No, I am well aware that the Israeli state has a long and well documented history of lying and fabricating evidence to support its genocidal goals. Just because Israel defines the entire civilian population as human shields does not make it so.

As I suspected, you will be unable to provide any independent sources or imagery of Hamas militants engaging in anything that would be recognized as human shielding under international law.

Conversely, I can provide several different examples from several different sources, which paint a clear and ongoing picture of flagrant war crimes being perpetrated by Israel. This is just the stuff that more closely aligns with “human shields”, using civilians, as well as civilian structures, uniforms, and vehicles, for protection. Israel has been openly violating international law for decades, their disregard for Palestinian life and basic human rights is excruciatingly well documented.

You’ll note that most of these articles do parrot all the lines from Israeli officials as their editorial boards force them to, some even repeat the claims of Hamas using human shields, but you will find none of those are tied to anything but Israeli testimonials. It’s reported matter-of-factly without a shred of evidence. The Israeli crimes however, usually include video or photographic evidence of them being perpetrated.

Surely if the practice of human shielding was common for Hamas, it should be easy enough for you to provide at least one photo or video of this happening, right? All I ask is that you provide one such example, anything that shows this actually happening that isn’t just an Israeli official, civilian, or militant saying it’s happening. If it’s common, it should not be hard to do.

Speaking of obvious falsehoods, I’m going to ask you to provide a single verifiable report of Hamas using human shields from anyone not directly tied to the Israeli state.

Not the distortion of humanitarian law which assumes that the mere presence of unarmed people suspected of being affiliated with Hamas means any civilians around them are “shields”, because unarmed people regardless of affiliation are not lawful combatants.

Not the absurd claim that suspected tunnels underneath civilians justify the massacre of those civilians in order to target military infrastructure.

Not the unverified testimonies of people with a history of fabricating lies on behalf of the Israeli government.

Just any single instance of someone in Hamas forcing a nearby civilian to endanger their life on their behalf, from a source that is not ultimately the Israeli government or military itself.

Quoting from the UN report “Anatomy of a genocide”, I have edited out the annotations but there are sources for every single one of the claims listed if you would like to verify yourself:

IHL strictly prohibits the use of human shields. Their use constitutes a war crime, as it violates the duty to protect the civilian population from dangers arising from military operations. When human shields are used, the attacking party must take into account the risk to civilians. Indiscriminate or disproportionate harm to civilians remains unlawful and the civilian population can never be targeted.

Israel has accused Palestinian armed groups of deliberately using civilians as human shields in previous aggressions on Gaza (including in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022). It also used it to justify high civilian casualties and attacks against paramedics, journalists and others during the 2018–2019 ‘Great March of Return’. UN independent fact-finding missions and reputable human rights organizations have consistently challenged these allegations, sometimes concluding that evidence of human shields had been fabricated. Nevertheless, Israel has used these accusations – sometimes then retracted – to justify widespread and systematic killing of Palestinian civilians in its ongoing assault.

After 7 October, this macro-characterization of Gaza’s civilians as a population of human shields has reached unprecedented levels, with Israel’s top-ranking political and military leaders consistently framing civilians as either Hamas operatives, “accomplices”, or human shields among whom Hamas is “embedded”. In November, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs defined “the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields” and accused Hamas of using “the civilian population as human shields”. The Ministry defines armed groups fighting from urban areas as deliberately “embedded” in the population to such an extent that it “cannot be concluded from the mere fact that seeming ‘civilians’ or ‘civilian objects’ have been targeted, that an attack was unlawful”. Two rhetorical elements of this key legal policy document indicate the intention to transform the entire Gaza population and its infrastructures of life into a ‘legitimate’ targetable shield: the use of the all-encompassing the combined with the quotation marks to qualify civilians and civilian objects. Israel has thus sought to camouflage genocidal intent with humanitarian law jargon.

International law does not permit the blanket claim that an opposing force is using the entire population as human shields en bloc. Any such usage must be assessed and established on a case-by-case basis before each individual attack. The crime of using human shields occurs when the use of civilians or civilian objects to impede attacks on lawful targets is the result of a deliberate tactical choice, not merely arising from the nature of the battlefield, such as hostilities in densely populated urban terrain.

Nevertheless, Israeli authorities have characterized churches, mosques, schools, UN facilities, universities, hospitals and ambulances as connected with Hamas to reinforce the perception of a population characterized as broadly ‘complicit’ and therefore killable. Significant numbers of Palestinian civilians are defined as human shields simply by being in “proximity to” potential Israeli targets. Israel has thus transformed Gaza into a “world without civilians” in which “everything from taking shelter in hospitals to fleeing for safety is declared a form of human shielding”. The accusation of using human shields has thus become a pretext, justifying the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.

Yep it’s actually Israel that has routinely and systematically employed captured Palestinians as human shields. For some background, there is this recent article in Haaretz stemming from anonymous IDF soldier reports, titled “In Gaza, Almost Every IDF Platoon Keeps a Human Shield, a Sub-army of Palestinian Slaves”.

If anyone is distorting rules of engagement and humanitarian law, it’s actually Israel. Something that has come up again and again, especially in the writing of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, is the concept of “humanitarian camouflage” and how the Israeli state has very deliberately misused terms of international humanitarian law to cynically redefine civilian people, structures, and infrastructure as military targets. I am going to quote from an article she co-authored (available here):

The article analyzes the components of this humanitarian camouflage, unveiling how it has been deployed by Israel as a legal-political strategy in the service of a war of total annihilation. We start by examining how, since October 7, Israel has justified its genocidal campaign in Gaza using two registers: on one hand, a brutal register of dehumanization of the Palestinian population of Gaza, construed as a terrorist population to be eliminated; on the other hand—and simultaneously—a liberal register to legitimize its eliminationist violence in the face of its international allies’ audience, disguising it as compliance with IHL.

We then expand the analysis of the second register, showing how the Israeli military, mimicking IHL language, has construed the entirety of the built-up areas of Gaza as a continuum of alleged military objectives, reclaiming the ‘right’ to ‘lawfully’ raze houses, schools, mosques, churches, hospitals, entire neighborhoods, and entire cities to the ground, including the infrastructures indispensable for the survival of the civilian population, rendering the living space of the victim group unlivable. Subsequently, we examine how lethal distortions of the IHL concept of proportionality and collateral damage have been functional in construing entire masses of civilians as killable surroundings of military objectives with a diminished, or non-existent, right to life.

The analysis continues by showing how an array of IHL concepts like safe zones, evacuations, human shields, and “hospital shields” have been mobilized by Israel as technologies of settler-colonial displacement and genocide, creating conditions of life leading to the destruction of Gaza’s Palestinians “in whole or in part.” The article concludes by arguing that the settler-colonial genocidal war against Gaza, and Israel’s marshalling of international humanitarian law to legitimize it, ultimately shows that the international order has reached a tipping point whereby political acquiescence towards Israel and its legitimization as an international law-abiding state eviscerates the key legal tools the international community has developed to prevent international crimes. If tolerated, condoned, and unpunished, this process may inaugurate a new era of mass atrocities against protected groups in the Global South, in which big powers will be able to portray genocides as ‘incidental’ and ‘proportionate’ means to achieve their war aims.

I highly recommend reading the three reports issued by the UN on these matters, “Genocide as colonial erasure” which focuses more on historical context, “Anatomy of a genocide” which covers more of the present patterns of conflict, and finally “More than a human can bear” which covers the widespread and systematic use of gendered and sexual violence inflicted on Palestinians.

Some noteworthy excerpts:

While Canadian soldiers fought an anti-fascist war overseas, at home the state targeted the left for repression far more than the Canadian fascist movement. During the Second World War, four-fifths of those prosecuted for subversive literature in Canada were communists, the majority of banned groups were communist organizations, and most of the people arrested for violating the Defence of Canada Regulations were leftists, not fascists. Many of those interned were Ukrainian or otherwise Slavic in origin, and many were Jewish. The Canadian state also confiscated property belonging to working-class Ukrainian organizations and gave it to Ukrainian groups with right-wing or even pro-fascist sympathies.

Today, leftists and progressives in Canada continue to endure overtly political policing, such as when they organize against Canadian complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. In November 2024, a militarized unit from the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) raided the home of Palestine solidarity activist Charlotte Kates. In a massive show of force, VPD officers arrived in an armoured police carrier, fired flashbang grenades, broke down her door, and reportedly seized her computers and phones. The previous month, Ottawa had declared Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, of which Kates is international coordinator, a “terrorist entity.”

As the Canadian left continues to mobilize, we should understand ourselves as part of a century-old tradition in Canada, a tradition that has always opposed genocide, fascism, and the capitalist system – and has always faced police repression and accusations of “un-Canadian” behaviour for doing so.

[…]

As Israel commits a genocide against Palestinians, the Canadian state is using its repressive powers to brutalize and criminalize those who oppose this indiscriminate slaughter. In May 2024, the VPD violently dispersed a rail blockade. That same month, police in riot gear used tear gas and batons to repress a street protest in Montreal. Meanwhile a secretive team in the Toronto Police Service’s Hate Crimes Unit, known as Project Resolute, has specifically targeted Palestine solidarity activists, recalling the Red Squads of early 20th-century Canada. Under Project Resolute, officers have executed nighttime raids and ransacked activists’ homes.

Many Canadians have been fired or denied work for their opposition to Canadian state policy. Meanwhile Thomas Carrique, Ontario Provincial Police commissioner, directly blamed immigration for the spike in protest activity. “Through immigration,” he said, “thousands of people, who may have had an orientation towards violence as a means of expression or activism, continue to arrive in Canada every year.”

The overtly political slant of 1940s policing remains to this day. A particularly illustrative example is the so-called “Freedom Convoy.” Organized by right-wingers in January 2022, the Convoy and its associated protests caused billions of dollars in economic losses, but police did not intervene for three weeks. By contrast, police waited just 16 hours before attacking the student encampment for Palestine at the University of Calgary, one day before clearing the York University encampment, and a few days before destroying the University of Alberta encampment, even though campuses are generally isolated from the city centre and important urban infrastructure.

Wechat has over a billion active users, it’s the world’s only super app. There are probably tens of thousands of users in Montreal alone. This is like saying “anybody using whatapp is already compromised” it’s ridiculous.

Yeah it would have been more appropriate to say “Chinese-speaking audiences” on my part, especially given the concern seems to be that it was aimed at Canadian voters who can read/speak the language.

The second link was definitely the one I was more referring to when talking about editorializing and characterizations, it’s more emotive language overall but it still doesn’t really say anything wrong or misleading. Disagreeing with the characterization could be reasonable, but the tone of it is like any sensationalized news aggregator blog or social media account anywhere else in the world. Like we don’t call it misinformation when people post a video called “[Public Figure] DESTROYED in HEATED DEBATE!” even if we roll our eyes at the language, and similarly any kind of social media format lends itself to catchier and more dramatic descriptions.

The lack of attribution could actually be the real source of concern. It’s possible there’s some disagreements on wording in a translation, or that not having direct links to sources is viewed as misleading but again… it’s not hard to see that’s exactly how just about any social media news account tends to function these days.

It just honestly feels like this is the Canadian government grasping at straws, especially given that this is being treated like overt election interference from the Chinese government. Given that there is a much more present and obvious concern about US interference. Most of our media outside the CBC and all of our social media is directly owned by US corporations that are backing the fascist threatening to annex us. I don’t understand why the fed and CSIS keep issuing these warnings about often dubious claims of malicious state actors from elsewhere, it’s maddening.

The funny thing is that you can actually check the official Canadian source right here that links to two posts directly (one and two) and if you use some browser translation you can see exactly what the articles actually say which is… literally just a news update for Chinese audiences offering a summary of Carney’s past behavior and achievements. It’s not even really negative, if anything it’s just vaguely uncertain.

I have read them both twice and am not really really finding any false narratives to speak of. The only real editorializing is in portrayal of current exchanges between Trump, Carney, and Trudeau, and if we’re going to consider any kind of characterization of foreign political leaders as somehow pushing a false narrative then we should probably take a look at how all our own media reports on the US, EU, and elsewhere ourselves.

Granted, I don’t speak mandarin and there is always a possibility that there are more skewed statements that are being lost in translation, but I don’t really understand why these particular posts summarizing Canadian electoral politics for Chinese readers on wechat are somehow some kind of election interference.

A snippet, from one of the posts that is being framed as some kind of attack on Carney, which is actually titled “The United States is facing a tough prime minister from Canada”:

Who is Mark Carney? What is his campaign message? Can he lead Canada through the current crisis?

Carney was born in a small town called Fort Smith in the northwest region of Canada. His mother was a teacher and his father was the principal of a local high school. He later became a professor of education at the University of Alberta. Carney, who grew up in an academic family, originally dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, but changed his mind after being admitted to the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He admitted: “I came to Harvard from Canada with a large student loan, and the most effective way to repay the loan was to become a banker.”

After that, Carney graduated from Harvard University and Oxford University, spent 13 years in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, and then returned to Canada to start a public service.

In 2008, Carney, who was only 42 years old, became the governor of the Bank of Canada and was praised for his quick and effective response to the financial crisis. Carney then moved to London to take charge of the Bank of England, the central bank of the United Kingdom, becoming the first foreign governor in the bank’s 300-year history.

The British media called him a “rock star economist” for his series of modern reforms to the traditional Bank of England.

During his tenure in the UK, Carney helped the UK through the turbulent period after Brexit and was called “the only adult in the room.” But at the same time, Carney also caused controversy for repeatedly warning about the economic risks of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU and making remarks about the risks of climate change to financial markets.

After leaving his post as Governor of the Bank of England in 2020, Carney served as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, Chairman of Bloomberg, and Chairman of Brookfield Asset Management.

His professional achievements have earned Carney a large support base among Canadian Liberal MPs.

Earlier, Canadian Foreign Minister Joly said Carney was “capable of dealing with major crises”. Canadian Environment Minister Guilbeault believed that Carney was best suited to “manage” US President Trump and lead the Canadian economy to achieve energy transformation in the coming years.

Is it though, especially given the present trajectory and conduct of the Trump regime?