Experts on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said a judgment on whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is unlikely before the end of 2027 at the earliest, amid warnings that the international community should not use the court’s glacial proceedings as an excuse to put off action to stop the killing.
Israel was originally due to present its rebuttal to the genocide charge brought by South Africa on Monday, but the court has granted its lawyers a six-month extension.
The South African legal team countered that none of the arguments given by Israeli lawyers were a legitimate reason for delay, and dragging out the case was unjustifiable in view of the humanitarian emergency in Gaza. But the court sided with Israel, which now has until next January to present its case.
“The second round is usually around six months each, so that’s another year, and then that brings us to January 2027,” said Michael Becker, who served as a legal officer at the ICJ from 2010 to 2014, and who is now assistant professor of international human rights law at Trinity College Dublin.
A range of factors could drag the case into 2028 however, including demands by other countries to intervene.
The UN declared Canada a genocidal country because over a period of about 150 years there was a higher mortality rate amongst FN, and the government forceably sent them to school to learn to read/write, which ended up screwing up things like their oral tradition culture. Personally, I’d argue that was more a matter of cultural integration, with a misguided/mismanaged school system lead by a religious group – and that religious group was definitely keen on indoctrinating people into their faith, as religious groups are, but they’re at semi-arms length from the regular population/government. Graveyards where people were buried didn’t have headstones after 150 years, resulting in constant media spam about unmarked graves, with some less than brilliant idiots equating unmarked graves to mass graves even to this day. But still, Canada’s history is basically genocidal right up until 2020 at least, according to the UN.
But they can’t seem to figure out that Israel’s mass graves with bulldozers just piling in corpses, explicit targeting of journalists and people seeking aid/food, flattening of whole neighbourhoods, killing crazy amounts of civilians, forced starvation complete with dying babies, and with a population on the Israeli side that’s openly saying shit like “We gotta kill the babies otherwise they’ll grow up to be terrorists. They’re all cockroaches”… on this one, we’re not so sure.
Someone make it make sense.
Personally, I’d argue that was more a matter of cultural integration, with a misguided/mismanaged school system lead by a religious group – and that religious group was definitely keen on indoctrinating people into their faith, as religious groups are, but they’re at semi-arms length from the regular population/government
"When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men. " - the guy on our $10 bill, i.e. the first PM of Canada.
Additionally, the Canadian government, even after closing most residential schools (with the last one being open until as recently as 27 years ago), continued to steal children from their families to place them in white homes and further destroy their culture. Look up the 60’s scoop and the ongoing statistics of Indigenous children in the welfare system.
The RCMP was created to uphold genocidal laws (like the law that outlawed powwows and public displays of culture).
Yes, Israel’s genocide is plain to see now, but make no mistake, what Canada did was very clear and very intentional genocide, and we continue to uphold that colonial (read: genocidal) system to this day.
Bonus John A. quote: “The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change.”
I’d also argue that 215 bodies is just as bad as “mass graves” whether or not they were put into a mass grave or individual unmarked graves. And that’s just at one school.
Some of the cultural differences that got impacted included slavery amongst FN, particularly out towards BC’s coast – where about 25% of some bands were slaves from other groups. Outlawing slavery was something done around the initial forming of the country – basically as BC joined and at the start of it all with John A. Do you maintain it’s wrong to call the practice of slavery savage, and that Canada should’ve allowed such traditions to persist? The old systems often also maintained a hereditary chief setup, with the leaders being fixed / based on blood – something that doesn’t exactly mesh with democratic principles, such as all people being created equal, and deserving equal respect. The implementation of that principle is admittedly a work in progress, and has been since the country was formed: women not gettin a say till much later is proof enough of that. But just because the country didn’t recognise women’s rights from its initial founding, doesn’t make the whole country misogynistic. But I digress – should we go back to explicitly preferencing people based solely on their blood lines? Or are we wearing rose-colored glasses and absolving all the potential wrongs/ills of the earlier culture, in favour of only the positive elements we want to highlight today, to make it a one sided story?
215 bodies over 150+ years is bad, but it’s nothing compared to the 60k+ deaths occurring in Israel in the past year. Like the total number estimated to have died at residential schools is 6000 over the 150 years. That’s one tenth the number compared to what’s gone on in Israel in the past year – that 6000, would need to be closer to 9 million to have the same sort of scale. There weren’t even 9 million people in the entire country of Canada until sometime after the 1920s.
There were definitely issues on this front, and there was a higher mortality rate amongst FN during the period, but for a time frame that goes back to “before phones / vaccines were common”, I honestly don’t think that’s so clear cut. School age kid mortality rates in general were around 1 in 250 back in the early 1900s - it wasn’t until fairly recently that the mortality rate dramatically improved, to like 1 in 4000, largely due to vaccines and advances in medicine. And old graves from 150+ years ago, or even from like 50+ years ago, not having headstones/markers isn’t that uncommon – I’ve no clue where my grandparents are buried, and I’m pretty sure they don’t still have headstones. There’s no specific reason to think that the bodies in old, unmarked graves weren’t treated with respect and dignity at the time of their passing, based on the customs of the time: or do you really think that old time priests who were super devout / wanting to spread the word of god, were doing disrespectful things to corpses of people they considered part of their flock, on a regular/systematic basis? That’d be one hell of a leap, and it’d need a lot more evidence to convince me. The level of dignity given to the dead in these two situations is very different, even if those missionaries at the time failed to follow the specific burial rights of the FN.
I looked up / read a bit more about the 60s scoop here - not sure if that’s a good source. One of the reasons development differed significantly between on reserve and off-reserve communities, I’d posit, is that non-reserve land allows for individual Canadians to ‘own’ the land. That ownership leads to development of that land, as you hope to pass it on to your kids. We see this sort of thing even today, with “leasehold” 99 year lease properties that are tied to FN groups being far less desirable / lower price than regular freehold properties. We also see it in the clear hesitation of many banks/FIs to lend to FN based on res properties/businesses, as there are no assurances that the band won’t just declare the land theirs and negate the security. As much of the development of industry is done by private sector, the government was ill-equipped to handle a huge number of under developed communities needing funds/infrastructure, and being wholly reliant on the gov for such things, without private sector interest. The lack of development on reserves translated to shit living conditions, with high mortality rates, particularly for kids. While we can look back and say it was wrong now, I’m not sure whether it would’ve been ‘better’ to leave the kids in those conditions to die / live in abject poverty, assuming that the government couldn’t instantaneously deploy infrastructure to those remote communities. Hell, our government can’t do anything of that sort even today. Realistically, one thing that’s missing from the discourse is “What should’ve been done better back then, given the real socio-economic situation of the time?”
I’d want a source for the RCMP comment, if you can? The history that I can see about it, does not align with your claim. I admit that the sources of that history could be biased though, so I wouldn’t refute your comment, but I won’t believe it either without some far more significant evidence. Like the RCMP site claims that the NWMP (precursor to the RCMP) first got started to basically defend FN from attacks by US Whiskey traders out west – seems a bit different than what you’re claiming, without a source… ? I mean, it’s basically the opposite, in that it was a response by Canada to try and defend/protect people in the west, specifically FN, with FN guides integrated into the force.
Does Canada’s history have issues? Sure. But it’s disingenuous to frame it entirely as a one sided thing, and to villainize one group while absolving the other. And in comparison to Israel’s actions in the past year, Canada has not, to my knowledge, ever done anything nearing that level of direct, pointed hostility / brutality. But by all means, prove me wrong – point me to the evidence that Canada rolled in to FN communities with the military, slaughtered everyone while laughing about it, and then dug mass graves to carelessly throw the dead babies in.
Equating what Canada did as part of its bumbling attempts at cultural integration to what Israel is doing today, or what Nazi germany did previously, is an inappropriate softening of the term Genocide. It cheapens and diminishes the moral insanity, the utter depravity, of what Israel is doing.
The article on the same site you shared here (https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/royal-canadian-mounted-police) about the RCMP goes over their history as the NWCP, who were created to control “unrest” among indigenous people and settlers (I.e. the people that were stealing their land). You can read about the Indian Act, which exists to this day. That book goes over the laws I mentioned about the police enforcing the potluck bans and how they punished indigenous people who went off reserve (similarly to how Israeli forces keep Palestinians within their own areas and don’t allow them travel outside without a pass). There’s a shorter version of the 21 things you may not know about the Indian act Here, and Bob Joseph is one the most renowned indigenous scholars in Canada. Police officers were also the ones who would “arrest” children and take them to the residential schools. orangeshirtday.org
As for the sixties scoop, there are a few things at play. One, the reservations were kept under-served (meaning in terms of electricity, etc) by the very systems the government had created. Two, as you mentioned, they did not own the land (and legally weren’t allowed to) so they were all “poor” in the eyes of the government. But most importantly, its the basis that the white government workers who were deciding what is or isn’t a good “fit” for the child were doing so based on their own cultural values
The ideal home would instil the values and lifestyles with which the child welfare workers themselves were familiar: white, middle-class homes in white, middle-class neighbourhoods. Aboriginal communities and Aboriginal parents and families were deemed to be “unfit.” (http://www.ajic.mb.ca/volumel/chapter14.html#6)
As a consequence, indigenous children were greatly over-represented in the child welfare system: by your own source, its a low estimate to say that 20,000 children were taken from their homes.
You mentioned that school age mortality was around 1 in 250. In residential schools, that same mortality was 1 in 25 (conservatively). The medical inspector of these schools himself even called out the conditions of these schools in his book A National Crime.
As for the savage comment, I barely even want to respond to that but White Canadians most certainly also had slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries, and I promise you that is not why he was calling then “savages”.
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The government itself recognized the actions as genocide, and what is disingenuous is to downplay the genocide of one group of peoples over another just because one was “less effective” at destroying a culture and murdering people.
I know I’m not going to change your mind so I’m going to stop replying after this. I want you to know that I don’t think Canada, or Canadians, are “bad” people, just like how I don’t think Israelis are necessarily “bad” people. The government does fucked up shit. All governments do fucked up shit. None of it is okay, and none of it is “better” just because it is less successful at its goal of erasing entire cultures. Yes, even those slave trading indigenous groups were doing fucked up shit, and no, that also was not okay. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to kill them all and replace them with your own fucked up shit.
Courts worldwide gotta get their shit together and get faster this is a joke.
Because it is easier to drag our feet.
