Mick Hartley

Terry Glavin at the Free Press on The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada. After the October 7th pogrom it was "like a dam burst". A grim catalogue of the surge in antisemitism across Canada – especially, as we've seen elsewhere, in universities and across the Left.

Then there's this:

In Liberal circles, a new ideological construction is gaining ground—one that threatens to destroy all that it touches in much the way Critical Race Theory has done. That new idea is “Anti-Palestinian Racism,” defined in such a way as to place Zionism—that is, the view held by the vast majority of Jews—beyond the pale of polite society, and potentially beyond the bounds of Canadian hate speech law.

According to the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, anti-Palestinian racism is defined as follows: “Anti-Palestinian racism is a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames, or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives. Anti-Palestinian racism takes various forms including: denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians; failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine; erasing the human rights and equal dignity and worth of Palestinians; excluding or pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives, Palestinians, and their allies; defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander such as being inherently antisemitic, a terrorist threat/sympathizer or opposed to democratic values.”

It is worth reading that twice. It is a definition of racism that makes the most fundamental defense of Israel’s existence racist. It renders it impossible to describe antisemitism without running the risk of being described as racist.

Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism, has some special insight into Canada. The Jerusalem-born 53-year-old former member of the Knesset spent about half her life in Canada. She went to school in Montreal, completed a law degree at Hebrew University, then came back to Canada for a master’s degree. A decade later, she returned to Israel.

Anti-Palestinian racism is a legalistic rendering of a vulgar slogan routinely chanted at anti-Israel marches across Canada over the past 10 months: “All the Zionists are racists.” Cotler-Wunsh points out the obvious: “APR renders anyone who self-defines or who is identified as a Zionist or just believes Israel has a right to exist as a racist.”

What we’re witnessing in Canada is the diffusion of “a very particular kind of antisemitism,” Cotler-Wunsh told me. The country’s susceptibility to the “anti-Zionist” iteration of antisemitism is partly because Canadians have lost the capacity to identify with strongly held national values, Cotler-Wunsh argued. “Canadians aren’t especially patriotic,” she said. “So there’s a ‘live and let live’ idea, but it results in indifference.” And that has allowed antisemitism to course through Canada’s institutional bloodstream, largely unchecked.

Cotler-Wunsh’s adoptive father, Irwin Cotler, is a renowned international human rights champion and Canada’s former justice minister. A tireless advocate for dissidents in Russia, Iran, China, and elsewhere, Cotler served as Canada’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism until just days after October 7.

Last December, after he failed to show up at a Toronto event celebrating the imprisoned Hong Kong dissident Jimmy Lai, it was disclosed that Cotler was under 24-hour police protection because of a threat to his life. The assassination plot was hatched in Tehran.

“Seeing that was heartbreaking,” Cotler-Wunsh told me. “The thought that this would happen in Canada, the thought that in this multicultural beacon of dignity for all, that Canada’s former justice minister, a human rights warrior who fought for hundreds of people around the world, is under house arrest—you could say, trapped in his own home—is really heartbreaking.”

Heartbreaking is a word that well describes the way Canadian Jews see their predicament these days. “I have never seen in all my life such a thing, such expressions from people of all ages, such expressions of apprehension, of isolation, insecurity, foreboding, expressed in different ways,” said Cotler, 84, when we spoke last week. “I see it when I meet with students; I see it when I meet with elderly people. I hear, ‘This is not the Canada I know,’ or ‘This is not the Canada I came to.’ Or ‘This is not the Canada I have ever experienced. This is something else.’ And they are afraid to publicly express it.”

In part, that’s because antisemitism is no longer just some protest culture eccentricity. It’s going mainstream, from the bottom to the top.