Damn. Sorry, gang. Canada can no longer regard with disdain America’s spiralling disintegration. With arguably the most ignorant, incompetent and malicious national leader anywhere ever, America is brazenly abandoning every value, law and aspiration that once made it a light unto the world.
Tsk, we say. But we are crumbling ourselves.
No one leader prompts Canada’s current disintegration. Worse, it is a sweeping cultural failure. As in Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, even America, etc., our nation has succumbed to that centuries-old mob pathology — antisemitism.
This is Canada now: a nation where a Toronto teacher can tell a six-year-old girl that because she’s half-Jewish she’s only half-animal. Whatever the consequences to that teacher — a Canadian teacher feels she can say that.
Of course we still have the antisemitism of the yob. That’s old hat. They don’t know better. One scrawled violent lies and threats on the outside wall of a Victoria synagogue (Canada’s oldest in operation). It was repeated a day or two later.
But it’s now well beyond the yob. The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria platforms an artist’s antisemitic statement that celebrates the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel. Remember? They killed over 1,200 people, including innocents at a music festival, abducted 251, and indulged in a fury of torture, rape, infanticide and mutilation. They proudly videotaped themselves. Hamas has continued that war still, at tremendous cost human and material, still holding and abusing hostages dead and alive.
Of course the world is appalled by that. They demand an immediate end — to Israel’s self-defence. Count our PM Carney amid that deluded mob.
That October is when we, our civilization, our humanity, finally snapped. Rationally, there was an initial indignation at that assault, even some sympathy for the Jews. But within days, even before Israel’s initial response, pro-Palestinian demonstrations erupted everywhere. We now know they had been planned well in advance and were well financed from outside (like Qatar’s extravagant funding of Middle Eastern Studies on western campuses). The Hamas atrocities seemed to have liberated, legitimized, the antisemitic extremists from any restraints that may have contained them.
The current antisemitism is precisely that which the IHRA declared our most dangerous: anti-Zionism. Of course, that doesn’t bar criticism of Israeli policy. Antisemitism kicks in when the accuser denies the legitimacy of the Jewish state, denies Israel’s right to defend herself, adopts prejudicial programs like BDS, holds Israel to a different standard than other nations and declares all Jews responsible for Israel’s government decisions. What other peoples face that?
Though Canada, the provinces and many universities have adopted that definition U Vic refuses. And acts accordingly.
A prof there proposed a course explicitly intended to disqualify that IHRA definition. He was exposed as supporting BDS, blaming North American Jews for Israeli policies and even having tweeted this profoundly antisemitic response to a North American Jewish leader’s declaration that because of the NY Times antisemitism he was stopping his subscription: “F$ck this Zionist pig!” Under outside pressure the instructor was persuaded to change the course to a historic study of the term, as then President Kevin Hall responded to the B’Nai Brith investigation. We might assume he suppressed his prejudice in the teaching. We might. But he remains the U’s antisemitism specialist.
I remember when university was called “higher education.” No surprise that both the artist in the current AGGV show and the exhibition’s curator are from U Vic, the latter a grad and the former the department grad advisor. Nor that that university during the summer encampments gave the Palestinian supporters a long free rein. Our campuses had no problem with the calls for the Jews’ annihilation: Free Palestine, From the River to the Sea, Bring the Intifada. U Vic even caged off the university’s convocation exercises so as not to inconvenience the anti-Israelis. Those slogans are the new lipstick on the old pig, Juden raus.
Across Canada there are reports of Jewish students harassed, professors feeling abandoned by their faculty associations, convocation speakers rousing anti-Israel heat, on a scale unseen since 1930s Germany. American campuses have been getting the press but we have the same problem — with no government intervention. Even hitherto responsible professional organizations — medical, legal, the UN, the ICCJ — have disqualified themselves by blatant antisemitism.
That’s what boggles the mind — what groups have turned against Israel. Take “Queers for Palestine.” Please. Hamas throws its gays from rooftops. In that region only Israel protects queers, granting them respect and all citizen rights and privileges. Here even Pride parades have split over their compulsion to attack the Jews. The same for other groups now militantly anti-Israel: feminists, Christians, dissidents of whatever form, the free press, artists.
This is madness. Of course. We are caught in that old mass hysteria from the yobs on up to the PM’s office — and the UN. With everyone in between.
Of course, the antisemites take great encouragement from their many supportive Jews. Their “tikkun olam” — the Jew’s commitment to improve the world — extends to supporting the very people who are determined to destroy them. If not now, then.
However well-meaning, these Jews are the current form of Lenin’s “useful idiots,” activists blinded by their idealism to the atrocities committed in their name. They join the non-Jews in condemning Israel for defending herself against the 75-year Palestinian campaign to destroy her. They blame Israel for the child deaths deliberately caused by Hamas weaponizing their own civilians — knowing the world will blame the Jews.
Of course their moral indignation only encourages Hamas to continue. The blood of a Palestinian child is on the hands of their army and on the martyrdom culture that weaponizes them — and on those here who encourage that. This is no time for the heart to deactivate the head. Defending their own should not be a Jewish crime — but now it is.
So too throughout the arts. Pro-Israel artists are banned from exhibitions. Related plays not anti-Jew are stifled before production. The Giller, Canada’s foremost fiction prize, teeters because so many leading writers objected to its sponsorship by the Bank of Nova Scotia. They support Israel, you see.
Yes, Israel. Those Jews. Our main ally in that area, the only democracy, still the heart and soul of our moral tradition. That may be why Jews are hated. As Hitler observed, they invented the conscience. More pressingly today, however, is this hard political reality. Israel is our civilization’s frontline of defence against the jihadist terrorist movement determined to establish a global caliphate under sharia law. Israel is fighting off Hamas (inter alia) so we will not have to. Yet our noblest friend is now our enemy because she presumes to defend herself. She’s Jewish.
So too our major media. The Globe and Mail, CBC, CTV — like the NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, etc — are by reflex anti-Israel. They feature the Arab lies of Israeli “apartheid,”“genocide,” inflated stats, in open bias against the Jews. They present far more Hamas spokesmen than Israeli and leave their lies unchecked. They report Hamas statistics (i.e. Gaza health officials) straight but add to Israeli figures “but that has not been confirmed by other sources.”
And the disproved lie — remember the 500 Palestinians killed when Israel supposedly bombed a hospital at the war’s onset? — doesn’t diminish their acceptance of the next ones. All of them. Continuously. (Btw, that was a misfired Hamas missile that killed about 50) Check Honest Reporting Canada for a daily exposure of this public network of antisemitic lies. Antisemites lie like Trump.
Only the National Post has the integrity to promote the truth — and defend Israel. Fortunately, Canada’s indigenous leaders also resist the Palestinians lies and their theft of Jewish history. A delegation of chiefs visited Israel to express their support. Knowing that the Jews were there 2,000 years before the Koran launched Islam, they view Israel as their inspiring model for a people surviving centuries of oppressive occupation to revive their own language, identity and nationhood;.
Nor is our government any relief. In Victoria the police have given up trying to control pro-Palestinian throttling of the streets. Palestinian flags and the kaffyiah — badges of Jew-killing — flourish openly from a city councillor to the legislature building. Despite having video the police haven’t caught the recent synagogue defiler. A Jewish MLA resigned in protest against the antisemitism in the BC cabinet.
Fulfilling our dread, PM Carney has repeated the lie of Israeli “genocide” (when it’s Hamas that is constitutionally pledged to eliminate world Jewry) and then taken this absurdly contradictory position: demanding Israel stop the October 7 war (i.e., her existential self-defence) while promising to reward Hamas with Palestinian statehood in the fall sitting of the UN, with certain required conditions set not in advance but in the nebulous future. .
Those 2-state sloganeers forget this: In 1948 Israel accepted that solution. The Arabs instead launched their — continuing — war to eliminate the Jews. There have since been eight land-for-peace offers (six by Israel), all rejected by the Palestinians, without discussion. They demand a statehood that would replace not join Israel. In short, genocide for the Palestinians is not a plight but their platform.
After this history of genocidal violence Israel is expected to submit to a new state of Palestine?
YCarney — inter alia — seems unable to say “antisemitism” without adding “Islamophobia,” as if they were matching dangers. They are not. “Antisemitism” is a centuries-old pathology. “Islamophobia” is a current coinage intended to dismiss any charge of Islamic violence as an irrational phobia. Given global violence against the West and especially the Jews, fear of that terrorism is hardly irrational. To claim equivalence is to equate Jewish self-defence with the Palestinians’ explicit determination to eliminate the Jews. (
Cue Connie Francis: “Where the votes are.”)
Anyway, if the powerful Israel’s intention really were genocidal wouldn’t it have been accomplished long since, without such intervening loss of Jewish lives? And would there have been such a large increase in the Arab population in Gaza and the West Bank? Could Israel — such a global over-achiever in science, medicine, tech, the arts, etc. — be so incompetent at genocide?
Instead Canada has a reflex opposition to any military or political support for Israel. It’s not just the “None is too many” shame of our historic parliament, but a rampant new sweep of antisemitism across Canada. Across our artistic, intellectual, social, political spectrum, we have a Jew problem. They live. We have to blame them for everything wrong here because they’re to blame for over there. There’s a song for that too: “Tradition.” But this fiddler is in the cesspool.
I see no brighter future for us than what the US is committing as it abandons all its ennobling values, ideals and practice. In by reflex targeting the Jews we are no better. Nor without a severe shift in attitude, knowledge and practice can we hope for a better future.