The Far-Eastern Sweet Potato

A Morally-Corrupt Enterprise

With hindsight, I cannot believe that during the 29 months that I worked for the Canadian government on matters of national security I was a participant (an unwilling one, at best) in Israel's racist treatment of Arabs in the Middle East. If I were still with that organization today, I would most assuredly have resigned in protest. On intelligence issues (and now even more so on the diplomatic side), Canada is inarguably an ally of Israel, and whenever one questions the morality of siding with them he is shot down and told that "he doesn't get it." On more than one occasion I protested being a participant in that wrongful enterprise, and that invariably created problems for me.

And the situation has only become unacceptable. Israel, not content with creating a humanitarian crisis in the Occupied Territories, is creating another one in Lebanon. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), Israel has made it next to impossible to reach Lebanese refugees in urgent need of assistance. Bridges have been bombed, in one case forcing MSF workers to deliver aid by crossing a river on foot. Israeli warplanes have also dropped missiles 40 meters in front of a UN convoy, killing two civilians. Israel had not given security or safe passage guarantees to aid workers, making their job all the more dangerous. And now a 10:00PM curfew in southern Lebanon has been imposed by Israel, which warns that any vehicle seen running after that time will be fair game. Compounding these problems is the naval embargo that Israel has struck against the country.

Close to 1 million Lebanese civilians have been forced to leave their homes, and when they return, many of them will find that they no longer have a home. About a thousand have been killed. Every day, we learn on the news of mostly Israeli soldiers being killed, against mostly Lebanese civilians, at a rate of 10 to 1. This, alone, is criminal. That Israel would then consciously assail aid workers and destroy the means by which their aid can be delivered during a humanitarian crisis is unconscionable. Despite its objections, Israel is now at war against the Lebanese people.

Whoever supports Israel—in Jerusalem or anywhere else in the world—is now complicit in a tremendous crime against humanity. This certainly does not mean that we should support Hezbollah's firing missiles into Israel, especially when we know that such missiles cannot be aimed properly, which makes that indiscriminate bombing, an illegal act of war. It all goes back to what I have been writing since the commencement of hostilities, that responses should be proportionate.

The Jewish state has been committing the same atrocities to the Palestinians for many years, but it took Lebanon to make the rest of the world aware of the nefarious regime of fear that has been crushing the region for so long.

I regret ever having had anything to do, however indirectly and against my will, with Israel's repressive and murderous regime. Nothing Hezbollah does warrants Israel's indiscriminate attack against an entire people.