In the past two weeks, firearms and explosive devices have been used against Jewish places of worship and schools across Canada, and in other cases, Jewish citizens have been violently assaulted. On Saturday, the historic Anshei Minsk shul in the Kensington Market area of downtown Toronto was vandalised and had its window smashed in by unknown perpetrators. A week earlier, gunshots were fired at a Jewish girl’s school in suburban Toronto and a synagogue in Montreal. In what has been described as a “deliberate act of hate” and an “attempt to intimidate” the Jewish community, a person set the front doors on fire at the Schara Tzedeck synagogue in Vancouver. The temple was a home for many Holocaust survivors seeking a haven in Canada.
In New Brunswick, a Muslim student violently assaulted a younger girl at Leo Hayes High School simply for “being Jewish.” The school’s tepid response to the troubling incident was to suspend the student for five days. It took ten days before the Fredericton police finally charged the student.
In Toronto, Adi and Moshe Cohen’s four children, ranging from senior kindergarten to grade 8, who attend North York’s Faywood Arts-Based Curriculum School, have been vilified for months for being Jewish. The two older children have faced repeated bullying, antisemitic threats and ongoing harassment, including death threats. Despite filing three police reports expressing their concern about the school’s failure to ensure a safe environment for Jewish students, nothing was done. Sadly, the principal, vice principal, teachers, Toronto District School Board and even the Toronto Police did nothing to address the alleged threats. Out of frustration with the lack of inaction in response to this hateful situation, a “community support walk” was organised at the Cohen’s request on May 17 to ensure her son’s safe passage to school. Over 150 parents showed up in support of the family and bullied children.
Last week, a student at Toronto’s Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCADU) filed a lawsuit seeking $1.3 million in damages after alleging she was subjected to ongoing anti-Jewish discrimination at the school and the school did nothing.
At a recent pro-Palestinian/Hamas protest at Union Station in Toronto, cowardly thugs with covered faces and masks held up signs that said, “Glory to our Martyrs,” and called for an Intifada Revolution (violence against Jews). Other ‘protests’ in Toronto and Montreal have seen hateful adults dress their children in clothing and imagery glorifying Hamas and Intifada.
A Jewish artist at the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival was banned from attending because she had previously served in the Israel Defence Forces, although an apology has been issued subsequently. A pro-Hamas gathering in Waterloo set up a tent for children called the ‘Kids Intifada corner.’
Much of the blame for this inexcusable and intolerant behaviour lies with the Trudeau/Singh coalition government. The supreme failure of leadership by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet and caucus to speak up for Jewish Canadians who have been the victims of violence and antisemitic hate has only emboldened Palestinian/Hamas supporters in Canada to the extent they feel they are free to publicly attack Canadian Jews and Jewish communities in Canada without consequence.
Politically, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh both support what many see as a false, antisemitic Marxist perspective when it comes to Jewish people and Israel. In March, Trudeau backed a motion by Singh and the NDP in Parliament regarding Gaza, which has deeply offended many Jewish Canadians. Although presented as a call for humanitarian support and an end to the blockade of Gaza, the motion included language that falsely portrayed Israel as the sole aggressor in the conflict. It ignored the complex realities on the ground, including the persistent and continuing threats posed by Hamas, the horrifying massacre of innocent people (including Canadians) and the taking of 230 hostages in the terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023. (Hamas has since murdered many of the hostages and has committed sexual crimes against the female hostages). Jewish Canadians viewed the motion as part of a growing trend of biased rhetoric against Israel in Canadian politics and the Jewish community in Canada. It fuelled more antisemitism, leaving Jewish Canadians feeling even more isolated and targeted and heightened concerns about their safety and the future of Canada’s commitment to fair and balanced discourse on international issues.
In short, the move by the Trudeau-Singh coalition attempt in Canada’s Parliament to delegitimise Israel’s legitimate security concerns while glossing over the barbaric October 7 Palestinian/Hamas terrorist attacks on Jewish people was a watershed moment for the Jewish community in Canada who felt utterly betrayed by their government.
The failure of political leaders, civil servants, teachers, principals, school boards, and police to protect Canadian Jewish citizens is unsurprising, given the pervasive prejudice and antisemitism on display within universities, at their unions, at teachers’ unions and within public sector unions. Worse is that law enforcement often fails to intervene effectively when Jewish Canadians are threatened, standing idly by while these supporters of the Palestinian/Hamas narrative spread their messages of intolerance with signs calling for violence, including ‘Intifada Revolution’ or ‘Globalise the Intifada’ (a call for violent terrorism),’ From the river to the sea Palestine will be free’ (a call to exterminate all Jews), ‘By any means necessary’ (a call to kill Jews) or yell ‘fuck the Jews, ‘Jews are dogs’, ‘We will put you six feet under’.
To be clear, these threats of violence against Jewish citizens go against Canadian values, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Canadian sensibility. They are an affront to Canadian Veterans who fought two world wars and engaged in a six-decade cold war to protect our democratic values and blunt the rise of voices who are purveyors of hate. Anyone who shows up a protest in Canada with a sign calling for violence, or with their faces covered and yell hateful slogans is literally defecating on Canada’s history, our constitution, our democracy, and our values and should be held to account.
Despite these ongoing issues, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his caucus remain inactive. This is the same government that invoked the Emergency Measures Act in February 2022 to address a month-long protest by truckers in Ottawa. Yet, the Trudeau government continues to take no substantial action to address the rising violence against Canada’s Jewish community.
Over the past 30 years, a concerning ideological shift has taken hold in Canadian and Western universities. Rather than prioritising facts and objective truth, education has been influenced by a biased and often misleading Marxist perspective. This transformation, overlooked by those outside academic circles, is particularly evident in humanities, history, and social studies departments.
This Marxist lens has significantly shaped the discourse surrounding Israel, portraying it as a colonising entity and challenging the indigenous connection of the Jewish people to the Middle East. At its core, Marxist theory interprets history through the prism of class struggle and anti-colonialism, often casting Western values and capitalism as the source of societal woes.
When these Marxist teachings and ideology are applied without critical examination to complex historical and geopolitical matters, students are taught beliefs that portray Israel as a colonising force and that it is acceptable to normalise antisemitic attitudes and actions towards Jewish people. This skewed perspective wrongly presents the Jewish state as a byproduct of Western colonialism, dismissing the deep-rooted historical and cultural connections of the Jewish people to the land. It also denies the Indigenous status of the Jewish people in the Middle East.
The Jewish connection to the land of Israel spans over three thousand years, supported by archaeological and historical evidence of their continuous presence in the region. The establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 was driven by historical claims and the urgent need for a Jewish homeland in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
The misleading narrative of Israel as a coloniser overlooks the legal and diplomatic underpinnings of its creation. Documents like the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and subsequent League of Nations mandates acknowledged the Jewish right to establish a national home in Palestine. The United Nations partition plan of 1947 further affirmed this, proposing the establishment of both Jewish and Arab states.
The prevalence of this distorted narrative fosters a biased and one-sided understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a result, students educated within this framework are often unaware of the complex realities on the ground, including the diverse narratives and legitimate aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians. This lack of nuanced understanding contributes to increased polarisation and, in Canada and other Western nations, is fuelling antisemitism.
Sadly, the results of this indoctrination of ignorance are playing out in real-time at several universities in Canada, including the University of Toronto and McGill in Montreal, where vile antisemitic and anti-Jewish’ protests’ led by ideologically driven and brainwashed ‘students’ preach “their truth.” Like the staff and students who were outed for antisemitism at Harvard, MIT, University of Connecticut and Northwestern University in the United States, the Canadian student protesters could all win an award for ‘Best Acting in a Fiction Protest’. Their kooky and misinformed view of history, combined with their enthusiastic belief in their misguided cause, make them the dupes of the century.
They would all do well to study Demosthenes, the Athenian intellectual, Greek statesman and orator from ancient Athens who famously declared, “A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.”
Canadian universities have a vital responsibility to foster informed and nuanced discussions, avoiding the perpetuation of ideological dogmas. Instead, students should be equipped to engage constructively with contentious issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, promoting a balanced understanding of both narratives. This necessitates moving beyond biased Marxist ideologies that risk influencing students.
To achieve this, university boards, government funding agencies, and other stakeholders must take decisive action to remove ideological influences from the education system. This will ensure that students receive a nuanced and factual understanding of history and power structures rather than being subjected to a slanted Marxist view that breeds animosity.
It is crucial for Canadian universities to shift away from ideologically driven narratives and prioritise teaching methodologies that emphasise critical thinking and exposure to diverse perspectives. Accurate representation of historical facts, including acknowledging Jewish historical ties to the land of Israel and understanding the complexities of the modern state and its geopolitical challenges, must be part of the pedagogy.
The perversion of pedagogy over the past three decades at Canadian universities has extended its influence far beyond university campuses and seeped into various facets of society. Graduates carry these twisted perspectives into their professional lives, shaping media, politics, and public discourse. This infiltration has now reached a critical point, as many indoctrinated students have entered roles in government, schools, unions, law enforcement, and other sectors. In these positions, they further propagate anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish narratives under the guise of objective truth, perpetuating a troubling trend of bias and prejudice.
Antisemitic bias has become a cancer in media reporting in Canada. This explains why a misinformed and misguided CBC Editor ordered all CBC journalists to only refer to the Hamas terrorists who butchered, burned and killed over 1,200 people on October 7 (and who gleefully filmed and posted go-pro videos of them of the gang raping and murdering Jewish women) as militants, not terrorists. While the CBC is one of the worst preaching this false narrative, there are others, and it is not just a few cases.
The website Honest Reporting Canada has been tracking biased antisemitic and anti-Jewish media stories by Canadian ‘journalists’ and or/‘writers’ for years. This link shows the extent and depth of the problem, and it is far beyond breathtaking.
Antisemitism and anti-Jewish behaviour have become rampant under the Trudeau government. Their emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, while well-intentioned, has been counterproductive in many ways, fostering division and contributing to rising antisemitism. By prioritising identity politics, Trudeau’s policies have inadvertently created a hierarchy of victimhood, where some groups are perceived as more deserving of protection and support than others. This has led to resentment and social fragmentation and has allowed antisemitism to flourish, as Jews are often seen as outside the mainstream narrative of oppressed groups, despite facing significant discrimination. Moreover, DEI initiatives under Trudeau have virtually ignored antisemitism because it doesn’t always fit neatly into the prevailing frameworks of their policies, exacerbating the problem rather than mitigating it.
The overt antisemitism in Canada’s public sector unions is beyond contemptible. It’s so bad that Webster’s Dictionary would be justified to put a picture of Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario President Fred Hahn to define the term cognitive dissonance. How else to explain his ignorant statement fully supported by his union that the Jewish people “stole” the land of Israel from Palestinians and that he encourages and condones antisemitism?
The same prejudice is on display by the ‘leadership team’ at The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), Canada’s largest federal government union, which is being sued by its Jewish members. Their statement of claim highlights numerous antisemitic incidents, including an October 28, 2023, PSAC online seminar entitled “Solidarity with Palestine,” which reportedly used antisemitic tropes and claims of colonialism to delegitimise Israel’s right to exist. They further allege, “The presentation was not balanced, and the presenters were stacked to ensure that anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiments were advanced,” the complaint read. “Jewish members of PSAC, specifically including the complainants, were offended and shocked at the lack of impartiality.” The seminar also urged union members to support the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanction) movement and rejected the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. Given the tragedy of the Holocaust and the lessons of history, only a complete ignoramus would reject the IHRA definition.
It reminds one of the adage that the people who make the decisions are so stupid that they are not even aware they are stupid.
The sad result of all this is that a disturbing number of Canadians, including first-generation Canadians and even newcomers, seem to think they have the right to threaten violence against Jewish Canadians at their homes, businesses, places of worship and elsewhere. The aggressive and unacceptable behaviour of many of these so-called ‘Palestinian/Hamas supporters who show up for ‘demonstrations’ is startling. This is not acceptable in Canada and must stop. It is a complete betrayal of the very principles and foundations that built this country.
Ottawa Life Magazine is calling on Canadians from Coast to Coast to Coast, people of all faiths and perspectives, to unite and take a stand against hate.
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