An Antisemitic Fire Raging Across Canada

When I was growing up, Canada seemed like an open and liberal society where Jews could feel at home. Today, this is no longer the case. Most Canadians of my generation probably agree.

At a protest in Canada, this extremist slanders “Israeli extremists” in true antisemitic double-standard fashion. (photo: Tristan Sosteric/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written by Stephen Schecter, a sociologist and writer.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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This is how Canada’s Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia, Amira Elghawaby, prefaced her remarks recently:

“This week, I met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to highlight how Islamophobia, and its intersections with anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism, continues to harm our social fabric, undermines pluralism and poses a direct threat to our democracy.”

What followed was a tissue of lies which amounted to nothing more than an outrageous confirmation of the pathetic and hypocritical Liberal government’s response to antisemitism, of course the real threat to Canadian democracy.

Among Elghawaby’s outrageous assertions were the following claims:

1. “Canadian Muslims of Palestinian and Lebanese descent continue to suffer devastating impacts of the ongoing violence, war, and humanitarian crisis in Gaza and Lebanon.”

2. “The devaluation and dehumanization of Palestinian and Lebanese lives have a direct impact in Canada, leaving many Canadian Muslims and others feeling a pronounced sense of exclusion, a sense of second-class citizenship, and vulnerability for themselves and for their children. Palestinian and Muslim identities continue to be frequently and unfairly associated with terrorism in public discourse, both online and offline.”

3. “A feature of a growing climate of division is the deliberate efforts to silence voices peacefully calling for the application of international humanitarian law, deeply shaking confidence in our civil liberties and in governmental and institutional commitments towards fairness, equity, and inclusion.”

4. “Through a series of roundtables across Canada, members of Parliament and my Office heard clearly that exclusion and erasure that are being reported by our communities, including among youth, are in part due to a lack of federal acknowledgement of anti-Palestinian racism. I welcome the Prime Minister’s commitment on adopting a definition of anti-Palestinian racism to describe the bias and discrimination far too many Canadian Palestinians are experiencing.”

In fact, Muslims of Palestinian and Lebanese descent have not suffered discrimination in employment, deprivation of life and property, or calls for boycotts of their businesses even if they have supported the brutal and unjustified attacks of Hamas and Hezbollah on Israeli citizens.

If they are associated with terrorism, it is only to the extent that they support it. Their children are not shunned at schools nor at universities, where many of their colleagues have joined them with vicious and false denunciations of Jews and Israel.

Significantly, the Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia does not even mention Muslim calls for “Death to Israel!” and “Death to Canada!” while the Maple Leaf forever flag is delightfully burned in downtown Vancouver in order to provide the necessary visual effects for peaceful protest.

Without mentioning Israel, the Special Representative sneakily implies that Israel has not followed international law in the conduct of its war of self-defence against Gaza and Lebanon, when in fact Israel has scrupulously respected international law to the extent it applies to war.

Even Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, said during a press conference on Thursday that he would have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if the premier arrived on Canadian soil, in line with a bogus warrant issued by the International Criminal Court this week.

“First of all, as Canada has always said, it’s really important that everyone abide by international law,” said Trudeau. “This is something we’ve been calling on from the beginning of the conflict. We are one of the founding members of the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice.”

Of course, Trudeau, Elghawaby, and other Canadian politicians permit themselves to opine on international law about which they are manifestly ignorant, just as they choose to ignore the war crimes of Hamas and Hezbollah, two entities manifestly of Palestinian and Lebanese origin.

In that respect, they are in excellent company, for the Prime Minister himself has no idea what international law is and how it applies to the situation Israel faces. She, he, and the rest of his government merely act as the ignorant echo chamber for the antisemitic United Nations and its creature organs.

The kicker to all this righteous posturing comes in the Special Representative’s call to adopt the definition of anti-Palestinian racism — non-existent though it is — which she claims, again falsely, lies behind the non-existent discrimination against too many Palestinian Canadians.

One wonders what anti-Palestinian racism is.

Is it, perhaps, holding Palestinians responsible for their ongoing century-old campaign to annihilate the Jewish state? Is it citing the historical record which shows Palestinian leaders have consistently opposed the Jews’ indigenous right to a sovereign state in their national homeland? Is it denunciation of everyday Palestinian and Lebanese complicity in the manifestly genocidal policy of Hamas and Hezbollah?

Anti-Palestinian racism is merely a fig leaf to justify Canada’s abandonment of Israel in its just war of self-defense and another weapon in the arsenal of the Canadian government and its Muslim supporters to silence any criticism of the criminal Palestinian policy which has led to the slaughter of thousands of Israelis, not to mention the indiscriminate Hezbollah attacks on Israel that have displaced 80,000 citizens from their homes.

Talk about war crimes and the flouting of international law.

Mr. Trudeau has never been able to bring himself to denounce the now rampant antisemitism in Canada without mentioning in the same breath the canard of Islamophobia which pales in comparison to the anti-Jewish sentiment exploding across the country. Perhaps he should have the Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia call his Social Envoy for Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism to ask for advice.

In reality, however, if the Special Representative wanted to combat potential Islamophobia, she has only to call upon Canadian Muslim communities to denounce Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Authority — and call upon the Canadian government to support the only democracy in the Middle East, namely Israel.

That would show Canadians that Muslim Canadians, and especially refugees of Lebanese and Palestinian descent who have fled tyrannical and murderous societies like Gaza and Lebanon, prize democracy over ethnic loyalty to the racist lands they left.

Such, alas, is not what she has done. Instead, she has added fuel to the antisemitic fire raging across Canada, drumming up support from a government that is both morally and intellectually bankrupt.

When I was growing up in Canada, I felt it to be an open and liberal society in which Jews could feel at home. Today this is no longer the case. But then most Canadians of my generation probably no longer feel at home today. We have all joined the dustbin of history as “white settler colonialists” who previously went by the names of coureurs de bois, Scottish railroad magnates, and the Plouffe family.

And, like the torn-down statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, we can patiently await our demise along with the country we once loved — so that Muslims of Palestinian and Lebanese descent can enrich the vertical mosaic with their own special version of pita bread, hijab feminism, and Muslim human rights.

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