Senseless gesture quickly followed by reports of “another blood drenched summary execution ordered by the devotees of the death cult that mindlessly and pointlessly slaughtered 1,200 Israelis”

Well, that latest Canadian adventure in diplomatic Boy Scoutism certainly went sideways, quickly, didn’t it?

Within hours of Prime Minister Carney joining France, the U.K. Australia and others in formally “recognizing” a Palestinian state that has neither territory nor working government nor respect for the existence of its neighbouring state’s borders, The Telegraph reported Hamas had carried out public executions of accused Israeli “collaborators.”

The executed were all Palestinians. They will now never enjoy the utopia dreamed (fantasized?) of by Canada recognizing, in Carney’s words, “the State of Palestine and offer(ing) our partnership in building the promise of a peaceful future for both the State of Palestine and the State of Israel.”

Here’s the reality of that “peaceful future,” according to the Telegraph report.

“Footage posted (by) Hamas…showed armed and masked members of the group lining up three blindfolded Palestinians in a public square in Gaza. Chants of ‘Allahu Akbar’ were heard among the crowd as they gathered to watch and film the public execution. The three men were ordered to kneel before three executioners shot them in their heads and upper bodies….”

Here, from a day earlier, is the Canadian Prime Minister’s text blaming Israel for “working methodically to prevent the prospect of a Palestinian state from ever being established… (and carrying out a) sustained assault in Gaza (that) has killed tens of thousands of civilians (and) displaced well over one million people.”

Compare that caustic criticism with the words of a Hamas official at the execution, as reported by the Telegraph.

“Pursuant to the content of Palestinian revolutionary law and based on the Palestinian revolutionary court, a death sentence was decided against those who betrayed the homeland….”

Wait? Revolutionary court?? Does anyone have a street address for the Palestinian Revolutionary Courthouse? I wouldn’t mind going on Google Earth to admire its early medieval architecture and look for the signs of its substrate tunnelling.

I know. I know. There’s no such thing. This was yet another blood drenched summary execution ordered by the devotees of the death cult that mindlessly and pointlessly slaughtered 1,200 Israelis almost exactly two years ago. Hamas then subsequently turned the deaths of those “tens of thousands of (Palestinian) civilians” into the most vile, immoral global propaganda campaign in recent memory.

Just how politically and morally repulsive is Hamas? Even Prime Minister Carney, in a truly pathetic gesture of pseudo even-handedness before launching into his excoriation of Israel, had to come clean. He acknowledged it has “terrorized the people of Israel and oppressed the people of Gaza, wreaking horrific suffering. It is imperative that Hamas release all hostages, fully disarm, and play no role in the future governance of Palestine.”

Yes, well, good luck with that, unless the Israelis succeed in their admittedly excruciating mission of rooting out Hamas from Gaza and defeating it beyond the possibility of resurrection. It’s a point made repeatedly by the Netanyahu government but one Canada’s diplomatic Boy Scouts just can’t seem to grasp.

Instead, Prime Minister Carney sees hope on the horizon in the form of 89-year-old Palestinian National Authority dictator-for-life Mahmoud Abbas. He, the PM says in his declaration of recognition, “has provided direct commitments to Canada and the international community on much-needed reforms, including to fundamentally reform its governance, to hold general elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part, and to demilitarize the Palestinian state.”

Direct commitments, you say? Well, well. The PA, whose former President was the dashing terrorist Yasser Arafat, has never lied before, now has it? And who wouldn’t implicitly trust the commitments of a near-nonagenarian whose name has been on Middle East assassins’ hit lists for decades? But, errr, who exactly is going to oversee this long-desired “demilitarizing” of Gaza and the “Palestinian state?”

Would it be the very same Mahoud Abbas who lost a civil war to Hamas in 2007, clearing the way for the victors to launch a pogrom that effectively divided the Palestinian territory and entrenched their rule-by-murder in Gaza?

Or would it be the Mahoud Abbas who, two years ago, one month prior to the Oct. 7 atrocity against Israel, suffered global condemnation for an anti-Semitic rant in which he claimed that Hitler launched the Holocaust against Jews – all 6 million of them – because they were money lenders, not because of their faith?

Hey, who wouldn’t back such a trusted, eloquent political warhorse in rebuilding a “peaceful future” for Israelis and Palestinians? Okay. I wouldn’t.

Neither, it seems, would Mosab Yousef, who happens to be the eldest son of Hassan Yousef, a co-founder of Hamas. In a Telegraph story published Sunday, Yousef the younger condemns what he calls “Palestinianism,” by which he means a “cultish curse that threatens not just Israel but the wider world,” in the words of the Telegraph’s Global Health Security Editor, Paul Nuki.

“Palestinianism is a political violent movement, and self-proclaimed Palestinians are those who are profiting out of the Palestinian cause,” Yousef told the Telegraph.

As the son of a founder of that politically violent movement, and an active participant in it until he was sickened by the mind-numbing atrocities he witnessed, Yousef makes a claim so shocking and impolitic that few without his pedigree would dare raise it even as speculation. While Hamas is everything its detractors say, he asserts, it is not the master but a creature of the Palestinian people themselves who have been generationally distorted by decades of resorting to bloodshed.

“Nowadays I make no distinction between Hamas and Palestinians,” he is quoted. “Most of the rapes, atrocities, beheadings, burning people, burning corpses…were committed by Gaza civilians, not the Hamas (military wing). The truth is, Hamas couldn’t control it.”

The Telegraph’s Nuki notes that Yousef’s personal story is a fascinating one whether we accept or reject his point of view. I want to come back to it in a follow-up Substack column to explore how a Son of Hamas, as his autobiography is called, became an Israeli spy in order to avert the terrorist destruction dished out by the death cult. Beyond that, why is his astonishingly well-informed perspective not a central part of the Israeli-Palestinian media narrative?

I want to leave this column, however, on the following note: A) How on earth did Canadian Boy Scout diplomacy become so perversely persuasive as to draw an intelligent man like Mark Carney into such a prime ministerial morass? And B) How is the “recognition” of such a territory-less, government-less, lawless “state” going to play out for federalism when the Parti Quebecois regains power and launches a third independence referendum for Quebec?

Be prepared for that to go sideways, too.

(Peter Stockland is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Montreal Gazette)

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