On May 29, 10 days following a joint statement made by Canada, France and the UK which told Israel it was behaving in a way which righteous countries would not put up with, a communion of Canadian religious sisters wrote to Prime Minister Mark Carney to express “gratitude for, and solidarity with” the position.

Srs. Margo Ritchie and Linda Haydock, on behalf of some 30 religious congregations in Canada, wrote that the situation in Gaza was desperate.

“For months now, humanitarian supplies have been blocked from entering Gaza. Community kitchens are closed. Warehouses are empty. War-traumatized families, including children, are slowly starving.”

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Though Ritchie and Haydock called on Hamas to release the “remaining hostages,” the blame for the humanitarian crisis was laid squarely at the feet of Israel.

According to the sisters, the situation is desperate not because Hamas wrested control of the aid entering Gaza as a means of supporting its war effort, stealing a portion for its own use and selling the rest at a profit, but because Israel has blocked aid into the Gaza Strip.

In fact, the letter was written more than a week after Israel had lifted the blockade, more than a week after complete debunking of  the claim by the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs Tom Fletcher that “14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours,” and three days after the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a joint Israeli-U.S. initiative to circumvent the Hamas-captured aid system, began distributing food boxes.

Were the good sisters aware, and if so did it give them pause, that just a few days earlier, Hamas — the murderous terrorist organization that has controlled Gaza since the 2007 Gaza Civil War — also expressed its gratitude and solidarity with the statement issued by Canada, France and the UK? On May 20, in a letter published online, Hamas called the statement “a significant step in the right direction.”

While Hamas urged the international community to take steps to halt the “savage Zionist aggression,” the sisters declared that “military operations in Gaza must stop” and commended the multinational promise “to take further action, including targeted sanctions, if Israel does not cease its military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.”

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The language employed by these Canadian Catholic sisters, living so very far from the place they are writing about, is straight out of the Hamas communications handbook intended for Western consumption and dissemination. It is only a tiny editorial step from Israel’s “military offensive” to “savage Zionist aggression.”

Srs. Ritchie and Haydock write of “slow starvation,” thereby not only accusing Israel of war crimes but participating in a media and NGO-driven trope of intentional starvation and genocide that has been swirling around since the beginning of the war. It is a trope that has been debunked. Like their secular counterparts Women in Black (ironically, it is now the secularists who wear more of a habit than these religious sisters) the object of moral indignation is always Israel, and never Hamas.

The letter from the religious congregations came across my desk because it had been attached to the weekly email bulletin I receive from my local Catholic church. The small, suburban parish is neither more nor less occupied with so-called “social justice” issues than any other Catholic church in Canada and I assume, though I have not checked, that many other parishes across the country decided to attach the letter to their parish email chain. I suspect that, of the small percentage of Catholics who will read the letter, an even smaller percentage will baulk at the underlying assumptions and tone as I did. Why? Because they are the very same assumptions and tone that has been broadcast from every newsroom and printed in every paper since Oct. 7, 2023.

As Seth Mandel wrote in Commentary Magazine, “If you got your news from the New York Times or the Washington Post or the BBC or any number of others, you followed an entirely different war — one that didn’t happen.”

Thankfully, there is a group of Canadian Christians and Jews now actively engaged in doing something concrete about a problem in their own Canadian backyard — the documented and undisputable dramatic rise in anti-Semitism.

Last month, the Simeon Summit Initiative, a collaboration between the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), United Jewish Appeal of Greater Toronto, Macdonald-Laurier Institute and Cardus, brought together over 70 rabbis, Christian pastors and lay leaders for two days of conversation and planning.

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When I asked Fr. Deacon Andrew Bennett, Canada’s former ambassador for religious freedom and a summit organizer, about his response to the sisters’ letter, he responded:

“There is no other religion with which we have a relationship as Catholics that is as close or as intrinsic as Judaism and the Jewish people. So, I would ask these sisters, where were your voices when the single greatest massacre of Jews, raping, kidnapping, brutality after kidnapping, where were those voices when that happened? I didn't hear those voices. So, it's fine to point fingers during a war. War is nasty, war is ugly. But who started the war?”