Ian Coopet
Algemeiner, Sept. 13, 2024
“… selling a nominal amount of weapons to Israel, which was fighting an existential war against Iranian-backed terrorists on multiple fronts, while trying to exert leverage to free civilian hostages, was somehow beyond the pale.”
After nearly nine years under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Canada’s foreign policy has drifted into a kind of high school debating club — where policy positions on foreign affairs are usually taken on the fly, and solely for domestic consumption. Where Israel is concerned, the end result has been an increasingly alienated Jewish community.
In the wake of Hamas’ October 7 terror attack, the Canadian government sounded the right notes, with Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland calling “for the [Israeli] hostages who were seized in this vile, horrific attack to be released immediately.” Not surprisingly, the terrorists didn’t comply with her polite request.
And the sympathy and goodwill for Israel quickly dissipated once the Jewish State began its inevitable and necessary military response.
By mid-October 2023, Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly and her Parliamentary Secretary Rob Oliphant were gullibly parroting talking points from Hamas’ Ministry of Health, which claimed that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli hospital, killing 500 people.
Days later, in a weekend press release that got lost in the news cycle, Defense Minister Bill Blair grudgingly accepted the facts: that the initial story was a lie, and the “hospital bombing” was in fact a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that landed in a parking lot. Neither Joly nor Oliphant ever apologized.
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