My latest: ignorance = hate

“I never really knew much about Jews until this year.”

That’s what Dana Remillard Kreil wrote in one of her essays, which ended up in court.  She went on:

“In other grades, all I was told was that the Jews are a RACE that are discriminated against. They had never had a fair chance. But not one of the teachers ever stopped to tell me of their TRUE origin. This year I learned of their origin and their wicked plans, and I am very scared that the world is going to fall to them. I only hope that we Christians will be strong enough to fight off their Satanic hate.”

Another kid, Gwen Mathews, read out some of her class notes at the preliminary hearing. “Christ told the Jews: ‘Your father is the devil, you are the children of Satan.’”

She went on: Jews secretly ran the French Revolution, and they had what they called the “Feast of Reason: They carried aloft a number of prostitutes. They would strip her and lay her on the altar. Then they killed an innocent girl, and poured the blood on the hooker. Then they cooked the girl and ate her.”

There’s a lot more of that, if you have the stomach for it. It’s what Gwen and Dana were taught. Not in Nazi-era Germany. But in Canada – Eckville, Alberta, to be precise – for many years.

Their teacher was the former mayor of Eckville, Jim Keegstra. In his social studies class, Keegstra taught kids for 14 years that the Holocaust was a hoax, that there was an international Zionist conspiracy, and that Jews are the biblical descendants of Satan.

If all of that sounds a bit like the sort of belief system propagated by Hamas, you’d be right. And if it also sounds not unlike the sort of vile anti-Semitism now manifesting itself around the planet – on university campuses, in the streets, everywhere online – you’d be right about that, too.

Jim Keegstra was ultimately prosecuted, successfully, for promoting hatred against Jews. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, and he lost. Keegstra died on June 2, 2014, which – as I wrote at the time – was the day that Hell got that much more crowded.

How did he do it? How did Jim Keegstra get away with preaching Jew-hatred to children – much in the way that Hamas and its ilk now do? How?

Lots of reasons, as it turned out. Inadequate classroom supervision. Disregard for the approved curriculum. But, as it turned out, something else: geography.

There were no Jews in Eckville, you see. Not one. And the nearest synagogue was two hours away, in Edmonton.

This writer was working for the Calgary Herald in the Keegstra years. I met and interviewed him, and many of his followers – which included the majority of his students, even after his trials.

And that is what struck me, over and over. Jim Keegstra was successful in teaching students to hate Jews because there were no living, breathing Jews nearby. He could make Jews into whatever he wanted, and he did.

Right now, at the back end of the year 2023, we are witnessing the biggest resurgence of anti-Semitism since the Second World War. You don’t need a poll to prove it. It’s the truth.

Also true: hatred is the product of ignorance. Hatred flourishes where education is absent.

That is why what the Doug Ford Government of Ontario has announced this week is so, so important.  Like other provincial governments of differing stripes, it has declared its intention to ensure that students are taught better about the Holocaust.

Other levels of government, in other places, need to do likewise. As we saw in the Keegstra scandal – as we are now seeing around the world – anti-Semitism is flourishing in those places where Jews are vastly outnumbered, or where they no longer exist.

“I never really knew much about Jews.” That’s what Dana Remillard Kreil said, so many years ago, in Alberta. It tells us the way out.

We are all in a dark and dangerous place. The way out is truth. The way out is education. The way out is learning that Jews are human, like humans everywhere.

In his Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare put it best. His main character was a Jew. And this is what that character famously asked:

“If you prick us [Jews], do we not bleed?”