Foreign affairs minister makes bogus comparison between Oct. 7 and allegations against Israelis in Gaza
Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, in Israel for a three-day visit this week, found time on Tuesday to deeply offend her hosts, announcing during a stopover in the West Bank that Canada would be putting up $1 million toward investigating allegations of sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinian women.
“We believe Palestinian women,” Joly wrote in a tweet reiterating the funding pledge.
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Joly’s statement on sexual and gender-based violence against Palestinian women came just a day after she announced a matching $1 million for survivors of sexual violence committed by Hamas Oct. 7, tweeting on Monday, “We believe Israeli women. And we stand by them in their fight for justice.”
The near-identical language Joly chose to use in each statement wasn’t lost on Israel’s Special Envoy for Combatting Antisemitism, Michal Cotler-Wunsh, who slammed the Canadian foreign minister on X for perpetuating a “false moral equivalence” between Hamas’s coordinated use of sexual torture on Oct. 7 and allegations of sexual misconduct levied against individual Israelis.
“Canadian tax (dollars) supporting blood libel inversion of fact (and) law,” Cotler-Wunsh wrote in a reply posted to X just minutes after Joly tweeted about Canada’s $1-million commitment toward investigating Palestinian sex abuse claims.
Cotler-Wunsh’s rapid-fire attack on Joly was just the latest in a steady stream of rebukes that both she and her boss Justin Trudeau have drawn from Israeli officials in the past five months. This scolding, however, was no doubt especially embarrassing for the foreign minister, coming in the thick of her abortive Holy Land charm offensive.
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The foreign minister’s recent tweets from Israel and the West Bank aren’t, however, a mere blip on the radar; they squarely fit a larger pattern of biased and inconsistent messaging on sexual violence as it pertains to the Israel-Hamas conflict.
It took Joly, for example, a full two months to condemn Hamas for using rape as a tactic of war on Oct. 7, despite incriminating footage surfacing while the attacks were still ongoing.
Meanwhile, the testimony of embattled UN special rapporteur for Palestine Francesca Albanese, a vociferous critic of Israel, was evidence enough for Joly to publicly endorse, last month, an investigation into sexual violence against Palestinian women in Gaza. Albanese had tweeted less than two weeks earlier that the bloodshed on Oct. 7 had nothing to do with antisemitism. A bipartisan group of 18 U.S. Congress members have since petitioned the UN to remove Albanese from her post.
Joly, a self-styled Feminist Foreign Policy evangelist, isn’t doing her own cause any favours by applying different standards to claims of sexual violence committed against Israeli and Palestinian women. One must also question Joly’s enthusiasm for an investigation into sexual violence in Gaza that could divert global attention away from obtaining justice for the scores of Israeli women and girls who we know for a fact were victimized on Oct. 7.
Why, in other words, is Joly insistent on “all lives matter-ing” the organized sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli women and girls on Oct. 7? Whether the allegations that Palestinian women were sexually abused by Israelis are true or false, there is no indication that anything approximating the scale and savagery of the weaponized sexual violence that Hamas tore through southern Israel on that day has since occurred in Gaza. To suggest otherwise is an affront to reality.
Mélanie Joly has shown herself to be a faux feminist by cynically perpetuating a harmful false equivalency between reports of sexual violence between Israeli and Palestinian women. Her insistence on helping Israel’s enemies muddy the waters and obscure the horrors of Oct. 7 can only do a disservice to all women and girls who bear the brunt of the use of rape as a weapon of war.
In playing politics with wartime sexual violence, Joly has willingly sacrificed her vision of Feminist Foreign Policy to the altar of political expediency. She’ll now have to live with this decision and the shadow it inevitably casts over her legacy as foreign minister.
National Post
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