The war against the Jews: the case of Canada

Synagogues and Jewish schools are attacked across Canada. In response, empty police cars sit outside such institutions to ward off future attacks. The Toronto District School Board adopts a resolution adding “anti-Palestinian racism” to its learning strategy. The BC Teachers Federation’s resolution to include “the Palestinian naqba and the Israeli occupation” in the BC school curriculum is endorsed by the BC Ministry of Education and Child Care. This is tantamount to including historical lies about Israel as part of what Canadian students will learn at a young age in public schools. Selena Robinson is fired from her ministerial post in the BC NDP government for stating that many Palestinians moved to Mandate Palestine from other Arab Muslim countries. This was deemed offensive to Muslims even though it is historically accurate. The Federal Liberal-NDP government has appointed one Birju Dattani to be head of the Canadian Commission on Human Rights even though he has shared articles comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and repeatedly lectured about BDS at British universities during “Israel Apartheid Week.” And to top it all off, the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs has sanctioned seven Israeli individuals and five Israeli entities for what she claims is “their role in facilitating, supporting or financially contributing to acts of violence by Israeli extremist settlers against Palestinian civilians and their property.” I note that she has never sanctioned any Palestinian for murdering Jews, nor has she sanctioned any Palestinian Authority figure for calling for, educating about, and rewarding the murder of Jews and the liquidation of the Jewish state. One of the Israelis sanctioned is Daniella Weiss, a 78 year old Zionist who heads the Nachala movement advocating the return of Jews to Gaza following the recent war. Her position makes perfect sense, unlike that of the delusional Trudeau government that still thinks the genocidal Palestinian national movement deserves a state in the heartland of Israel so it can annihilate Jews more expeditiously than it already has. And all this in the name of peace. What it actually is is the war against the Jews, Canadian version 2.0.

The Canadian government’s tepid response to the mounting antisemitism in Canada has been to condemn it, but not without condemning in the same breath Islamophobia and all forms of hatred. Yet Islamophobia is a made-up phenomenon after Muslim Islamists rammed their planes into the Twin Towers and changed air travel forever. In France Muslims behead French schoolteachers and throw elderly Jews out of windows. In Canada the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association published a report asserting that denouncing anti-Israel and anti-Zionist rhetoric is a form of racism against Palestinians, thereby inverting the very racism pro-Palestinian advocates embrace (“Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea”) and claiming in the process that Palestinians are a race, adding one more lie to the Palestinian propaganda arsenal claiming Moses and Jesus were Muslim prophets!

What, dear reader, do you think should be the Jewish response? Certainly not writing letters and sending emails to the different government ministers and school boards protesting their actions and urging them to change course. We are far past that avenue of Jewish advocacy as news anchors fill our screens with lies from Palestinian news outlets and their UN/NGO sponsors while our university campuses get filled with encampments of masked students and keffiyeh wearing Muslim operatives now announcing summer camps to indoctrinate Canadian youth in the Palestinian narrative, the whole enterprise treated with impunity by intimidated university authorities. For those who don’t know better - and many it seems do not - the situation reeks of Germany in the thirties before Hitler came to power. So much for Holocaust education. No, the times call out for something more serious and far-ranging. What follows are some suggestions.

Jewish advocacy groups should be calling out the Canadian government for its openly antisemitic policies centred on its failure to support Israel, Canada’s only democratic ally in the Middle East. This would include the charge that such announcements as halting arms shipments to Israel and sanctioning Israeli individuals and groups by deeming them “extremist settlers” are nothing but revamped age-old blood libels against Jews. Jews should be demanding that given inadequate judicial action and pusillanimous university authorities in the face of campus encampments, the federal government should invoke the Emergencies Act to clear these encampments off university grounds and arrest and imprison the perpetrators. And when the government fails to respond, Jewish advocacy groups should call for the defeat of the NDP-Liberal government at the polls by massive support for Pierre Poilièvre’s Conservative Party of Canada. They should also be demanding the Canadian government move its embassy to Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish homeland. Or would Canada like Israel to locate its Canadian embassy in Quebec City?

Weak-kneed Jews like Anthony Housefather should be called out for their cowardice. When the Liberals lined up with the NDP to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and put Canada behind a path to Palestinian statehood, Housefather should have resigned in protest. Instead he chose to stay in the Liberal Party and work from within, a strategy that is not only wrong but inimical to Jewish strength, lulling Jews into thinking that the current government is serious about protecting them. What happens as a result? With a looming war in Lebanon because Hizbollah, in violation of UN resolution 1701, fires rockets daily at Israeli towns driving 80,000 Jews from their homes, the Canadian Foreign Minister can only warn Lebanese Canadians to leave the country before war breaks out. No calls on Hizbollah to cease and desist. No words of sympathy for embattled Israel. No call on UNIFIL to fulfill its mission. But when war breaks out you can be sure this antisemitic Canadian government will be among the first to deplore the Muslim loss of life in Lebanon and call for a cease-fire.

Jewish advocacy groups should call for the defunding of SSHRC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Given that the intellectual distortion of the Israeli situation stems from the ideological proclivities of Canadian professors in the social sciences and humanities, the latter should be penalized by having their research funds cancelled so that their efforts at distorting the world view of generations of students through critical race theory, unfounded gender/queer theory and all the other lies of cultural Marxism would no longer be financed from the public till. Given that research grants are doled out by professors to their colleagues, this tool which is constantly leveraged to ensure ideological conformity would no longer be available to enforce wall-to-wall adherence to a view that is totally false when it comes to understanding anything in modern society. The benefits to Canada would be even greater than those to the Jews who attend these institutions.

Given that this is unlikely to happen soon, Jews will have to take measures to assure their own safety. A Jewish Rapid Response Team should be organized in every sizeable Jewish community. This team would be able to respond to any attack on Jews and stop threats whenever and wherever they occur. Such teams would deal creatively with intimidation of Jewish students on college campuses, mobilize Jews for school board meetings, even visit mosques to call for Muslim support for Israel. Indeed, Canadian Jews should be vociferous in calling on Canadian Muslims to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel. If Canadian Muslims and Muslim Associations are committed to democracy and liberal values rather than sharia law, they should have no trouble supporting the only liberal democracy in the Middle East where religious tolerance, women’s freedom and gay rights are the order of the day.

Canadian Jews should make every effort to send their children to Jewish day schools, since the public schools are not safe. And they should make their decisions known loud and clear. Money raised by Jewish Federations should be earmarked as a priority to support those families who cannot afford it. All Jewish children in Jewish day schools should receive krav maga training in the elementary grades and training in the use of firearms at the high school levels. Jewish adults should themselves enrol in gun shooting classes and apply afterwards for gun permits, restricted though guns may be in Canada. If it were known that tens of thousands of Jews had guns, perhaps violence against Jews and Jewish institutions would be taken more seriously and perpetrators would think twice before attacking them. Even applying for a gun permit would indicate how unsafe Jews now feel in this country. And should a pogrom break out, at least we would not be defenceless.

Prominent Jews who contribute greatly to Canadian medical and cultural institutions should announce that they are no longer doing so as long as Jews are not made to feel safe, especially on university campuses. Why should the names of Jewish philanthropists be all over hospital buildings when Jewish kids are being attacked on university campuses and Jewish synagogues and school are being vandalized? No more Jewish money for universities, hospitals and museums, not to mention other charitable endeavours, until the Canadian public sees fit to make Jews feel at home and welcome in our own country. No more support for Gay Pride events when the organizers allow groups like Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to march on our city streets. Not only no more support, but open denunciation should be the order of the day, calling out these groups for the blatant racism they practise and naming it for the racism that it is.

There is more, much more that could be done. But the above would do for starters. Jews have to understand that there is now a new war against them throughout the western world and Canada is no different. Anti-Zionism and Israel bashing is only the latest twist in the oldest hatred, which for millennia thrived on Jewish powerlessness. But Jews today are no longer powerless because we have our own state - the state of Israel - and in the last analysis it is the strengthening of the state of Israel which is our best line of defence. In the end, if we Jews stand up for ourselves forcefully and forthrightly, we will also be standing up for the Jewish state which alone protects us. Remember: we were not protected when the Crusades trampled across Germany and the Inquisition burned us at the stake and one country after another expelled us until the Nazis burned us alive. But when the Arab Muslim lands expelled 850,000 of us because Jews proclaimed Israel’s independence, those Jews at least had some place to go. The new anti-semitism has shown us that ultimately the only solution for Jews is to move to the land of Israel. We should definitely send our kids there to study, work and live once they are of age; and we should all consider moving there now before matters get even worse. It is no exaggeration to say that there is a war against us in this land as there is throughout the remains of Christendom, not to mention the large swath of the world that lives under powers imperial or totalitarian. If Holocaust education has left no mark on the western world and beyond, it ought to have left one on Jews; but apparently it has not done that either, except to lull us into believing that never again cannot happen again. But it is happening again, and we ought to pay attention.