A Toronto Sun editorial 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 graduate degree 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, Harper once described Israel’s brutal 2006 invasion of Lebanon as “measured” and justified while his government simultaneously demeaned Lebanese Canadians desperate to flee Israeli bombs.

Using its illegal Dahiya doctrine of disproportionate force and collective punishment of civilians, the IDF’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon killed 1,100 and wounded 4,400. According to a Human Rights Watch report, 80 percent of those 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.

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), Kafr Qasim (1956), and other Israeli outrages ignored by the Western media. In 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 no time for the International Court of Justice’s conclusions on Israel’s genocidal intent in Gaza and Amnesty International on Israeli apartheid. The former PM still considers Israel a credible ally in spite of the IDF’s ongoing campaign of destruction and territorial expansion across the Middle East.

Like most Western leaders, Harper has routinely denigrated historical context and justified Israeli aggression and marginalization of Palestinian autonomy without acknowledging the inevitable results of state terrorism.

In spite of claims consistently made by the mainstream press, Hamas’s 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 a desperate attempt by Hamas 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 and surveillance technology, as well as high-tech weapon systems. That deal is dead, even as Trump prepares to reenter 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 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.

Harper’s Middle East rhetoric seemingly reflects the religious stance of the evangelical Christian and Missionary Alliance of Canada, 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 nuclear apocalypse to return Jesus Christ to Earth, precipitating the “rapture” described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. Most evangelicals accept the Revelations’ notion that unbelievers (including most Jews, apparently) are damned.

Of course, Harper omits this pesky detail when expressing his “moral clarity” in support of Israel’s faltering campaign of territorial expansion and domination.

Morgan Duchesney is a Canadian writer and Karate teacher whose work has appeared in Humanist Perspectives, Adbusters, Briarpatch, Canadian Dimension, Shintani Harmonizer, Victoria Standard, the Hampton Institute and the Ottawa Citizen. In addition to political writing, Morgan has published martial arts work and short fiction.