Canada's Trudeau Government Imperilling Security

"That's super-concerning. It means that there's a disconnect between the partner agencies engaged in the processing of foreign nationals seeking entry into Canada. It's really alarming."

"This is yet another example of why we need to have [a] serious review of how policing, security and intelligence are undertaken in this country and how to coordinate it and make it more efficient and effective." 

"When it happens 46 per cent of the time, why the hell even bother having CBSA then? Why did you ask them in the first place if you’re basically flipping a coin? This is yet another example of why we need to have serious oversight and constant audit of CBSA and its relationship with other agencies."

"That’s not how migration and border security should work."

"To me it's unacceptable. As a Canadian I expect more, and I think other Canadians expect that our federal law enforcement, intelligence and border security agencies can work seamlessly, share information seamlessly. And if there are administrative or legal hurdles, then that's something  Parliament needs to look at."

Kelly Sundberg, criminologist, former border services officer, associate professor, department of economics, justice and policy studies, Mount Royal University, Calgary

"[The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) goal is to] prevent inadmissible foreign nationals or permanent residents from entering or remaining in Canada."

"It should be noted that not all risk is captured through enforcement actions, nor can it be fully monitored through surveillance."

"Having these individuals in Canada could have negative consequences for the country’s reputation or result in actions that are more difficult to intercept and act on [e.g. business espionage or threatening Canadian residents], particularly as most of these individuals are short-term visitors."

"One individual with an inconclusive screening result was authorized entry to Canada but was later alleged to be a member of a terrorist organization and ended up in the Removal inventory [for deportation]; as such, the risk to public safety of this individual being in Canada was potentially very high."

Internal audit of the Immigration National Security Screening Program

According to an internal audit of the Immigration National Security Screening Program, close to half of all foreign nationals who were flagged by Canadian security agencies to the Immigration Department for their ties to serious offences, including war crimes, espionage and terrorism were nonetheless permitted to take  up residency in Canada between the years 2014 and 2019, the years the audit covered. Immigration officials, despite warning, ultimately took it upon themselves to approve temporary or permanent residency or refugee applications for a whopping 46 percent of the over 7,000 cases for which the Canadian Border Security Agency recommended against applicants being allowed into the country.

 

Quietly published earlier this year by the CBSA, the data emerged through a study meant to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of the country's Immigration National Security Screening Program operated by Canada Border Security Agency's national security screening division. A program in tandem collaboration with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) with a goal to "prevent inadmissible foreign nationals or permanent residents from entering or remaining in Canada". They both get a failing grade in spades.

A young person waits with their families' belongings after getting off a bus and waiting for a taxi to cross into Canada at Roxham Road, an unofficial crossing point from New York State to Quebec, in Plattsburgh, New York, U.S. March 25, 2023. (Carlos Osorio/REUTERS)

Security screeners are tasked with reviewing temporary or permanent residence applications or refugee claims that Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) flags, as posing a potential security risk. Screeners must assess the potential inadmissibility of applicants under sections of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, dealing with serious crimes such as espionage, terrorism, crimes against humanity, or organized criminality - and then must submit a recommendation to IRCC officers.

 

Although the greater majority of applications are positively screened, then allowed into the country, of the 7,141 instances where security screeners forwarded a "non favourable" recommendation to IRCC during the years covered by the audit, 3,314 were permitted into Canada, according to the report. Most of the individuals (numbering 1,887) were allowed into Canada as a result of another government department asserting their applications be approved "in the national interest for high-profile foreign nations who are inadmissible", through a "public-policy exemption", noted the audit. 

 

Some of the people who got off buses from New York City to Plattsburgh, N.Y. in the hours after the deadline before strict new border rules in Canada decided to try their luck at Roxham Road anyway. (Carlos Osorio/REUTERS)

IRCC spokesperson Nancy Caron stated that if an officer determines an applicant is inadmissible to Canada on serious grounds such as violating human rights or organized crime, an exemption can be granted if "it is deemed that the entry of this person is in Canada's interest." "Public policy exemptions are issued on a case-b-case and exceptional basis", further remarked IRCC in a statement. 177 such applicants were approved when IRCC disagreed with CBSA's assessment.

 

The current audit, pointed out Professor Sundbergm, is another in a series of 'wake-up' calls. If CBSA or another security screening agency feels a foreign national should not be granted permission to enter Canada, that then should be the definitive response, he pointed out reasonably. Two major, unexpected influxes of applications during the five years covered by the audit were highlighted; the first, Operation Syrian Refugee when the Trudeau government resettled over 26,000 Syrians within three months to Canada beginning in 2015.

 

The second represented the sudden influx of 55,000 irregular migrants (illegal entries to Canada) entering at the U.S. border, mostly through the infamous Roxham Road crossing in Quebec between 2017 and 2022 -- and still crossing to the present time, to claim refugee status. In addition, whenever a "inconclusive" finding came back to IRCC from CBSA, the applicant for refugee status was permitted into Canada by IRCC.

 

Of the more than 420,000 applications receiving favourable recommendation from CBSA between 2014 and 2019, 295 were later investigated and set to be deported. Approximately half of the applicants in that group were found to be members of a terrorist organization. Not mentioned is the very real fact that there are thousands of entrants to Canada deemed to be inadmissible and for whom extradition notices have been sent out, but the individuals involved are nowhere to be found although they're somewhere in Canada...

 

The Canada Border Services Agency said its internal review policies and procedures have been 'refined' in light of the granting of permanent residency to a person of 'national security concern.' (CBC)

 

The Start-Up Nation

"Seventy-Five years ago, on the fifth day of Iyar on the Hebrew lunar calendar, which falls on April 26 this year, on the eve of Great Britain pulling out of Palestine, the region's Jewish community declared 'the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel'."

"The Zionist movement was formed to re-establish the ancient Jewish homeland in Judaea, as a refuge for a people who faced centuries of persecution. At the end of the 19th century, the World Zionist Organization began building the institutions that would form the basis of an eventual state."

"Following the Holocaust, Zionism came to be seen not just as a dream, but as an existential imperative for a people who had barely escaped total annihilation."

From ubiquitous carbonated water to drip irrigation for growing crops in the desert, the USB key and anti-missile systems, Israel has a talent for creating things the world wants.

 

Modern-day Israel has distinguished itself as a innovative hub of human creativity, a vast beehive of technological advances as well as an agricultural focus on the art of the possible. In an arid landscape where water is always in short supply, its lack through normal means and natural resources has been rectified by coercing nature to cooperate with enterprising methods in resupply to huge advantage not only to Israel but in sharing its remedies to the rest of the water-scarce world.

 

Ranking highest in the world for per-capita startups, Israel's rate of tech investment has registered as much as 28 times greater than the United States. In the 1980s, the USB stick was invented in Israel. Israeli agricultural scientists popularized the cherry tomato. Smartphones with Waze operate with Israeli code. The brilliant inventive power of Israeli scientists has led to all manner of inventions uniquely Israeli which become technologies with global spread.

 

Translation machines represent a particular Israeli tech inspiration possibly reflective of the many langues aside from the country's national Hebrew, being spoken. Babylon, one of the first software programs offering instantaneous translation of documents and web pages was the work of an Israeli company in 1997. In the 1990s Wizcom Technologies debuted pens able to scan words and translate them to an LCD screen. OrCam Read, a hand-held device, can scan printed pages and read them aloud. 

One of the country's first major technical challenges to face Israeli scientists was how to maximize scarce water resources. Israeli geography is largely desert; almost all sources of surface water arrive through neighbouring territories hostile to Israel. Israel now produces 20 percent more water than required internally, with three major initiatives.

 

Huge desalination plants to repurpose sea water into potable water; a centralized water management system repurposing wastewater, replenishes aquifers and moves awater through a complex system of canals, pipes and reservoirs. Irrigation, the third, a method of agriculture developed in the 1950s where water crops use targeted drips instead of sprinklers. 

 

The Pillcam ESO is used to photograph a patient’s esophagus.

 

Rewalk, a robotic exoskeleton enabling paraplegics to walk, grabbed world attention to gawk at Israeli medical technology. Israeli researchers invented tiny cameras and sensors to be introduced into the human body; disposable 'cameras'-in-a-pill, the PillCam that can be swallowed to allow doctors to view the state of a body's internal organs. An off shoot of Israel's security tech sector. Surveillance cameras, drones and spy cameras, part of Israeli defence technology.

ENvizion Medical based in Tel Aviv created a "smart" feeding tube to help chart its path down the esophagus, meant to prevent health-care providers from accidentally sending the tube into the lungs. Another, a flexible and high-resolution Aer-O-Scope colonoscope sends a tube to scope around the human colon. 

Israel's never-ending concern over hostile neighbours scheming to destroy it by incremental attacks and lethal violence required technology capable of destroying incoming missiles. The country's military poses an advanced catalogue of technologies designed to shoot down missiles; Iron Dome the most famous among them. About 90 percent of incoming rockets and artillery shells are blocked from landing through the latticework of sensors and interceptor missiles along Israel's border.

 

Israel has an advanced catalogue of technologies designed to shoot down missiles from hostile neighbours.

 

A qick reaction missile -- Arrow 3 -- "designed to intercept and destroy the newest, longer-range threats, especially those carrying weapons of mass destruction" has been developed. A tiny anti-missile system to be attached to tanks and armoured vehicles is the Trophy countermeasure system, designed to detect an incoming anti-tank missile and disarm it at the last second with a burst of small projectiles.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbours?

In 2013, Israeli labourers were put to work repairing the security fence that separates Gaza from Israel. A sniper killed one of the workmen and Israel retaliated by bombing Gaza at a number of Hamas sites and where the sniper shot the fence repairman from. Hamas issued a statement condemning Israeli 'aggression'. This is the security fence necessitated by countless suicide bombing incursions from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel that left 900 Israelis dead in the last several decades, young and old, wounding many more.

Israeli army soldiers carry a labourer shot near the Israel and Gaza border to a helicopter.

 

The Israeli workman who was shot dead that day was a civilian contractor who worked for the Israeli Defense Ministry. The day previous, an Israeli police officer had been stabbed and wounded at a West Bank junction. And a few days on, a bomb exploded on a bus in Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv. Minutes before, passengers were warned to exit the bus, a quick appraisal that worked to prevent casualties. 

 

Israel responds ... A Palestinian inspects a Hamas training camp after it was hit by an Israeli air strike in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

There was a wholesale reduction of Palestinian terrorist incursions from the West Bank and Gaza Strip into Israel after the controversial security fence was built. In a sense, the fence, while protecting Israelis and saving countless lives, gave impetus to the slander of Israel as an 'Apartheid State'. The usual Palestinian contortion of reality, where no Jews are permitted to live in the West Bank governed by the Palestinian Authority, while 20 percent of the Israeli population is comprised of Israeli-Palestinians with full citizenship.

The fence has, since its building, fallen into disrepair with gaps and breakages occurring here and there. Upkeep to the fence is ongoing. Recent deadly incursions into Israel by Palestinian terrorists resulted within a two-week span of attacks, in 14 Israelis being killed, knifed or shot to death, as well as vehicular homicide. This led to damaged areas of the fence having to be repaired once again to restore its integrity as a deterrent to deadly violence.

View of a hole in the the security fence, near Mevo Horon, March 30, 2022.

(photo credit: YOSSI ALONI/FLASH90)

Where, on the occasion of the murder of five Israelis by a 29-year-old Palestinian from Jenin, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was heard to condemn the violence, calling for a "permanent, comprehensive and just peace", he and his Fatah party have never stopped inciting Palestinians to violence against Jews. From primary school curricula up to high school and through social media the PA, Fatah and Hamas glorify martyrdom, teaching Palestinian children to view Jews as the enemy.

The only 'permanent, comprehensive and just peace' that the PA's Abbas will countenance in reality is to see Israel defeated in conflict, and the country and its Jewish inhabitants disappear, to enable Palestinians to claim the entire geography as their own, 'from the river to the sea'. More recently, during the confluence of Passover, Easter and Ramadan, violence has once again flared up at the Temple Mount over which the Noble Sanctuary of Islam was built, with the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque.

The Temple Mount, the most sacred place in Judaism where the two Temples of Solomon sat, the second ruined by the Romans during their occupation of Judea, has been ruled off limits to Jewish worshippers to satisfy the monopoly claimed by the Jordanian Islamic Waqf authority to whom Israel signed over authority with the peace agreement it signed with Jordan. Mahmoud Abbas has railed against 'filthy Jewish feet' soiling the Noble Sanctuary when Jews have appeared on the Temple Mount.

During this Passover week, Israelis were given permission by the Israeli government to approach the Temple Mount, while Israeli Palestinians who call it the Noble Sanctuary prayed at the Al Aqsa mosque. Palestinians assaulted Orthodox Jews and they rained rocks down on Jews gathered at the Wailing Wall to pray. The Palestinians gathered rocks, placing them within the mosque, and lobbed them along with incendiary devices at Israeli security.

Attempts to restore peace and security saw hundreds of rioting Palestinians injured. Smoke bombs and tear gas was used, as well as truncheons wielded by the Israeli Security. Hundreds of rioters were arrested. The Arab Muslim world reacted, insisting on cautious moderation in response to the riots where, if they were themselves faced with the savagery of violent riots, would have used more forceful means to disperse and arrest the rioters.

Avishai Yehezkel, one of the victims, was buried in Bnei Brak   Reuters

The recent murders of Israelis by Palestinians, outwardly condemned by the PA's president, rings hollow on many fronts, not the least of which is that the Bnei Brak attack that killed five Israelis was carried out by a Fatah militant, earning praise from senior Fatah members who are part of the West Bank governing party. Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza as well as Fatah, celebrated the murders, handing out sweets and adding incendiary threats for further deadly attacks. 

These are the neighbours that the international community, the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, the UN Security Council, the Arab League -- whose member states never allowed Palestinians to settle in their own countries as citizens -- all insist that Israel must negotiate for a peace accord with. A neighbour against whose malevolence and thirst for the murder of Jews necessitated a security fence. 

In Israel's case, good fences did not make for good neighbours.

Finally, Locking The Barn Door ...

"The agencies will form a view, and for the partnerships that are deemed high risk, they will not be funded."

"The bottom line is that [research projects] that are found to be high-risk will not be funded and those which come with a low-to-medium risk assessment will be required to have risk-mitigation measures put in place."

Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne

 

"Money is no object in Chinese R&D, and the Chinese partner in most cases would be happy to step in to fund what would otherwise have been the NSERC [Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council] portion."

"This would still have Canadian researchers contributing to projects that hold a national security risk for Canada."

"The guidelines seem to be limited to areas where there is federal funding. National security threats are hardly limited to areas receiving federal funding and these guidelines should cover all university research in a way that reflects federal responsibility for all aspect of national security."

Richard Fadden, former CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) director

A view by drone of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg on Wednesday, June 9, 2021. (Trevor Lyons/Radio-Canada)

 

The Liberal government was recently on the embarrassing political hot seat with opposition parties insisting on assessing information in Parliament relating to the situation that took place at Canada's high-security microbiology laboratory when two Chinese scientific investigators, a husband and wife, were summarily escorted out of the laboratory in 2019 and a year later when their high security credentials were revoked, fired from the lab. Escorted out of the lab at the time was a number of Chinese biology students working alongside them at the National Microbiology Laboratory.

An unauthorized shipment of Ebola and Henipah viruses left the laboratory, sent to the Wuhan Institute of Microbiology with which the two scientists collaborated. It was also revealed that a microbiology specialist who worked for the People's Liberation Army biology laboratory was employed for a while at the Winnipeg laboratory. China has long had a habit of exploiting secret data, the intellectual property of other countries, lifting it and treating it as their own, providing useful short-cuts to refine their own scientific investigations.

Xiangguo Qiu, her biologist husband and her students were escorted out of the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg in July 2019. The RCMP have been investigating a possible 'policy breach' reported by the Public Health Agency of Canada. (CBC)

The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fought to deny the opposition Conservatives in the House of Commons access to revelatory documents and it has now seen fit to resort to protecting future federal government-funded research projects from the sticky hands of foreign governments. Without naming China specifically, the federal innovation minister announced new guidelines for scientific research granting to avoid as much as possible in future the kleptocratic inroads that Beijing has made into Canadian research property.

The head of the Public Health Agency of Canada defied a Parliamentary order to present the documents requested that would reveal the explanatory background of the two fired Chinese biologists who worked at the Winnipeg laboratory. The situation surrounding the two and the mystery of specific details aroused attention and gave rise to the urgent matter of security related to scientific research, with Canadian intelligence property falling into the wrong hands. Henceforth, researchers applying for grants through NSERC must complete a comprehensive security risk assessment.

Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, were escorted from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg on July 5, 2019. After that, the University of Manitoba ended their appointments and reassigned her graduate students. (Governor General's Innovation Awards)

A national-security review conducted by Canadian security agencies and a team of scientists will be called for any project assessed as "higher risk". Any project judged to fall into the category of high risk will not be eligible for government funding. Roughly $1.3-billion is granted each year by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council to fund research and training. It is not the only funding source, however since the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities including most of Canada's research-intensive universities lays claim to funding $8.5-billion of annual research.

Last year the Canadian Security Intelligence Service repeatedly gave warning of Canada targeted by sophisticated state-sponsored infiltrators whose function it is in service to their countries of origin to purloin information and intelligence from Canadian companies and researchers. NSERC grants for the present involving researchers and private-sector partner organizations will require inspection and clearance to qualify for federal financial support for their projects. In time the process is meant to be expanded to cover all federal granting councils along with the Canadian Foundation for Innovation.

Grants are to be scrutinized to determine research that could be of potential benefit to other countries' military, police or intelligence agencies, or that would focus on critical minerals, nuclear power, critical infrastructure or technology and software subject to restrictions under the Export and Import Permits Act. All those categories neatly sum up the interests of the People's Republic of China in securing data and rights of all kinds, as well as its focus on monopolizing critical minerals and software and other areas of technological advances.

Criticism has come the way of the federal government for its obvious willingness to trust cooperative ventures with China-based corporations which then have the opportunity to cyber-access highly secret information. Such as the federal government partnering with Huawei Technologies in the funding of computer and electrical engineering research at Canadian universities. NSERC announced in February its collaboration with the Canadian arm of Huawei to fund studies, in contrast to top universities in the U.S. and Britain which have halted further research funding from Huawei over intellectual property and national security concerns.

A 2018 investigation revealed Huawei to have established a vast network of relationships with leading research-focused universities in Canada in the creation of a steady pipeline of intellectual property (theft) the company uses to underpin its own mobile technology market position. Western countries have assumed growing concerns over efforts by China to scour the world for technology with both civilian and military value -- characterized by Richard Fisher, senior fellow on Asian military affairs at the International Assessment and Strategy Center as a global "intelligence vacuum cleaner".

The logo of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies is pictured next to a statue on top of a building in Copenhagen, Denmark, June 23, 2021. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay/File Photo

The Moral of the Story: Beware, Take Care, Be Wise

"The Government of Canada [should] demonstrate stronger leadership on the issue of procurement and national security, including at the highest echelons -- the Prime Minister, ministers and senior officials."

"[Government should] prohibit Chinese state-owned enterprises, partial state-owned enterprises, including companies receiving undisclosed government subsidies, and technology companies from obtaining federal contracts related to information technology or security equipment or services."

"[The Privy Council Office should look] to develop, implement and oversee a policy to direct all government departments and agencies to review current contracts with China related to information technology or security equipment or services."

"The Committee heard that the federal government should not always choose a supplier based mostly on the lowest price when evaluating bids for security equipment."

"Where circumstances warrant, it should put greater emphasis on national security risks."

"Throughout its study, the Committee became concerned that federal departments and agencies did not collaborate to assess potential threats to Canada's national security when the government was procuring a replacement of security screening equipment in Canadian embassies."

"The Committee recognizes that closer collaboration among federal departments and agencies is required."

House of Commons Government Operations Committee

 

Government procurement infamously selected a Chinese company's X-ray machines to be installed at all Canadian missions abroad until the absurdity of awarding such a contract to a Chinese company was highlighted by an investigative journalist, in the wake of Beijing arresting and charging two Canadians with espionage and imprisoning them on those trumped-up charges in an effort to apply pressure to have Canada release Huawei's CFO who had been detained by the RCMP at a stopover in Vancouver honouring an extradition request by the U.S.Department of Justice.

Relations with China have since descended to their lowest pitch, with Beijing threatening repercussions should Canada decide not to permit Huawei to take part in Canada's 5G upgrade as the rest of the members of the Five Eyes group (an integrated, collaborative intelligence-sharing between members, U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) have done. Even under those strained relations, the Liberal government still decided to proceed in partnering with CanSino, a Chinese pharmacological company to joint-produce a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, which Beijing chose to cancel unilaterally.

The Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, tutored and mentored by former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, hungered for a free trade deal between Canada and China. Canadian corporations headquartered in Quebec see such a free trade agreement with China as a profitable venture, sitting on the Canada-China Business Council continuing to promote business with China despite Beijing's hostility and threats.

Canada's government under the Liberals refuses to take China's cybertheft proclivities, political and academic infiltration and influence-peddling seriously. It is only very recently that in public fora, Justin Trudeau has stated Canada's opposition to China as a growing threat to the world order in its focus on control, power, monopolistic trade, influence and its soft power working hand-in-glove with its hard power. Investing in vital infrastructure loans to developing countries while threatening Taiwan, Hong Kong, and abusing the human rights of Tibetans, Christians and Uyghurs.

Now, a parliamentary committee has released a report calling on the federal government to place greater consideration on issues such as national security in tendering contracts and favouring bids by Chinese companies, all of which must, by Chinese law, answer to Beijing's call. Apart from the fact that many are state-owned corporations. The concerns expressed go across party lines since the committee is comprised of Liberal, Conservative, Bloc Quebecois and NDP members.

Government officials testified before the committee, along with experts on China and national security. The committee reviewed a threat assessment from the Department of Foreign Affairs, describing the Chinese company selected to install and service its security equipment on contract to the Canadian government with the company in question characterized as "a Chinese state-owned enterprise with direct connections to the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party". 

The X-ray machines were not considered a security risk since their use was in a publicly accessible area, unconnected to embassy computer networks. The committee was informed however, by an official with the government's Centre for Cyber Security, that this view of X-ray machines was outdated; they now typically come equipped with hard drives and USB ports potentially useful to hostile actors "with malicious intent". And that certainly describes Beijing's attitude toward Canada.

The report released by the committee found no effective government strategy in place to manage security risks revolving around China and federal procurement. Stronger security measures were recommended, to focus on screening companies and employees who install and maintain equipment in sensitive federal facilities such as embassies. There is room for improvement at flagging potential security threats.

"We are being introduced in a very rough way to a new world where the rules of the road are decided by the strongest."

"We've always said in Canada that we needed a foreign policy that built on the international rules and regulations… but China is starting to play rogue."

Paul Heinbecker, former Canadian ambassador to Germany, representative to the United Nations 

"Relations between the two countries can't be reset until the two Michaels [Spavor/.Kovrig] are set free. Once that happens, relations should be reset in a different way."

"China is capable of acting aggressively against Canada. China is not our friend and we should stop treating it as though it is. We should form a relationship with China based on mutual needs."

"We should treat China with respect but always protect our own interests and push back when necessary. We also need to find allies who will help us retain our sovereignty in a world where China is trying to encroach on it."

Former Canadian ambassador to China David Mulroney (2009 to 2012) 

China's President Xi Jinping and Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are shown at the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan on June 29, 2019   (KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images)

Unravelling Israeli Sovereignty

"Real sympathy with the Palestinian people means searching for solutions for an actual and practical peace that guarantees their safety, security, and development. The solutions should also stop those [Hamas] who are ready to burn Palestine and its people."

"[The Hamas terrorist group] was well prepared for this war by building trenches in which its members can take shelter, while innocent Palestinians were being killed. Hamas likes to play the role of victim and kill Palestinians to win Arab, Islamic and international sympathy."

"Some ask, is this the right time to present the crimes of Hamas.? This is precisely the best time to do so. The reader can conduct a quick search on the Internet to learn about the crimes that Hamas has committed against the Palestinians. Hamas has the right to destroy its homes with its own hands, but it has no right to destroy the homes of Palestinians and underestimate their blood and the blood of their children."

"Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood patrons do not care about the suffering or interests of the Palestinians. They only care about demonizing those who stand against them. Hamas is saying: Let the Palestinians die for the sake of a Muslim Brotherhood victory."

Saudi writer/researcher Abdulah Bin Binjad Al Otaibi 

"Abbas wants to cover up for this decision to postpone the Palestinian elections so that he can continue to sit on the presidential chair at the expense of Palestinian blood. Hamas aspires to increase its popularity and drain the pockets of those who see it as a resistance movement by launching futile missiles that harm it more than doing any good."

"A few months ago, we were very happy with the signing of the Abraham Peace Accords [with Israel], which the people rely on to create peace that benefits everyone politically, economically and socially,"  "But the extremists are working to kill this dream. It is sad that some are working hard for peace, while others are working hard for the sake of war and the continuation of the conflict."

Emirati writer Al-Sheikh Wuldalsalek

Air Strikes in Gaza   EPA

Geographically, Israel is a tiny sliver of a country. As such it wasn't too much to ask for, for the remnants of world Jewry following World War II when the total number of diaspora Jews was reduced by six million men, women and children. And the singular event of the Holocaust convinced Jews that there was no country where Jews had residence, whether for a thousand years or a hundred, that would bother itself to give security to its Jewish civilian population (with rare exceptions).

Throughout history in the millennia of the diaspora, Jews became accustomed to keeping a low profile, hoping not to bring attention to themselves. They lived in Europe and throughout most of the world where happenstance took them, sometimes tolerated, sometimes not, but always vulnerable to a fallback scapegoat position of a tiny ethnic, cultural and religious minority among majority population of different heritage, culture and religions and often visceral hatred of Jews.

That tiny sliver of a country has produced miracles. As a nation dedicated to the preservation and safe security of Jews it has also absorbed, as a democratic state, people of other ethnic, cultural, social and religious groups as citizens of a Jewish state. In that state pioneering breakthroughs of another kind regularly take place in various areas of science and technology. Discoveries that render service to the world at large, from medical advances to agrarian and technological discoveries.

This country of great accomplishment whose science, medical research and allied breakthroughs give it recognition, has also in its over 70 years of existence, never started a war, though it has fought many, for its survival. It has some admirers and many critics. Who never tire of challenging the reality that is Israel's existence. From the horror of the immediate Holocaust years when the world witnessed the liberation of death camps and became knowledgeable of the hideous strategy to exterminate the Jewish identity and people, empathy has returned to the viral pathology of anti-Semitism.

In 1948 Israel was given permission by the great United Nations to form a sovereign nation out of that sliver of land representing a mere fragment of its ancestral heritage geography. Arabs, identifying themselves as 'Palestinians' (when the original Palestinians were in fact Jewish inhabitants of the land), refused the land they were offered under the UN's Partition Plan of equal opportunity. When combined Arab armies marched on the nascent Israel to destroy it, half of the Palestinians, some 700,000 people, left with plans to return once victory was assured.

At the very same time, a like number of Jews, Sephardic and Mizrahi who had lived for thousands of years in Arab lands were summarily exiled, becoming stateless refugees, and were welcomed to Israel where they found haven. Neither the Arab/Muslim nations in the Middle East nor the Palestinian Arabs themselves would give recognition to a Jewish state in the  geography; ongoing hostilities led to a number of wars until the final one that saw Israel take the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, east Jerusalem and in fact the Palestinian Territories in its defence from its enemies.

An Israeli soldier looks on as Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercept rockets launched from the Gaza Strip  Reuters

Returning the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians did nothing to convince the Palestinian leadership that it would be in their best interests to live in peace, side by side, and to attain their own sovereignty through a mutual agreement with a fellow-nation it would give recognition to. The Palestinian Authority speaks of 'occupation', but it is one forced upon Israel by constant violence afflicting its people from incited Palestinians who are taught that 'resistance' (violence) against the 'enemy' (Israel), results in martyrdom for which they can anticipate financial rewards and/or Paradise.

During the First Intifada in 1987, the Palestinian uprising, conflict saw 1,200 Palestinians  and 150 Israelis die. And when the Palestinian leadership identified Palestinian collaborators with Israel they executed over 800 of their own people who preferred to live in peace with Israel rather than kill Jews and die as martyrs to the Palestinian 'cause', thus setting an example that other Palestinians with such dangerous ideas would be certain to avoid.

Of those Palestinians who remained in Israel, a number equal to those who fled, this 700,000 has swelled to 1,900,000, representing 21 percent of the total 9.2-million Israeli population. Not the 'apartheid' government that Israel-haters are so fond of declaring, but one that accepts its Palestinian population as citizen-Israelis. A month ago, before this current round of attacks between Gaza/Hamas and Israel, the Jewish People Policy Institute released an annual study on Israeli identity. 

The overwhelming majority of the 1.9 million the world knows as Palestinians, refer to themselves as Israeli-Arab (51 percent), or just Israeli (23 percent), with those who identify as Palestinians amounting to roughly 7 percent.

Yet in the West Bank and Gaza the Palestinian Authority (Fatah/PLO) and Hamas, celebrate the 'Naqba' (Catastrophe) which identifies the establishment of Israel in 1948. They could be celebrating 'Palestine' from that same date forward, had they not refused categorically to even consider accepting half the disputed territory as their own. In fact, the land originally envisaged as being offered to Israel was much greater in size, but was handed over to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan which had been ensconced there as compensation when the British Mandate helped the Saudis to claim Arabia as their own, displacing the Hashemites contesting Arabia as theirs.

There's a certain hypocritical similarity in the two situations which no one ever seems to linger on, all the more so when Jordan illegally occupied part of Jerusalem, the Judean city of antiquity, the Old City called Eastern Jerusalem where Judaism's most sacred symbol sits, under an Islamic shrine and mosque built on the twice-ruined Temple of Solomon. Under Jordan's rule, the Jews who had lived in East Jerusalem since time began were forcibly displaced and no Jews were permitted to enter the area,much less to pray at the Wailing Wall, the remnants of the Eastern Wall of the Temple.

Even before that Jews were massacred in Hebron, Sefad and a dozen other ancient Jewish communities in the 1920s by rampaging Arab/Muslim mobs in what is now Israel. And the Jews exiled in 1948 from Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya among other Arab states where Jews lived for thousands of years, might consider those events their own 'naqbas'. The designs of the Muslim Brotherhood in their alignment with the Nazis helped entrench anti-Semitism throughout the Arab world in the 1940s.

And what brings the situation to the present, is the break-away group from the Muslim Brotherhood that became Hamas with its charter outlining its intention to exterminate Israel, with their links to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the al Quds Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the great patrons of Hezbollah, Hamas and Yemeni Houthis, all happily conspiring toward the destruction of Israel, with the complacent disinterest of the West other than its instant recoil of disapprobation when Israel has the unmitigated gall to defend itself.

Palestinians inspect damage to buildings in Gaza City on May 20, 2021.  Fatima Shbair/Getty Images

"What’s different about this round is the fact that Hamas has managed – not just to fire missiles in the direction of my house or to bash Ashkelon with lots of rockets – but they have made Jerusalem, and Arab and Muslim claims and complaints about Jerusalem, into a focal point."

?They have incited Arab citizens of Israel to attack Jews, who attacked Arabs in return. They have helped start a conflict inside Israel, while inciting a mini-intifada in the West Bank and also sympathy rockets fired from Lebanon."

Yossi Alpher, former Israeli intelligence officer

Why Is Israel Bombing Gaza Again?

"We will continue as long as it takes in order to restore calm for all of Israel's citizens."

"One other thing: I"m sure that all of our enemies around us see the price we are exacting for the aggression against us and I am certain that they will have absorbed that lesson."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

 

"Tensions Rise in Middle East As One Side Wants To Kill Jews And The Other Side Are Jews Who Don't Want To Die And Neither Will Compromise."

The Babylon Bee

Rockets are launched from the Gaza Strip toward Israel on Wednesday. (Hatem Moussa/The Associated Press)

 

This is a determination and an attitude born of no longer wanting to accept a ticking time bomb perched on Israel's border prepared to explode at any time. This is a nation of a people that has been tried and tested far too often by malevolent forces believing it has no human right to exist, bolstered by the silent support of countless others whose visceral hatred of Jews leads them to criticize Israel when it responds to violent provocations threatening the lives of its citizens. Those critics who deny bias against Jewish survival cannot really expect a state constantly attacked by missiles, rockets, suicide bombers, car rammings, knife attacks and violent riots along with incendiary events to do nothing to defend itself.

None of the countries that see fit to urge Israel to curb its response to ongoing rocket barrages that have only one purpose, to kill as many Israelis -- preferably Jews, since a hefty minority of the population is non-Jewish, belying the apartheid label -- as possible, would themselves sit calmly by not bothering to react when missiles fly by and hit random targets like schools and synagogues and apartment buildings in their own countries. Israel has up to the present after over a week of attacks from Gaza, sustained a relatively low rate of deaths and injuries, in comparison to the numbers of deaths and injuries sustained in Gaza. The low-death rate of Jews appears to mystify and bother onlookers from abroad.

And that owes largely to the fact that bomb shelters have been built everywhere in Israel to protect the population from the never-ending grip of Palestinian terrorist attacks. These are terrorists who enjoy their games of delivering death to Jews. All costs related to the weapons used, the rockets and other military equipment, courtesy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah in Lebanon, all fostered by, trained and equipped by the Iranian theocracy. If Israel were to wait until "the Arabs love their children more than they hate us", to paraphrase former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, it would be an endless wait.

 

An Israeli bomb squad unit inspects the site where a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip hit a sidewalk, in Ashdod, Israel, on Wednesday. (Heidi Levine/The Associated Press)

 

For Palestinians who hate Jews and the presence of Israel, are accustomed to teaching their impressionable children from a young age through school curricula, television, songs and family tradition, that Jews are their enemy, and there is nothing finer than to aspire to become a martyr in defence of Palestinian intentions to annihilate Israel so Palestine can be free 'from the river to the sea'. Mothers praise their children who die as 'martyrs' while attempting to or succeeding in killing Jews. They don't speak for the countless others who would prefer to live in peace with their neighbours but fear speaking out and revealing themselves.

Western media appear to exult in framing their reportage around Israeli responses to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad efforts to destroy Jewish lives, as though it is Israel that is the aggressor and Palestinians in Gaza the helpless victims. Gaza Palestinians are indeed victims, but of the ruling Hamas in Gaza who deliberately inflict danger on the population for the greater goal of luring the Israel Defence Forces to bomb civilian enclaves which Hamas uses as shields and props for their missile and rocket launches.

The Palestinians have no bomb shelters to head to. There are only underground tunnels laced below the towns and cities in Gaza, affording protection for Hamas terrorists, their commanders and their foot 'soldiers', where undisturbed, they can produce new rockets and maintain a sizeable inventory of munitions. Civilians can look to their own devices; they are there as fodder for the Hamas public relations machinery that can point out to the international community and the media hungry for sensational 'news', the number of Palestinian women and children that Israel 'targets'.

 

Smoke billows after an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City targeted the Ansar compound, linked to Hamas, in the Gaza Strip on Friday.  Mahmud Hams / AFP - Getty Images

 

While Hamas denies bomb shelters for the people they govern even as they use them as human shields, drawing fire toward crowded urban settings like hospitals, schools and mosques, the IDF makes every effort to alert people living in areas where Hamas-linked buildings are located, to advise them to leave before a bomb is dropped. Hamas deliberately targets crowded civilian venues like border towns, as a war crime. Its goal is to terrorize and to kill; that it succeeds in the first instance and less so in the second seems to give Israel an 'unfair advantage' in the minds of its critics; the Israeli death toll is too low to satisfy those who point to the greater number of Palestinian deaths in the carnage that Hamas has brought to Gaza.

When the IDF portrayed itself earlier last week as being on the cusp of an invasion into Gaza, Hamas quickly ordered its commanders and 'fighters' to assemble in the underground tunnel system popularly referred to as "the Metro" by the IDF, where weapons manufacturing, storage, launch sites are installed in a voluminous underground network. From there, they were prepared to launch an attack on IDF troops supposedly entering Gaza.  IDF intelligence is such that it was able to determine these anticipated responses where key tunnel entrances and exits are located, then bombed them to trap those inside, along with their weapons.

Zealously and endlessly digging miles and miles of underground tunnels beneath urban centers and elsewhere in the Gaza Strip may seem at first glance to be a tactical winner, but what it does is destabilize the integrity of large buildings built above ground with an unstable foundation supporting them as a result of the wide-ranging, deep and extensive excavations. The buildings 'destroy' themselves as the ground they're on and the streets nearby collapse when bombed.

 

Thanks to a naive and gullible international population reading spurious headlines reporting on Israel's 'uneven' response to Gaza rockets, people ask: "Why is Israel attacking Gaza again?"

Journalists work near the destroyed Al-Jala'a building, which housed international press offices, and Hamas security offices, following an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Saturday, May 15   CNN