Thanks to Hamas and Its Cheerleaders, Canadians Are Getting a Good Look at What Real Antisemitism Looks Like

The same ‘anti-hate’ watchdogs that issued apocalyptic denunciations of the Ottawa convoy have become strangely silent now that campus progressives are cheering on Islamist terrorism.

In September, it was reported that representatives from the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) had petitioned the federal government, seeking $5-million in public funding. According to the non-profit group, the funds would be used to promote a “strong pro-democracy, anti-fascist and anti-hate culture.”

Three weeks later came the October 7 terrorist attacks, the most deadly single instance of antisemitic slaughter since the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps in 1945. Here in Canada, there was no shortage of individuals and institutions cheering on this mass murder, which had been perpetrated by a terrorist group—Hamas—whose founding 1988 charter literally cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in making the case for the annihilation of the Jewish state. At McGill University, a group called Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) praised the murderers as “heroic.” A McMaster University scholar announced herself as a 10/7 Truther, blaming the killing of civilians on Israeli soldiers. Fred Hahn, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ Ontario branch, declared himself to be “thankful” for such acts of “resistance” (whereupon he was duly re-elected to his position). For any NGO dedicated to promoting an “anti-hate” culture, this was surely a target-rich environment.

But the days passed. And then several weeks. CAHN’s Twitter account, usually an open spigot, had suddenly gone completely dry. Not a word in regard to the October 7 attacks, nor the Canadian antisemites who celebrated them. Had some absent-minded CAHN intern perhaps lost the password?

Eventually, we got an explanation. On November 6, CAHN’s chairman meekly explained that his group decried only hateful acts that emerged from “the extreme right.” Which is to say that the extermination of more than 1,000 Israeli Jews didn’t qualify as the right type of antisemitism. “I wish we had the resources to do more,” he added, cleverly dangling the possibility that his group just might get around to denouncing Hamas if that $5-million government check arrived. But presently, “we just don’t.”

To be fair to CAHN, lots of activists play this same cynical game. Antisemitism comes in many different flavours, and so it’s easy to selectively weaponize abhorrence of Jew-hatred according to one’s ideological palate.

Antisemitism inevitably contaminates all radicalized political movements because it feeds into every fanatic’s belief that history’s “true” path has been deflected by some cabal of evildoers. In fascist mythology, Jews achieve this deflection by contaminating the bloodline of the sturdy volk. Under Soviet communism, Jews were financiers and kulaks sabotaging the path to Marx’s workers’ paradise. The Islamist variant presents Jews (or, if you prefer, Zionists) as a geographic contaminant that must be expunged to fulfill a religiously mandated vision of a kāfir-rein Levant. More recently, social-justice cultists in the west have vilified Jews as double oppressors who are infected by both (a) the original sin of whiteness, and (b) the add-on sin of colonial genocide. (A parochial Canadian version of this antisemitic thesis plays on the claimed analogy between Hamas terrorism and Indigenous activism. I have always found this to comprise a slur on First Nations, Métis, and Inuit activist groups, not a single one of which has ever, to my knowledge, advocated the mass murder of white Canadians.)

It’s an old story, of course, one that goes back in recognizable form to the sixth-century decrees of Justinian: The crops are dying, the village well is dry, and everyone has scrofula—this must be Isaac’s fault. What is new in our age, however, is that anti-antisemitism has itself become a popular theme of mass-market politics, one that has been embraced with great enthusiasm here in Canada by both Liberal and Conservative politicians. (As for the NDP, let’s just say: Keep trying. You will get there.) Even in France (France!), more than 100,000 people just marched through city streets to condemn antisemitism. Édouard Drumont must surely be rolling around in his grave.

As a Jew (albeit of the lapsed variety, especially at dinnertime), I find this heartening. On a personal level, I’ve lost track of all the gentile friends, colleagues, and neighbours who reached out to me after October 7, asking whether I’d lost loved ones. ( I didn’t.) I will note that some of these well-wishers happened to be Muslim—something I mention this because there are conservatives who claim that Canadian Jews may soon be set upon by a wave of pogroms led by unassimilated immigrants from the Middle East and Central Asia. I absolutely reject that kind of fearmongering (notwithstanding the unfortunate pronouncements from certain Islamic religious and civic leaders, and the truly ugly scenes that have played out on campuses), which can blur into real Islamophobia.

But the grubby flip side of this welcome mainstream rejection of antisemitism is that the mantle of anti-antisemitism is now seen as a valuable—and therefore contested—political asset. And so partisans on all sides have every incentive to extravagantly denounce certain subvarieties of Jew-hate as harbingers of a second Kristallnacht, while staring at their shoes when the same antisemitic slogans and symbols start popping up among their own fellow travelers.

In many cases, this hypocrisy is so overt as to be almost comical. In particular, many of the same social-media demagogues who once warbled hysterically about the supposed antisemitic fury animating the Ottawa convoy protests and the fabled “Diagolon” movement now earnestly warn us to intersectionally “contextualize” the mass murder of Jews by Hamas, a group of self-avowed antisemites whose tactics on October 7 were copied from Nazi Einsatzgruppen (with pick-up trucks and motorcycles substituting for halftracks and vans). In early 2022, amid those protests, much of the Canadian intellectual class lost its collective mind over a single confederate flag, a protester who (quite stupidly) used a Swastika to impugn Justin Trudeau as a fascist, and a confused nutbar who showed up with a homemade sign blaming Jews for vaccine mandates. At the height of this social panic, a Globe & Mail columnist Tweeted, “Told my 13yo I had to go out to run an errand. He told me if I run into any of the protestors: ‘pretend you’re not a Jew.’”

I genuinely wonder whether any of those who claimed Canada was then under siege from antisemites are reassessing their pronouncements now that we’ve just gotten a good look at what actual antisemitism looks like. I realize that the presence of one type of Jew hate doesn’t preclude the existence of another. But speaking as a Jew, I’d certainly feel much safer walking the streets of convoy-occupied Ottawa than strolling past the SPHR merengues-for-martyrs bake sell on any given Canadian campus.

This war won’t last forever. Tempers will eventually cool down, and we’ll all return to our regularly scheduled Canadian bickering over carbon taxes, home prices, and genderwang. In these battles, it won’t take long for someone, somewhere in this country, to raise the hue and cry over claimed evidence of antisemitism within the ranks of his or her opponents. When that happens, I’d suggest taking a moment to inquire as to what these self-announced enemies of antisemitism had to say on October 7 and the days that followed. In many cases, I suspect, the answer will be: nothing at all.

This column is reprinted here with permission from the National Post, where it originally appeared.