French politician, member of the European Parliament and pro-Palestinian activist, Rima Hassan, was recently refused entry into Canada by the liberal government of Mark Carney. The decision was applauded by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) who had lobbied the federal government for her denial.
The CIJA, whose title trumpets its politics, apparently was allowed to have a voice as to who can enter the country. Was it because of the federal byelections, two of them in downtown Toronto ridings with large Jewish populations? Surely the Carney government wouldn’t be so bent on a majority government that it would allow the supporters of a genocidal regime dictate its immigration policy.
Why does the CIJA exist? Shouldn’t Israeli and Jewish matters be two separate concerns? Or is it easier to cry antisemitism when you conflate the two? Do all Jews in Canada support the murderous Netanyahu regime? Of course they do not.
Avi Lewis, Naomi Klein, hundreds of Orthodox Jews, organizations such as Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) and Jews for a Just Peace who are, at least in spirit, successors to the early 20th century Jewish Bund movement, join international voices such as Bernie Sanders, Sarah Silverman, Seth Rogen, Natalie Portman, Mandy Patinkin, Jon Stewart, Roger Waters, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein, and Gideon Levy, among thousands in denouncing Israel and its horrific actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
Looking back a century, a purely Jewish state was opposed by Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Their opposition was not to Jews living in Palestine side by side with Arabs, but that they would seek to evict the Arabs and create a state based on religious identity. Forming a state around religion is problematic. The pursuit of faith over evidence is enough to argue against a religious state but more, religion mostly excludes those outside the tribe and often lays the groundwork for religious totalitarianism.
Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan under the Taliban, are examples of the horror of religious states where leaders deny basic rights to the population under threat of imprisonment or execution. People live and die in these countries without knowing the joys of freedom of thought and action. The pursuit of happiness is lost in the adherence to archaic rules and the irrational organization of one’s life around superstition and myth.
The CIJA and other Israeli advocates like B’nai Brit and disHonestReporting Canada (HRC) have much to answer for. If they are truly concerned about Jews and Jewish matters, why are they not condemning Israel? Is it their god right or wrong? Does allegiance to their god, their religion, their culture, their circle, rob them of their morality, enable them to justify any atrocity Israel visits on Palestinians?
These hateful groups are not just pro-Israel. They are anti-Palestine. They think of Palestinians as an inferior race, without rights, who must be removed from their homes if Israel is to achieve its biblical territorial goals. They caused and continue to cause the endless suffering of innocent Palestinians and condemn as terrorists anyone who might speak out on behalf of Palestine.
These days Israel’s, and by extension their global shills, list of targets includes aid and human rights organizations. These groups have no political agenda but they have the audacity to criticize Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank – Doctors without Borders (MSF), Oxfam, the World Health Organization, the Red Cross/Red Crescent, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, CARE International, Médecins du Monde, and Save the Children among many others.
If all of these organizations call out the cause you blindly support, it is not time to look at yourself? You are sanctioning genocide by supporting restrictions on the ability of aid groups to aid and by attacking these neutral observers who call out the horror they see everyday.
Besides a general contempt for lobby groups which exist to exert influence that most of us will never have, who seek additional rights beyond those of the individual, my strongest disdain is reserved for religious lobby groups. They are tribal in nature, ancestral in being, and imbued with expected favoritism and faux outrage.
Imagine in the year 2026 in Canada there are organizations with tax-free status that propagate religious nonsense, that believe deeply in us and them, and that attempt to influence who gets into the country and for which politicians you should vote. That such exclusive organizations should operate with the help of a supposed inclusive government is against everything for which a modern cosmopolitan state should stand.
The main alternative to a Carney-led government is an even more conservative party that pays slavish obedience to the corrupt state of Israel. It parrots Netanyahu talking points. Conservative politicians like the loud-mouthed Pierre Poilievre and insufferable Melissa Lastman, actively and unreservedly support Israeli war crimes. Hopefully, a political party led by Poilievre never wins power. If it does, Canada may have to move its parliament to The Hague and hope for a lot of escorted absences.
But one might have hoped for more from Carney. Pale endorsement of an unworkable two-state solution is hardly enough. We are witnesses to genocide in both Gaza and the West Bank, a genocide that threatens to spread to other countries that fall under the grandiose idea of Greater Israel.
Denying entry to someone who advocates for the defenceless people of Palestine is a victory for those who support apartheid, war crimes, ethnic-cleansing and genocide. Hassan is a determined spokesperson for Palestine. That immediately puts her in the sights of the pro-Israel snarling attack dogs that form the CIJA, B’nai Brith, and HRC.
To the outrage of these Israeli conspirators, Hassan saw the 2023 Hamas assault on Israel as legitimate and shared a sympathetic article about a Japanese pro-Palestinian activist, Kozo Okamoto, who participated in a 1972 attack at an airport in Israel that killed 26 passengers. In the article, Okamoto said ´´I gave my youth to the Palestinian cause. As long as there is oppression, resistance is not only a right, it is a duty. ´´
Hassan was born in the Neirab Palestinian refugee camp near Aleppo in Syria, one of 6,000,000 Palestinians prohibited buy Israel from returning to Palestine. The Neirab camp, one of the poorest of the many Palestinian refugee camps scattered throughout Syria and Lebanon, was a place where food and medicine were scarce, where disease was a constant threat, and where hope was but a hard-to-hear whisper.
Hassan spent the first nine years of her life in that unbearable shithole before her mother was able to bring her to France. In France, she was able to study, eventually obtaining a master’s degree in international law from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris. She was elected to the European Parliament in 2024 and has been an outspoken advocate for the Palestinian people and refugees. If anyone has the right to acknowledge those who stand up for the Palestinian cause, Rima Hassan has earned it. She should be receiving plaudits not fending off bullies and arrest warrants.
At the behest of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, (CRIF), a branch of the same sleazy group that turned Jesus over to the Romans, French police have taken Hassan into custody and charged her with apologizing for terrorism. Israel meanwhile ignores hundreds of UN resolutions, breaches ceasefires as soon as it signs them, assassinates children, targets journalists and medical professionals, destroys hospitals and schools, bombs refugee camps, starves the Arab population and terrorizes and murders Palestinian residents of the West Bank.
Why does Israel still have a voice in the public square while supporters of Palestine are threatened, harassed, and arrested?
The designation of who is a terrorist and who is a resistance fighter depends on who’s in better position to determine the nomenclature. By any objective and moral standard, Israel would be the terrorist state and Hamas the resistance. But as has been the case since the early days of Zionism, thanks firstly to Great Britain and now the United States, Israel has far more global sway and blood money to spend than Palestinian Arabs.
Name me a country that wouldn’t try to defend itself. American revolutionaries were terrorists to the British. A racist and cruel apartheid regime in South Africa was able to convince much of the western world that Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) were terrorists. World War II resistance groups in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Norway, Denmark, and the Soviet Union were terrorists to the Nazis. There was Jewish resistance in Poland, Lithuania, the Soviet Union, France, Greece, Italy and the Netherlands as well as within the Nazi death camps. To the Nazis they were terrorists, to the Jewish population, they were heroes.
When condemning Hamas, when using them as a scapegoat for the unspeakable humiliation and violence Israel has inflicted upon Palestinians for over a century, Israel and its apologists purposefully fail to mention its own terrorist groups that preceded its unfortunate nationhood in 1948. Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi were nothing more than armed thugs, the 20th century version of today’s West Bank settlers.
These militias, designated terrorist groups by the British, defended Jewish expansion into land it didn’t own, inflicted violence and displacement on the Arab population, and attacked the British authorities. In 1944, Lehi assassinated the British Minister, Lord Moyne, in Egypt for trying to restrict Jewish immigration to Palestine. In 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel killing 91 people of different ethnic backgrounds.
The best work of the militias, later to form the bulk of the Israeli Defence Force, the IDF, was the atrocities they carried out against the Arab population of Palestine during the Nakba. The Nakba, meaning ´catastrophe, ´ was the 1947-48 killing and displacement of 700,000 Palestinians, forcing them into the tiny strip of land of Gaza, into the numerous Palestinian refugee camps in the region or into premature graves.
The people of Gaza lived, live, in a concentration camp for most of their lives. Surrounded on all sides by Israel or its defence forces, subject to death, poverty, checkpoints, deprivation, despair, hunger, illness and humiliation, treated like inferiors by an arrogant neighbor, of they would rise up. Largely ignored by the outside world, they took their lives into their own hands. Hamas came to be because of Israel. It was a response to the monstrosity of Israeli occupation, of the daily degradation of the Arab people.
Hamas has no planes, no tanks, no ships, no guns of war with which to defend itself, so it does what inferior military forces have always done, engage in guerilla warfare, in skirmishes, in rocket attacks. What else could they do? Or should they just accept whatever shit Israel was shovelling on them until all Palestinian land was stolen or they didn’t exist? What would you do if subjected to the same humiliation, the same destruction, the same final solution? Would you fight back any way you could, or would you accept your fate and fade away?
To use Hamas as justification for supporting Israel is a false and gutless argument, one that ignores history and gives cover to Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
In denying entry to Rima Hassan, and in announcing after the illegal attacks on Iran by the puppet master Israel, and its tangled-up puppet, the United States of America, that you support Israel’s right to ‘’defend’’ itself, and by refusing to act against the ongoing and violent takeover of Gaza and the West Bank, the Canadian government has shown that it prefers appeasement to morality, cowardice to courage.
Canada’s current response to Israeli atrocities is not much better than the kowtowing of former Prime Minister, pious Christian, and Zionist cheerleader, Stephen Harper. Then an evangelical Protestant and now a devout Catholic, the former blinded by religious fervor, the latter cowed by political expediency, the Palestinians never stood a chance in Canadian jurisdiction.
Let’s be clear on what the CIJA and B’nai Brith and ZionistHonestReporting Canada and other Israeli conspirators and apologists are defending:
‘’They (the Palestinians) should be crushed to pieces, starved to death, and not resuscitated with humanitarian aid that gives them oxygen.’’ Itamar Ben Gvir, Israeli Minister of National Security
´´The army must find ways more painful than death for the civilians in Gaza. Killing them is not enough.´´ Amihal Ben-Eliyahu, Israeli Heritage Minister
´´We will never let a single grain of wheat to enter the Gaza Strip. It might be justified to let 2 million Palestinians die of hunger.´´ Bernard Smotrich, Israeli Finance Minister.
This is the truly fucked-up mentality of the group of racist murderers that the CIJA and B’nai Brith and the oxymoronic HonestReporting Canada supports. The CIJAs, the B’nai Briths and the HRCs of the world, always ready to bully and intimidate with cries of antisemitism, utter nary a peep against Israeli warmongers. They are so blinded by religious tribalism and covetousness, that they forfeit all claim to decency and equality.
The CIJA, the B’nai Brith, HonestReporting Canada, the World Zionist Organization (WZO), the World Jewish Congress, the American Zionist Movement (AZM), Maccabi World Union, all of them with innocuous or resistive names, are in fact malignant assailants. One of the worst was/is the Jewish Defence League (JDL) who in 1978, actor Vanessa Redgrave called a name that fits all of them – ´´Zionist Hoodlums. ¨
Redgrave’s crime, for which she was burned in effigy by the JDL, who reportedly offered a $5,000 bounty for her head, was to finance and narrate a film called ´´The Palestinian.´´ Imagine the courage it took in 1978 to go so off script and portray Palestinians in a sympathetic light. Friends and business opportunities must have run and hid, goddammit.
Countries like Canada should be stripping these genocidal enablers of their charitable status instead of giving them a platform for Zionist proselytism or a say as to who can enter the country. The groups should also be on a ¨no-lie´´ list, their activities closely monitored for Israeli bullshit.
It’s time for Canada and other countries to close their Israeli embassies, to bring home their diplomats, and to stop doing business with this maniacal regime.
Let another Israeli, someone not wed to its dogma and false narrative, disavow Israel and its dangerous ways. Fania Oz-Salzberger, Israeli historian and writer, apparently channeling Yeats, wrote, “The monster masquerading as Judaism on the hilltops of Samaria and Judaea is an enemy to every Jew in the world.”
A dark and quivering shadow hovers over Canada and with a few notable exceptions, (Spain, Colombia) other democratic nations. Having seen unchecked malevolence in the 20th century, it’s both saddening and infuriating they can be so morally ambiguous in this new face of overt racism, virulent hatred, and obvious genocide.
I salute the courage of Rima Hassan, Vanessa Redgrave, and Pedro Sanchez, Prime Minister of Spain, three people of thousands from different backgrounds, united in a difficult cause, each with more balls than the eunuchs running Canada and other western democracies.
Paul Heno April 2026
Leave a Reply