Kelly O’Connor, an immigration lawyer in Toronto, said she gasped out loud when she saw the text. Any medical worker who denies care to someone hurt in a war zone is committing a “serious breach of the Geneva Convention,” she said in an interview.
“It’s completely outrageous that the government would ask these kinds of questions because it’s trying to promote that someone would violate the Geneva Conventions in wartime, which is really not something that the Canadian military stands for,” O’Connor said.
Vancouver-based immigration lawyer Randall Cohn said the questions in the letter are “patently illegal and absolutely egregious.” He has seen two such letters asking about medical treatment of Hamas members — sent to a doctor and a nurse — and he is aware of two more, he said in an interview.
The people who received these letters and brought them to lawyers were afraid to do it, Cohn said, because they worried they would be penalized by Canadian immigration officials. He wonders how many other people have received similar letters but haven’t shown them to anyone out of fear.
The federal Immigration Department said that an interview with its minister, Marc Miller, was not possible.
Doesn’t matter. Telling medics who they can and can’t treat is a war crime.
There’s a reason we have international rules and standards for conflicts, and a huge number of them have to do with how medics and aid-workers operate. If you start perverting that, then medics dies and war gets worse than it already is.
Similar things apply to how civilians and prisoners are treated, and for the same reason: mistreat non-combatants and you can expect the same in return. When the Americans brutalized Iraqi combatants, it resulted in American troops and civilians, both in and out of conflict zones, dying. All because of Bush’s “You’re either with us or with the terrorists” absolutism that not only didn’t end the war sooner, it wrecked American soft power for the following quarter-century at least.
War is awful, but at least it can be less awful is basic rules get followed. This is one of them.
Israel is finding this out the hard way, just like the Americans did when they flushed their reputation after the second gulf war. Netanyahu probably knows this, but because he’s not the one who’s at risk he’s happy to put targets on doctors, aid-workers and the Jewish diaspora world-wide to save his cowardly political skin.
No one says Hamas isn’t a terrorist organization, but that’s not what’s being argued, here, and if Netanyahu hadn’t shot his wad Israel woud enjoying broad international support and sympathy right now, with help and aid and assistance and lot of goodwill. But if he did that, he’d probably be unelected by his own supporters, because his staying in office and out of jail on corruption charges depends on the support of Israeli neo-fascists.