Terror's Apologists

Sadly, there are plenty:

“Honest people must ask themselves ‘why is the je*ish occupation lying about many of the barbaric actions that took place Saturday?” said one meme making its way around social media in Canada. “They are using these made-up acts of cruelty and barbarism to tell the world a mini-Holocaust just happened to them again.”

The kind of people who use "y'all" are the emotionally stunted, pretentious sort who thrive on smugness.

Case in point:

On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted on X: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”

 So far, Sharif’s post has been liked 100,000 times and reposted nearly 23,000 times—by, among others, The Washington Post’s global opinions editor, Karen Attiah.

 The point was: Don’t be squeamish. Never mind the Jewish girl being pulled by her hair with blood streaming between her legs. Never mind the women being raped beside the corpses of their friends at a music festival. Never mind the children and babies snatched from their parents.

If you can’t handle it, if you condemn it without a preamble or equivocation, you’re an apologist for the Zionist colonizers.

All this is a good reminder that when people say something, they often mean it, and we should believe them, or at least take them seriously. Fancy-sounding academic jargon is not a curious intellectual exercise. Words make worlds.

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In 2016, shouts of “shame” came from the Conservative benches as the newly elected Trudeau government reinstated funding to UNRWA, a UN agency oft cited as a back door for terrorism funding.

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“For years, UNRWA has been manipulated by Gaza’s corrupt Hamas government in flagrant contradiction of the UN stated policy of neutrality,” said former Conservative cabinet minister Peter Kent. He would also tell CBC News he was “horrified” at the decision.

Stephen Harper’s government cut off the UNRWA entirely in 2010, citing it as an unchecked avenue for terror indoctrination. The agency’s main focus is a network of 715 schools serving Palestinian refugees, and multiple reports both then and now have found curricula filled with materials referring to Israel as the “Zionist Occupation” and praising suicide bombers as “martyrs.”

But the Liberals reinstated the $25 million-a-year funding anyway, with then-minister of international development Marie-Claude Bibeau saying there were “robust control measures” to ensure the cash isn’t used for anything unseemly.

That funding would continue even after a leaked UN report in 2019 framed the organization as being racked by corruption and abuse. UNRWA head Pierre Krahenbuhl and a small coterie of senior management were accused of “sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other abuses of authority, for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent, and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives,” according to the report, which was obtained by Agence France-Press.

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And it is set to continue still, even as many of Canada’s peer countries audited their Palestinian aid streams to identify any money that might be going to Hamas. On Oct. 9, the European Commission announced an “urgent review of the EU’s assistance for Palestine.”

But the Ministry of International Development told Postmedia this week that Canadian funding would continue moving into Gaza just the same – albeit while “ensuring that no money goes into the hands of Hamas,” said spokesman Alex Tétreault.

In fact, Gaza will be getting more money than usual. Just five months ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government had announced it was increasing its UNRWA payments, citing them as necessary to “peace and prosperity in the Middle East.” In addition to the $100 million Canada had pledged over four years, Ottawa tacked on another $3 million in “emergency aid,” some of which was earmarked for Gaza.

According to former Canadian ambassador to Israel Vivian Bercovici — a perennial critic of UNRWA — Tétreault is describing something that isn’t possible.

“This is an outright lie,” she wrote in a Tuesday social media post. “You give the money and there is no transparency or accountability. None.”