A few excepts from this piece by Haroon Siddiqui in the July 20/2006 edition of the Toronto Star:
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Whereas several G8 leaders thought of the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon as outrageously disproportionate, Harper found it "measured."
A Canadian prime minister thus did not utter a word of protest against the killing of eight Canadians, let alone of nearly 300 other people and the displacement of about 500,000 civilians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.
It's a line of thinking in which the only lives that matter, and the only territories worthy of immunity from violence, are American and Israeli.
This is the immoral calculus that's at the heart of so much havoc in the world today. And it is this that Harper has committed Canada to, with little or no debate in Parliament or anywhere else.
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The crisis in the Gaza Strip has been in the making for a year. Israel evacuated the territory, only to keep a stranglehold by controlling the movement of people and goods. This helped Hamas win the parliamentary elections, which triggered even more collective punishments.
Harper led Bush in initiating Western revenge on the Palestinians for electing the wrong people. Canada helped foment a humanitarian crisis, with mass starvation and the near-breakdown of the social order.
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Gideon Levy, columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, wrote: "It is not legitimate to cut off 750,000 people from electricity. It is not legitimate to call on 20,000 people to run from their homes and turn their towns into ghost towns. It is not legitimate to kidnap half a government and a quarter of a parliament. A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organization."
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United Nations human rights chief, Canadian Louise Arbour, said yesterday the scale of killing in Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories could involve war crimes.
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