Western democracies continue to ignore the problem of big numbers of migrants who bring their inherited hatreds and conflicts to create major problems for their adopted countries, whose values they neither understand nor respect. In the wake of demonstrations that blur the line between pro-Palestine and antiSemitic, a Leger-Postmedia poll in Canada has interesting pointers to public opinion that might well translate to Australia. PM Justin Trudeau is fond of saying ‘diversity is our strength’. Not so fast, say most Canadians. Diversity can bring problems alongside benefits. Newcomers should embrace Canada’s ‘values and traditions’ and discard cultural identity incompatible with that. Non-permanent residents who express hate towards minorities or support for terrorist groups should be deported. Canadians reject 2:1 the notion that ‘certain minority groups should be given additional rights and privileges in accordance with notions of decolonisation, anti-racism and equity’. Meanwhile in Europe anti-immigration parties have started moving from the fringes into the public square. Geert Wilders in the Netherlands is the latest example. Riots in Dublin prove public anger is at boiling point. Turns out the far right is the new deep centre.

Trudeau has probably equivocated the most of any Western leader on the Gaza war, implying a moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas as a nod to key party voters and MPs. This habit of damaging foreign relations by appeasing ethnic votes was shown a month before 10/7 when Trudeau broadcast evidence-free allegations of Indian involvement in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian activist for Khalistan as an independent Sikh state. In effect Trudeau said publicly to Modi: we hold you guilty. Now prove it. India’s High Commissioner Sanjay Verma said in a CTV interview on 26 November: ‘Even without the investigation being concluded, India was convicted.’

Now we learn that US law enforcement foiled a plot to assassinate the Canadian-US citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, lawyer for the US-based group Sikhs for Justice. The US conveyed its concerns behind the scenes to India in June. When the Financial Times broke the story on 23 November, India said the US had provided information on the ‘nexus between organised criminals, gun runners, terrorists and others’. Indian authorities were examining the inputs as they impinged on India’s own security interests. It’s possible India acts differently relative to the geopolitical weight of Canada and the US. The simpler answer is the three-part explanation offered by India: targeted assassination in foreign jurisdictions is not official policy; if an Indian link exists, it is of great interest to India itself; India therefore will look into any specific information and report its findings behind the scenes.

Meanwhile Canadian authorities are ignoring the elephant in the room of how and why Nijjar got citizenship in 2015. He entered Canada on a false passport in 1997. Soon as his claim to refugee status was rejected, he married a woman who sponsored him for immigration. That too was rejected, indicating a marriage of convenience. There is also an undated and uncorroborated video of him at a Canadian training camp with an illegal assault rifle. Sikh militants were responsible for the biggest single act of terrorism in Canadian history, namely the bombing of an Air India flight in 1985 in which 329 people died, yet Ottawa has steadfastly refused Indian requests to curb the activities of Sikh extremists. Recalling the ‘celebratory’ chants of ‘Gas the Jews’ at the Sydney Opera House, should we quibble with Indian Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar that freedom of speech does not extend to ‘incitement to violence’? His most memorable statement was his insistence in June last year that ‘Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems’. History, demography and geography combine to make Israel’s security dilemma the most existentially acute of any democracy. But the scale and diversity of India make its governance the most complex and challenging of any democracy. For reasons that elude me, Western analysts regard India’s problems as third world rather than a fellow democracy’s.

India shares another dilemma with Israel: the moral hazard of trading terrorist prisoners for kidnapped hostages. On Christmas eve 1999, the Indian Airlines flight IC 814 was hijacked to Kandahar in Taleban-ruled Afghanistan. The 155 hostages’ family agitated outside the Prime Minister’s official residence in New Delhi demanding their release. The government capitulated to the hijackers’ demands. Three Islamist terrorists in Indian jail were handed over to the hijackers in Kandahar on 31 December by the foreign minister. One of them was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. Another was Maulana Masood Azhar. British-Pakistani Sheikh was arrested in 2002, tried and convicted for the kidnap and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The murder conviction was overturned by a court in 2020. The Pakistan-born and based Azhar founded Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM: ‘The Army of Mohammed’) in 2000 and remains its leader. The US designated JeM a terrorist organisation in 2001 and Australia followed in 2003. JeM launched a suicide attack on India’s Kashmir and federal parliaments in 2001, was linked to Pearl’s kidnapping and murder in 2002, and was involved in the brutal Red Mosque uprising in Islamabad in 2007. India holds Azhar responsible for the terrorist attacks on Mumbai in November 2008 in which 175 people were killed, including some at Chabad House; and for attacks on Indian military facilities and personnel in 2016 and 2019.

The 19-year-old French-Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was abducted from Israel by Hamas in 2006, held captive in Gaza for over five years, and repatriated in 2011 in exchange for the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners. On the eve of the exchange, Louis Rene Beres argued in the Jerusalem Post that ‘No modern government has the legal right to free terrorists in exchange for its own kidnapped citizens, military or civilian… Any such exchange, however humane to Shalit and his family, would imperil thousands of other Israelis’. Among those released in 2011 after serving 22 years in an Israeli prison was Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas in Gaza and mastermind of the 7 October attacks. Netanyahu calls him a ‘dead man walking’.

The politics are always in favour of trading captured prisoners for hostages. The latter are identifiable people in the here and now, with photos and family members garnering immense public sympathy with strong tugs on everyone’s heartstrings. Future victims of the atrocities that the freed terrorists mastermind are abstract conceptions, with no images and family to plead their case with powerful emotional resonance. Now that we have hard evidence of moral hazard’s heavy toll on Indian and Israeli lives, can we still doubt the core argument by Beres regarding hostage-for-jailed prisoners swaps?