] See X: https://x.com/kahlissee/status/1863167615490728082?s=51

Also see: https://x.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1861872540303433766?mx=2; and

[7] Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello Pera, Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2006) p. 78.

[8] See https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/amp/news/254648/pope-francis-addresses-artists-including-creator-of-blasphemous-crucifix-photo ; and

[9] B.W. Tuchman, Bible And Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984), p. 124.

[10] Donald M. Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 33.

[11] C. Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 11.

[12] Ibid., p. 19.

[13] See Donald M. Lewis, op. cit., Part One, pp. 25-103.

[14] Salim Mansur, “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus: The Chronicle of Zionist lies and their implosion foreseen”: https://salimmansur.substack.com/p/falsus-in-uno-falsus-in-omnibus

[15] On the difference between mainline Protestantism and Protestant “evangelicalism”, see: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jesus/evangelicals/evmain.html#

[16] K. Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 252.

[17] Ibid., p. 253.

[18] Salim Mansur, “Theodor Herzl and Pope Pius X: Political Zionism and its war against history” : https://salimmansur.substack.com/p/theodor-herzl-and-pope-pius-x

[19] See the transcript of Rev. Munther Isaac’s sermon, “Christ under the rubble: A Liturgy of Lament” : https://salimmansur.substack.com/p/christ-under-the-rubble

[20] On Justice Ivan Rand and UNSCOP, see William Kaplan, Canadian Maverick: The Life and Times of Ivan C. Rand (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), chap. 6, pp. 221-251.

[21] Lloyd Axworthy, Navigating a New World: Canada’s Global Future (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), pp. 234-5.

[22] See the statement on the website of the government of Canada: https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/international_relations-relations_internationales/mena-moan/israeli-palestinian_policy-politique_israelo-palestinien.aspx?lang=eng

[23] See Rev. Munther Isaac’s 2024 Christmas Eve message:

[24] See Romeo Dallaire : https://www.justpeaceadvocates.ca/release-dallaire-calls-gaza-genocide/

[25] See Canadian Senator Yuen Pau Woo speak in the Senate: