honeybadgerpress.ca

Stephen Harper’s “Moral Clarity” in Defense of Israeli Exceptionalism

Canadian Dimension: 20 November 2024

A Post Media pundit recently praised Stephen Harper’s “moral clarity” on current events in the Middle East. After quitting politics in 2015 the former Canadian prime minister worked with American Zionist billionaire and Trump backer Sheldon Adelson before serving on the boards of organizations like The Friends of Israel Initiative. In addition to his MA in economics, Harper “…received an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University…” presumably for his faithful commitment to Israeli exceptionalism.

For the moment, let’s table the current Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) slaughter of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians and consider Harper’s past attitude to Israel’s military aggression. For example, prime minister Harper once described Israel’s brutal 2006 invasion of Lebanon as "measured and justified” while simultaneously demeaning Lebanese Canadians desperate to flee the IDF bombs.

Using its illegal Dahiya Doctrine of disproportionate force and collective punishment of civilians, The IDF’s 2006 Lebanon invasion killed 1100 and wounded 4400. According to a Human Rights Watch report, 80 percent of these casualties were civilians who had the misfortune of living near Hezbollah units and Palestinian refugee camps.

While IDF losses were light in 2006, Hezbollah surprised the world by damaging or destroying over 50 advanced Israeli tanks, an impressive feat that caused an IDF retreat. Unfortunately for Israel conscripts, today's IDF seems to have learned nothing from that painful lesson.

Stephen Harper would never admit that Hezbollah was created in the early 1980s to protect Lebanon from Israeli efforts to invade that country and destroy Palestinian resistance groups based in border-area refugee camps.

Those Palestinians refugees had fled Palestine in 1948 and 1967 to escape the grim fate of their peers at massacre sites like Deir Yassin (1948) Quafr Kassim (1956) and other Israeli outrages ignored by Western media. In Stephen Harper’s view, displaced Palestinians have no right to reclaim their lost homes or seek justice.

In spite of his prime ministerial law and order rhetoric, citizen Harper has not time for the International Court of Justice’s (IJC) conclusions on Israel’s genocidal intent in Gaza and Amnesty International on Israeli apartheid. The former prime minister still considers Israel a credible ally in spite of the IDF’s ongoing campaign of destruction and territorial expansion (Eretz Israel) across the Middle East.

Like most Western leaders, Harper has always denigrated historical context and justified Israeli aggression and marginalization of Palestinian autonomy without acknowledging the inevitable results of state terrorism.
In spite of consistent corporate media claims, Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel was not unprovoked. Of course, it was an atrocity and possibly a war crime since Israeli civilians were killed and taken hostage, but this outrage was not a spontaneous anomaly.

The attack was Hamas’ desperate attempt to refocus the world’s attention on Palestinian self-determination. Under the failed Abraham Accords, the Trump administration had pressured leading Arab states to ignore the Palestinians in exchange for access to Israeli security/surveillance technology and high-tech weapon systems. That deal is dead, even though Trump will soon enter the White House.

In addition to the thousands of Gazans killed during the IDF invasions of 2008/09, 2014 and 2021 is the fact that, according to the UN, “…Israeli forces in 2023 killed (in the West Bank) 492 Palestinians, including 120 children…more than twice as many as in any other year…”

The world can no longer ignore Gaza and the Palestinian cause, although that grudging acknowledgement has come at a terrible human cost. In spite of his keen Zionism, even Stephen Harper has not openly defended the IDF’s indiscriminate killing and maiming of thousands of infants, children, women and seniors in Gaza. Nor has he publicly defended the withholding of food and medicine. Unfortunately, Harper’s instinctive hostility to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) raises questions about his unstated opinions on the fate of Palestinian civilians.

Self-proclaimed “theocrat” Harper’s Middle East rhetoric seemingly reflects the evangelical stance of the evangelical Calgary Alliance Church, where the former prime minister has been a long-time member.

This Seventh Day Adventist sect believes that Israel’s presence in the Middle East will trigger a welcome nuclear apocalypse to return Jesus Christ to Earth, precipitating the “Rapture” described in the bible’s Revelations section. Most evangelicals accept the Revelations notion that unbelievers (including most Jews, apparently) are damned.
Of course, Stephen Harper omits this pesky detail when expressing his “moral clarity” in support of Israel’s faltering campaign of territorial expansion and domination.

Morgan Duchesney
Ottawa / Cape Breton - Canada