This article originally appeared in the National Post.
By Dagny Pawlak and Joe Adam George, June 24, 2025
As the sun shines over the ghost town of Metula which abuts the Israel-Lebanon border, blue jacaranda petals softly fall from their trees to blanket its missile-torn streets in a vibrant lavender hue. It is a scene of heartbreaking juxtaposition — nature’s relentless beauty blooming against the backdrop of human devastation, where time stands still in an eerie dance between lush abundance and complete war-torn destruction.
“Most of them will return,” David Azoulay, the mayor of Metula, told our group on our recent tour — speaking of his 2,000 evacuated residents — “because this is our home. We will rebuild and pull through.” These words come from a man who slept on the floor of his tiny subterranean office for months after October 7, as his town was mercilessly shelled by Hezbollah in a devastating campaign entirely unprovoked by Israel, one that obliterated over 60 per cent of the city’s buildings and homes and forced the evacuation of an entire community.
Once-beautiful family homes now lie in piles of rubble, with all that remains of everyday life found in the charred remnants of furniture and melted appliances. Yet here, rolling up their sleeves, the people of Metula are rebuilding their city piece by piece, determined to breathe life back into what was once a vibrant community in northern Israel.
A Dubious Investigation
Amidst rising tensions with Israel, Canada’s premier law enforcement agency, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), is preparing the ground for an investigation into potential war crimes related to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Should the target of the investigation be the state of Israel, or Israeli Canadians who served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), it would expose a moral blindness so profound it borders on the obscene.
Perhaps, Ottawa needs reminding that Hamas set the region ablaze in its barbarous rampage on October 7, forcing Israel into a seven-front war of survival against the Iranian regime’s genocidal Islamist terror proxies. Inexplicably, the RCMP didn’t disclose any plans to prosecute Hamas for murdering eight Canadians. While Canada launched a thunderous campaign for its Ukraine investigation — complete with hotlines, dedicated webpages, airport signage, and breathless media interviews — the Israel-Hamas war probe has skulked in shadows, acknowledged only when pressed by journalists.
Treating Israel like Russia isn’t merely a false analogy or bureaucratic inconsistency. It is the manifestation of a grotesque double-standard and the weaponization of the justice system against a long-time ally, revealing how deeply the malignant mix of moral relativism and vote-bank politics has infected Canadian institutions and society.
The Forgotten Massacre
In the communities of southern Israel’s Gaza envelope, the scene is even more harrowing. Among the rubble lay children’s clothes and the toys they were playing with moments before Hamas terrorists and Gazan civilians plowed through the security fences and massacred them in cold blood — for the unforgivable crime of being Jewish.
Residents walk through these ruins as the sound of bombs and artillery fire echoes in the near distance, an ongoing reminder of the Israeli nation’s unwavering determination to seek justice for these victims, and to reunite the 58 hostages still withering in Hamas’s subterranean tunnels of horror.
This was not war. This was butchery. Systematic, premeditated, celebratory butchery that Hamas terrorists livestreamed to the world with gleeful pride. They did not merely kill — they savoured the killing, reveled in it, and made their victims’ final moments exercises in unimaginable pain and terror.
The Moral Abyss of False Equivalence
When we speak of war crimes, let us be unequivocal about what we have witnessed. Hamas has constructed the most extensive military tunnel network in the world beneath Gaza — not for civilian protection, but for predatory warfare. When 95 per cent of cement transferred to Gaza for humanitarian reconstruction was systematically diverted to build these tunnels of terror, there was no outrage from the international community.
The evidence of Hamas’s depravity extends beyond conventional warfare. In those underground lairs, Israeli forces discovered not only the expected arsenal of weapons, but also disturbing quantities of lubricants, Viagra and condoms — the calculated implements of systematic sexual violence.
Even Gazans are not spared from Hamas’s cold-blooded war tactics. The use of civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza is a documented human shield strategy of the terror group. Hamas doesn’t merely commit war crimes; it premeditates and executes them with methodical precision.
Urban warfare expert John Spencer has observed that Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history — measures that exceed what international law requires and surpass what the United States employed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, Israel stands accused while Hamas, which weaponizes every hospital, school, and mosque escapes condemnation.
The Compromised Arbiters
If war crimes investigations are relying on UN statistics and testimonies, an inconvenient truth must be confronted: 12 UNRWA employees were fired for allegedly participating in the October 7th massacre of Israeli civilians. Indeed, the very organization providing “neutral” assessments had personnel directly complicit in the terrorist atrocities they now claim to investigate objectively.
This isn’t a footnote to be dismissed — it is a cancer that metastasizes through pretty much every UN report, every casualty figure, every moral pronouncement. How can any investigation maintain credibility when the parent body is institutionally compromised?
The Cruel Irony of Our Times
There is a cruel irony in how major media outlets seem to have inexhaustible space for coverage of Hamas’s fictional tales of Israeli brutality in Gaza, while the death and destruction the terror group unleashed on innocent Israelis almost immediately disappeared into a memory hole of willful amnesia.
Israel did not want this war. It was thrust into conflict by the most savage terrorist attack in its history — an invasion of Israeli territory unseen since 1948. Its response, while necessarily devastating, has been constrained by unprecedented efforts to minimize civilian casualties while confronting an enemy that systematically maximizes them.
Those who have borne witness to the devastation wrought upon Israel on October 7th perceive a naked truth that Canada’s selective justice refuses to acknowledge: There is no moral equivalence between a democratic nation that defends its citizens and a genocidal death cult that celebrates their slaughter.
Applying different standards to different conflicts, or granting terrorists the cover of false moral equivalence, does not advance the cause of justice — it desecrates it.
The victims of the October 7 attacks deserve better. The families of Metula deserve better. If Canada’s commitment to international justice is sincere, it must call out evil by its name — without equivocation, hesitation, or the moral cowardice that masquerades as neutrality.
True justice sees all victims and names all perpetrators. Anything less is not justice — it is complicity dressed in the language of law.
Dagny Pawlak is the Senior Communications Officer at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Joe Adam George is national security analyst at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and Research Lead — Islamist Threats at the Middle East Forum.
