A relative mourns as she carries the body of 8-month-old Palestinian infant Laila al-Ghandour, who died after inhaling tear gas during a protest against the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem, at the Israel-Gaza border, during her funeral in Gaza City May 15, 2018. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

When the only thing refugees can do to advance their cause is present themselves at someone’s border to be shot, you know the world has lost its way on this file.

When 60 human beings are gunned down in cold blood, when a doctor is shot while tending to wounded civilians, and people want to talk about the dress Ivanka Trump wore at the U.S. embassy opening in Jerusalem, you know a whole class of people has been dehumanized.

When 2,800 people are hit by live fire or tear gassed by drones for protesting an illegal occupation that has gone on for more than 50 years, it is a strange time to announce that history would look back on this despicable day as a step towards peace.

Yet Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s gruesomely green Middle East envoy, made that statement with just 40 miles between the embassy celebration and the border slaughter, and the bubbly and the barbarism.

It was Kushner’s “let them eat cake” moment. The president’s son-in-law delivered his lines like an extra out of the cult film “Night of the Living Dead.” It was as if the mass shootings didn’t register with him. It was as if Israel’s “eye for an eyelash” policy, as Special UN Rapporteur, Canadian Michael Lynk called it, was perfectly justified in Kushner’s mind.

How else could he blame the Palestinians for their own slaughter? Men, women, children, doctors and journalists.

Remember that fascist-tinted moment in Toronto in 2010 when police rounded up and detained more than 1,000 people protesting the G-20 Summit? It was called “kettling.”

No one liked seeing fellow citizens put under the jackboots of the police. Former Toronto Police Services Board chair Alok Mukherjee wrote that the security fiasco of that year “left a permanent emotional scar” on him.

Imagine, though, if the authorities had opened up on the crowd with live ammunition and killed 60 people on the spot? All of it captured on video.

Remember those recent TV clips of a few hundred Mexicans pushing up to the U.S. border, hoping to get a piece of the American Dream?

What would have happened if the National Guard, which Trump dispatched to “defend” the U.S. from illegal immigrants, had mowed down 60 of these poor and unarmed people? All of it captured on video.

And what would happen if a person who owned a house in a gated community, dealt with someone who climbed over the wall by shooting them stone dead?

In all these cases, we would not be scolding or expressing our disapproval or having a discussion about independent investigations in a country that doesn’t permit them.

We would be arranging murder trials.

But in the case of the Palestinians, the world looks the other way. It is the breathtaking display of under reaction reserved for those who have been rendered sub-human by the more powerful.

The Trump White House has made itself especially repugnant by blaming the border slaughter on Hamas, the tried, true and utterly transparent fig leaf used to justify ultra violence against Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces.

Think about it. Scores of deaths and thousands of casualties on one side, none on the other. Stones, kites and Molotov cocktails from a few, answered by live fire, tanks, and jet-fighters from the combined might of the Israeli military?

Trump’s ghastly attempt to shift the blame for Israel’s mass shootings to the Palestinians may be designed to distract from his culpability in this tragedy. There is blood on this president’s hands.

When Trump departed from longstanding American policy by moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, he knew the consequences for Middle East peace — especially in the absence of an active peace process.

Trump knew that both Israel and Palestine saw Jerusalem as their national capital.

He knew the status of the city was supposed to be settled in final negotiations between the two parties.

He knew that having Christian evangelicals open and close the embassy ceremony would be provocative with Palestinians.

How could he not know, when one of them, Robert Jeffress, a Baptist pastor from Texas, was on record saying that “the dark, dirty secret of Islam” is that “it is a religion that promotes pedophilia” and is “a heresy from the pit of hell.”

And this man is a spiritual advisor to the president.

By moving the embassy, and by doing it with a glamorous gala prominently featuring members of his own family, Trump didn’t just put his thumb on the scales of peace talks, he put his whole administration there — and he did it cynically.

The day-to-day business of the U.S. ambassador will take place in Tel Aviv for at least the next year and a half, if not longer. There was no need to move the embassy now.

This was all about U.S. politics with the mid-terms approaching, a crass and ill-advised move to galvanize Trump’s fundamentalist Christian base. That project is all the more important at a time when the president’s serial lying on everything from policy to porn stars is taking a toll on Republican prospects in Congress.

Without naming the president, Rex Tillerson hit the nail on the head this week about what is happening in Trump’s America.

“If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom.”

It is hard to believe that just a few short months ago, Tillerson was Trump’s secretary of state. He probably feels the same.

It remains to be seen if Americans are ready to swallow Trump’s view of who was responsible for all the dead and wounded Palestinians in Gaza. But don’t assume everyone will be appalled.

Gallup did a poll back in 1970 after four Kent State University students protesting the Vietnam War were shot dead on their campus by members of the National Guard. The poll found that 58 per cent of Americans blamed the students for their own deaths.

That same year, historian Katherine Scott reported that 76 per cent of Americans “said that they did not support the First Amendment right to assemble and dissent from government policies.”

As American historian Rick Perlstein put it, “In fact, the ‘far right’ was never far from the American mainstream.”

It still isn’t.

Which is why the reaction of the rest of the world is so important — and so disappointing.

A few countries, like Ireland, summoned the Israeli ambassador to “protest” the mass shootings.

British Prime Minister Theresa May was “deeply troubled.”

French President Emmanuel Macron “condemned” the violence of the Israeli military.

Russia and China expressed their “concern” over the killings.

As for Canada, our leaders didn’t do much.

Conservative leader Andrew Scheer utterly disgraced himself and the country by trivializing the mass shootings, and attacking Justin Trudeau for his strong words about Israel’s use of “excessive force.”

Scheer has proven he has both a wooden head and a wooden heart. He’s a remote control northern Republican, just like his ideology-soaked predecessor.

Trudeau has done a far better job of capturing the revulsion that many ordinary people around the world, including in Israel, are feeling. He charted a wise course in opposing the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and made the right call not to attend the ceremony.

For all that, he deserves credit.

But his call for an independent investigation into Israel’s possible “excessive force” against civilians was tepid stuff. Possible? Really?

Although the prime minister and his foreign affairs minister both said the right things, their words don’t change the bottom line. Canada took the minimal diplomatic action under the circumstances — far less than Turkey and South Africa, which both recalled their respective ambassadors.

So far, Canada has done no more than dutifully echo the secretary general of the United Nations, who is calling for an independent investigation. That’s not terribly inspiring. What are the chances the country that did the shooting is likely to embrace the idea of a third party murder investigation involving its military and political establishment?

You would think that the circumstances would speak for themselves.

Thousands wounded.

Sixty killed.

Eight dead kids.

All in one day.

But this is 1984. That’s why Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador at the UN, is able to say that no country would show the “restraint” that Israel had.

For those not interested in the ambassador’s alternative universe, here is another view, reported in The Guardian. It is from Ilan Goldenberg, a former official with the U.S. State Department and Pentagon, who heads up the Middle East program at the Center for a New American Security.

“Traditionally, we’ve tried to play a role of fireman in the Middle East. Now we’re playing the role of arsonist.”

Tragically, either way, the same people always get burned.

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