HAMAS’S ATTACK HAS OPENED UP ANOTHER FRONT IN THE GROWING WAR AGAINST LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
Chris Alexander in the Globe and Mail
Liberal democracies need to understand this broadening conflict and respond by sanctioning, isolating and prosecuting those responsible.
In 2021, Kabul fell to the Taliban, leaving Afghanistan occupied and oppressed. In 2022, fascist Russia invaded Ukraine and tried to seize power in Kyiv. And earlier this month, Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,400 Israelis and have taken around 200 hostages.
With Moscow so eager to find a distraction, it should come as no surprise that there is growing evidence Russia had a hand in Hamas’s massacre. According to Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Hamas’s drone tactics seemed similar to Russia’s - a fake video, amplified by Russian social-media users, claimed Ukraine funded the Palestinian terror group; and the Wall Street Journal reported that funding for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, came from a sanctioned Russian crypto-exchange. The Kremlin has recently had high-level contacts with top Iranian and Hamas leaders, and after the October 7 attack, senior Hamas official Ali Baraka told state-run Russia Today that Moscow “sympathizes” with the group. “Russia is happy that America is getting embroiled in the Palestinian war. It eases the pressure on the Russians in Ukraine. One war eases the pressure in another war. So, we’re not alone on the battlefield,” he said.
Iran has an interest in Russia’s success, too. Alongside China, it is now the main supplier of military weaponry to wartime Russia, particularly of drones. With Moscow and Tehran benefitting from this new theatre of war, Israel’s challenge now is not only to destroy Hamas, but to deter and disable Iran’s other proxies in the region, particularly Hezbollah.
After all, both Iran and Russia have targeted civilians, downing aircraft over Russian-occupied Donbas and Iran, and pursuing genocidal campaigns in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere. Our response should be to sanction, isolate and prosecute those responsible – including sanctioning Iran for its state sponsorship of terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, removing Russia from the UN Security Council, banning Russian and Belarusan athletes from competing at the Olympics and elsewhere, and engaging in NATO action to protect ports, pipelines and cables in the Baltic and Black Seas – while stepping up support for Israel, which has become a new front in the war for the future of liberal democracy.
We should invest fully in Ukrainian victory and restore credible deterrence. Delays only prolong the war and extend the shelf life of Mr. Putin’s fascist regime. Ending both requires defeating Russia’s genocidal forces as quickly as possible and ejecting them from all of Ukraine, including Crimea. Supporting Ukraine’s victory is an investment in making every liberal democracy, from Estonia to Taiwan, safer from the threat of invasion.
Shared Foes
As strongly suspected, Russia – true to its modus operandi of aggression and subversion well-tested by history – was indeed behind Hamas’s attack on Israel. Hamas's indiscriminate barbarism against Israeli civilians has only been matched by Russian barbarism in Ukraine.
Both wars – Russia's war on Ukraine and Hamas’s war on Israel – upended a world order purportedly based on such principles as the right of every nation on Earth to its own homeland, statehood, independence and freedom – and to defend itself against aggressors in their quest to deny any nation its inalienable right to exist.
Due to their location on the world map, today both Ukraine and Israel are forced to accept that new geopolitical reality - Russia, its allies and proxies are shared foes. This unparalleled geopolitical circumstance ought to pave the way to closer relations between Ukrainians and the State of Israel.
Former deputy head of mission of the Canadian embassy in Moscow and Canadian cabinet minister Chris Alexander in his article "A new front has opened up in the war against liberal democracy" (The Globe and Mail, Saturday, 21st October 2023, Opinion page 8) has accurately addressed the fundamentals affecting the current international situation, as well as some important measures to be taken in order to begin resolving them.
