Categories for Feature

My latest: the Beast is awake

I have never seen it this bad.

And I’ve seen it when it is really, really bad. But never like this.

Anti-Semitism, that is. Hatred and/or prejudice towards Jews.

Some context, here.  As a journalist, I have been writing about, and researching, Jew-hatred since 1986. As a lawyer and a citizen, I’ve been opposing it for almost as long. I’m not Jewish, but I’m a Zionist – that is, I favor re-establishing the Jewish homeland that existed long before Christ.

Now, over the years, I’ve seen a lot of anti-Semitism. It’s hard to forget.

An Aryan Nations fanatic – who believes Jews are the literal descendants of the devil – jammed a rifle in my chest at his group’s compound in Caroline, Alberta in 1987. When I worked for Jean Chretien in the early Nineties, the RCMP didn’t wanted me traveling with the Liberal leader, because I posed an added security risk – too many neo-Nazis wanted me dead, they said.

Some neo-Nazi skinheads planned to firebomb my place in Ottawa, resulting in several weeks of on-site police protection in 1994. A Ku Klux Klan leader gained access to my place in Vancouver in 1997, necessitating even more security and a vacating of the premises.

Online threats and attacks from Holocaust deniers Ernst Zundel and David Irving, and their fans, in 2001. Lots of those.

And, in 2018, a Toronto anti-Semite publishing a “newspaper” which talked about me being “bludgeoned to death.” (I successfully pushed for a private criminal prosecution in that case – and Judge Dan Moore let the Nazi go.)

And so on and so on. I’ve written five books about racism and anti-Semitism, hundreds of newspaper columns and stories, and I’ve been on the receiving end of lots of death threats over the years. I’ve spent plenty on security – and, yes, I’ve learned how to be a really good shot.

And in all of that time, after experiencing all of that nonsense and more? I’ve never seen it this bad.

If you’re a Jew, you know exactly what I mean. Anti-Semitism, which never really goes away, is seemingly worse now than it has been in decades. And Jew-hatred – which is now manifesting itself in unlikely places like university campuses, and small businesses, and elementary schools, and restaurants and private residences – is just about everywhere. It’s the new pandemic, and deadly in its own dark way.

In Toronto alone, there’s been a 132 per cent increase in anti-Semitic incidents since October 7, when Hamas murdered 1400 Israeli men women and children – and raped and tortured many more. Think about that: after October 7, the worst day Jews have experienced since the Holocaust, things got worse for them. Not better.

Things got worse everywhere, in fact.

Pollsters and social scientists are at work, computing the data, assembling the grim statistics. Police agencies are tallying the depressing numbers. But all of us – all of us who pay attention, anyway – know the truth: anti-Semitism, always bad, is getting markedly worse at the back end of 2023.

In media newsrooms, we are all talking about it. At this newspaper, one of our writers got roughed up at an “anti-Zionist” protest on Sunday – told he worked for a newspaper run by the Jews. And, for those of us who are in the business of predicting the future, it feels like blood will be spilled – and not in Gaza City or an Israeli kibbutz, either.

Here. Now.  It feels like someone is going to get killed. It feels like there will be blood.

Israel will win the war against Hamas, yes. It will be long and it will be bloody, yes. Of that there should be little doubt.

But, elsewhere, it feels like Israel – the Jewish state – is losing. Online, in cities across the West, in public opinion, perhaps: it feels like Israel is losing another kind of war.

It’s not irrelevant when we see more than 100,000 protestors marching past the British House of Parliament on the weekend, demonizing Jews and the Jewish state. It’s not irrelevant when Ph.Ds are joking about Jewish babies being beheaded or cooked in ovens. It’s not irrelevant when Jews are afraid to go outside their homes – in Canada.

Now, more than ever, those who support Israel – those who oppose terror and hate – need to fight back. We need to be seen, too, and we need to confront every barbaric lie and every blood libel. We need defeat anti-Semitism. As we have done before.

The rough Beast, per Yeats, is again awake, and it is slouching towards Bethlehem.

We must defeat it. We must.


My latest: the social media sewer

Places of higher learning?

Places that are stomach-churning, more like.

We refer to campuses all over North America, of course. Since October 7, far too many students at university, college and high school campuses have blamed Hamas’ victims, not Hamas. They have promoted hatred, not opposed hatred.

On Wednesday, thousands of students at more than 100 universities across the United States and Canada protested “fascists and Zionists,” said the World Socialist Web Site.

In Canada, police were called in to escort Jewish students at McGill University, away from a big anti-Israel protest. Security has been enhanced to protect Jewish students at three British Columbia universities: UBC, Simon Fraser and U Vic.

Three York University students’ associations published pro-Hamas statements, and refused to retract, even after it was pointed out that Hamas raped, tortured and murdered more than 1,400 Jews – and kidnapped hundreds more. Thursday, hundreds of high school students walked out of classes across the Toronto District School Board to wave Palestinian flags and attack the Jewish state.

And this short summary doesn’t even include the multiple death threats and assaults that have been happening on campuses across North America – motivated by Jew-hatred.

Why is this happening?

Bad parenting, possibly. Hateful professors and instructors, to be sure. But, more than any other factor, Generation Z – that is, those born in 1996 and later – are being targeted by anti-Semitic and extremist organizations online. And the statistics tell the disturbing story.

• According to a poll conducted by Harvard University (which itself has had no shortage of anti-Semitic student activity), more than 50 per cent of Americans between 18 and 24 believe Hamas’ pogroms were “justified.”
• Where are those young people getting their information? From the Chinese-regime-run TikTok. TikTok is the search engine they use, more than Google or any other. The European Union, unlike Canada, has demanded this week that TikTok detail the efforts they are making to curb pro-Hamas propaganda. So far, TikTok hasn’t responded.
• When one U.S. researcher engaged with just one TikTok post on the Israel-Hamas war, his feed was almost immediately overwhelmed with anti-Israel messages. He looked at the resulting data, and found that “TikTok is being controlled by anti-Israel bot farms – much of which is paid for by Hamas-supporting organizations.”
• If you look even deeper, you can see why Israel is losing the information war among young people. Among the ever-important hashtags, for example, “Stand With Israel” got two million views. Meanwhile, “StandWithPalestine” got an extraordinary 37.7 million – almost twenty times as many.
• It gets worse: because TikTok is now so overwhelmingly anti-Israel, its engagement flywheel – which online platforms use to increase momentum and profit – encourages more and more anti-Semitic content to attract eyeballs.

This, perhaps more than anything else, helps to explain why white, affluent, under-educated high school students who have never set foot in Israel – from San Francisco to Toronto – have embraced extremist messages. Their primary source of news and information is a sewer pipe for Jew-hatred.

This writer has written in the past that TikTok needs to be banned in the West because it has been shown to be a tool used by the Chinese regime to destabilize democracy. It is a real and present danger.

So too, now, with our young people. Right now, the minds of our youth are being poisoned with toxic, hateful messaging – messages that are deeply and unabashedly anti-Semitic. Not enough is being done to counter it.

The Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, once said this: “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which [we] can play.”

Well, the press has since been replaced by TikTok and its ilk. It has been replaced by digital devices which every single Gen Z kid carries with them.

And it is like a snake, spitting lies and hate.


My latest: we need leaders who know how to make a decision, like this guy

Decisions.

That’s all the voters are looking for, really. They know that they are not going to get their way on every single policy decision.

So they all want just one thing from their political leaders: decisions. Clear, coherent, concise decisions.

This writer worked for a leader like that: Jean Chretien. He won three back-to-back majorities not because he was universally loved, or even that his priority was being universally loved.

He won every single election he contested over a 40-year political career because he knew how to make a decision. That’s it. Because that’s the job. It’s simple.

Al-Qaeda attacked America on 9/11, and Chretien did not hesitate. He made a decision. He said we would go with America to fight Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. We did.

Later, George W. Bush wanted to wage war against Saddam Hussein. Chretien told him to wait until he had proof of weapons of mass destruction. Bush wouldn’t wait. So, Chretien made another decision: we would not join the Americans in Iraq. For them, it turned out to be a quagmire.

Decisions. At a time of war, being able to make a decision – being able to stake out a clear position – is essential. Human lives depend on it.

So, on the eve of the anniversary of Chretien’s massive election victory, we were treated to the spectacle of a Liberal government that can’t make a decision. Our so-called Minister of Global Affairs called for “a humanitarian pause” in the fighting in Israel and Gaza.

On the very same day – the same day! – Canada’s Minister of National Defense (correctly) labeled Hamas a terrorist organization, and (properly) said that they must be destroyed.

Which is it? A humanitarian pause, or destroy them? What’s the decision, Trudeau Liberals?

The Trudeau Liberals are not alone in their apparent fondness for sucking and blowing at the same time, however. Here’s a sampling.

• Trudeau initially said Israel had a right to defend itself, “in accordance with international law.” A couple days later, several of his Liberal MPs openly contradicted him and issued a letter calling for a ceasefire. None have been disciplined.
• CBC, the Toronto Star and even the New York Times claimed that Israel had bombed a hospital in Gaza. It hadn’t. The hospital is still standing, and there were no 500 victims. But have the Star or CBC expressed regret for their decision to effectively blame Israel? No.
• The Ontario NDP stubbornly defended one of their own after she refused to back down from statements that many considered anti-Semitic. A few days later, they decided to kick her out of their caucus.
• Canada’s Ambassador to the the United Nations, Bob Rae, rightly and courageously called for Hamas to be destroyed. The hopeless and hapless Joly, meanwhile, instead called for a “de-escalation.” If 1,400 of your family and friends were raped, tortured and killed – if hundreds of them were kidnapped – would you be telling the victims to “de-escalate” and suck it up? Or would you favor pursuing and stopping the wrongdoers? You know the answer.
• António Guterres, the Secretary General of the United Nations, properly condemned the brutal attacks of Hamas. Then, in virtually the same breath, he said that Hamas’ rampage “did not happen in a vacuum” – and added that the Palestinians have been subject to over 50 years of “suffocating occupation.” Get that? Condemn the bad guys – and then say the bad guys weren’t acting “in a vacuum.”

And so on and so on. It’s enough to make you ill. (Actually, it does.)

We are going through a dark and dangerous time. We are on the precipice of things getting worse before they get even worse.

At such a time, we need the sort of leadership Jean Chretien showed: clear and coherent and concise decisions. The ability to decide.

We’re not getting that.


My latest: history now

Do you ever feel like you are living in history? Because you are.

Right now.

For too many, history is distant, abstract. It’s scribblings in dog-eared high school text books. A bit of dialogue recalled from a movie, or something said on a guided tour while on vacation.

For too many, history is events that are recalled, perhaps, but never really experienced. They’re just some words on a page, like these.

The great American writer James Baldwin knew what history is. He lived through it and sought to capture it in his books and essays. “History,” said Baldwin, “is not the past. We carry our history with us.

“We are our history.”

Now, people are busy. They are scrambling to get across town to get on to work on time, or get a kid to hockey practice, or pay the hydro bill, or catch a few hours of sleep. They don’t have time to ponder history. They only have time for now, right now.

But history doesn’t wait for us. It’s happening all the time. Right now, in particular.

Right now, just about everywhere, sociopaths are marching in city streets, condemning the victims of Hamas, not Hamas. Right now, in places we believed to be places of higher learning, our children are being taught that barbarism is acceptable, even defensible. Right now, in our legislatures, elected people are publishing rationalizations for murder.

Right now, Jewish businesses – places that employ everyday people doing everyday things, trying to get by – are being targeted by chanting, menacing monsters. Right now.

At Cafe Landwer, for example. History is happening here, in this bright and sunny Toronto restaurant.

The people who founded Cafe Landwer know history. They have put it right on their website.

They write: “In 1919 on a picturesque street in the center of Berlin, Moshe Landwer opens a small and romantic coffee house, which quickly turns into one of the city’s favorite hangout spots. In 1933, with the rise to power of the Nazi regime, Moshe Landwer, along with his family, makes aliya [immigrates] and settles in Tel Aviv.”

Not mentioned, there, was what happened to Jewish businesses in Berlin, not long after Landwer left Germany: Kristallnacht. “Crystal night,” it was called, to describe the slivers of glass that littered the streets. After Nazi thugs smashed windows of Jewish businesses.
Terrorizing them. Demonizing them.

And now, more than a century later, the café that Moshe Landwer created is being targeted again, in the most unlikely of places. Not in Nazi Germany – in Canada. Here, now.

Thugs descended on Cafe Landwer on the weekend. Screaming at patrons. Chanting “boycott.” In an insane, spit-flecked rage. Targeting a restaurant?

For being Jewish.

My colleague Brian Lilley and I went to Cafe Landwer on Monday (more…)


My latest: listen to Josh

Josh Gilman is a writer. And the whole world needs to see what he’s written. 

And, in the past few days, a lot of the world has. 

Josh is Canadian, a Dad, a communications specialist, and was formerly involved in politics. The party he belonged to isn’t actually relevant. What’s relevant is what he wrote, because he wrote it from his heart. As a human being. As a believer in humanity. 

And as a Jew. 

His blogged essay – titled “Why you might have lost all your Jewish friends this week and didn’t even know it” – is simply extraordinary. And, as noted, it has gone around the world. 

Usually, he told me, his blog entries get seen by a couple hundred people, mainly family and friends. But this one? It’s now getting closer to one million views – with half a million in the States alone, and thousands more in far-flung places like Ireland, Sweden and South Africa. And, of course, Israel. 

There’s not enough room here, unfortunately, to quote all of what Josh wrote.  If you are online, a link to all of it is here. Read it. The gist of it, really, is found in these passages:

• “When you are Jewish, you are always aware that there is a large population in the world that wants to kill you. Even if they aren’t trying now, you read history and you see that every few generations, at the very least, some group tries to kill all or at least a lot of Jewish people.
We may like your posts that say ‘never again,’ but we never fully believe it.”

• “Did you know that that is a category of friend that every Jewish person has in their mind? Who would I run to? Who would hide me? We don’t wonder if; we wonder when. Because we know that whether it is indeed us, or whether it is our brothers and sisters in Israel, or in France, or in Pittsburgh, it will happen again somewhere.”

• “The greatest soothing to my soul this past week has been seeing friends and old colleagues post notes of support. It truly means the world. It’s not too late. But consider this carefully, because it is not a game. If you read this and choose to reach out, choose to take a stand publicly.”

Most of us do not ever need to wonder if someone will come to kill us one day. Or, wonder who will take us in, so that we can survive. But Josh has. His family and friends have. Jews have.

Josh and his family have temporarily relocated to the United States for work – I won’t say where – but he agreed to answer some of my questions about what he wrote. He told me he started writing his essay to “process my own thoughts and feelings.” He sent it to Jewish friends. They said it reflected what they were feeling, too.

“The response,” Josh says, “has been overwhelming. I’ve received messages from all over the world. From grandmothers in Germany, to writers in Hollywood, from almost every corner of the planet. Jews and gentiles.”

He’s proud, and he should be. But how is he feeling, these days?

“Different waves,” he says. “Waves of grief, at what has happened. Waves of concern for the ongoing war. Waves of defiance, [that] the terrorists and murderers will not win – and we will win and we will thrive.”

He pauses. He mentions the so-called “day of jihad,” last Friday. “That night my youngest daughter was crying in the middle of the night…I just held her and stared at her beautiful face, thinking of every Jewish baby that was murdered. And I was overwhelmed by both gratitude that I was holding my darling daughter, and by grief for every family destroyed in Israel.”

I want to keep quoting this amazing young man, but I’ve run out of room. I ask him if he has any final words, anything that he wants non-Jews to know, too.

He muses. “For my non-Jewish friends, you simply have no idea how meaningful your words of love and support are. It’s never too late to reach out and it means everything.”

So, there you go, friends of Israel and the Jewish community.

Listen to Josh Gilman – and reach out.


My latest: obstruction of justice to cover up obstruction of justice

If you’re going to finally confirm that justice was obstructed to hide obstruction of justice, when would you do that?

When voters are focussed on a bloody war in the Middle East, probably.

There are lot of moving parts in that lede. Let us explain.

And here’s one truism, which is eternal: if you’re in government, and you’ve got bad news coming out – “taking out the trash,” as they say – then you need to come up with something else to distract readers/viewers/listeners. You need to “change the channel.”

The Justin Trudeau government are masters at it. They may not be very good at actually governing. But at changing the channel? They’re without equal.

Trudeau was dropping in the polls, so he announced a shiny new cabinet. He was getting hammered on the Chinese election interference story, so he picked a fight with some Premiers on health care funding. And, of course, whenever any unhelpful issue raises its head, Team Trudeau will haul out that hoary old chestnut, abortion, to distract. And so on.

This week, they did it again. For four years or so, the RCMP had wanted to investigate allegations that Trudeau and his circle obstructed justice. That is, that they tried to get former Attorney General Jody Wilson Raybould to stop a prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, a big Liberal Party donor, for corruption.

Eleven people in and around Trudeau’s PMO did that, we now know, at least 44 times in 2018. Each time, Wilson Raybould refused – and she ultimately was driven out of government, and the Liberal Party, for refusing to do what would almost certainly be obstruction of justice.

And, now, we have learned that the RCMP wanted to investigate whether crimes had been committed. But they couldn’t – because Trudeau and his cabinet refused to cooperate.

In 2021, as the Mounties were nearing of a months-long probe into obstruction of justice in the SNC-Lavalin scandal, they hit a roadblock: Trudeau et al. wouldn’t give them access to cabinet documents about what went on. The RCMP commissioner personally made the request, no less, and was rebuffed.

Documents finally released this week – while war was raging in Israel and Gaza – revealed that the RCMP had “pushed as hard as possible,” and “exhausted all avenues” to get the evidence they needed to justify prosecution. But, in true Tricky Dick Nixon fashion, the Trudeau cabal said no.

The RCMP needed Trudeau’s gang to waive cabinet confidence and show them the evidence.

But Trudeau wouldn’t. As result, the damning documents declared, the RCMP concluded it had “insufficient evidence” to purse the case any further.

To some folks, this seems outrageous (it is) and shocking evidence of the Mounties’ ineffectiveness (it isn’t). Here’s why: section 39 of the Canada Evidence Act prevents cabinet secrets from becoming public from as long as 20 years. The bar is absolute. If the cabinet says no, the police can’t overrule them.

(That’s not all: if a police force wants to serve a search warrant or conduct an interview with an MP on Parliament Hill, they can’t. The Speaker can stop them – and, in the past, has done so more than once.)

So, Canada is a democracy, yes. But, in this democracy, some of us are more equal than others.

The rest of us can’t stonewall a police criminal investigation indefinitely. But Prime Ministers and cabinet ministers can. And, as we saw this week, they did.

It’s like obstruction of justice to cover up an obstruction of justice, you might say.

And, what better time to finally admit it, than when Canadians’ are paying attention to the war in the Middle East?

 


My latest: promoting terror should be a crime

It “brings progress.”

That’s what a Canadian union leader said, the day after Hamas massacred hundreds of Israeli men, women and children. “Progress.”

Three student unions at a major Canadian university called Hamas’ terrorism “a strong act of resistance” – and called Israel a “so-called” country. “Resistance.”

At street protests across the country, Hamas is celebrated. In Toronto, they waved the flag of Hamas, a listed terror group in this country. Someone else brought along the flag of the Taliban – which 158 Canadians lost their lives fighting, not so long ago.

They played recordings of the sounds of Hamas’ missiles landing, and mocked “Zionists.” They chanted cheerily about an ancient slaughter of Jews.

There have been rallies in support of Israel and its people, yes. But since Hamas’ October 7 mass-murder of more than 1,300 Israelis, there have been too many unambiguous expressions of support for terror. Here, in Canada.

For murder.

In other places, you’re not allowed to advocate for murder and genocide. Britain’s Home Office has drawn up plans to expel students and others who express support for Hamas. France’s Interior Minister has banned all public demonstrations in support of Hamas.

In Canada – apart from some editorials in newspapers, and performative condemnations by politicians – we have done nothing. Zero. We have instead permitted the willful and open promotion of murder.

Enough.

We are a country of laws. We are a country of laws with reasonable limits on what people can say. Just as it is a crime to threaten to kill or harm another person in Canada, it is a crime to promote hatred.

Section 319 of the Criminal Code of Canada says that you cannot willfully promote hatred against an identifiable group, like Jews. Section 318 makes it a crime to promote genocide against an identifiable group. Like Jews.

This writer has been part of a successful effort to prosecute, convict and jail two Toronto men who willfully promoted hatred against Jews and women. It was overdue, and it was the right thing to do.

We now need to do likewise with those who would advocate for the homicidal subhumans who make up Hamas and its ilk. We need to make it unlawful to willfully promote and defend terrorism.

Don’t we have a law like that already, some ask? Well, we used to. We used to have section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which prohibited communications which were “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.”

It was a non-criminal sanction, that mainly provided for fines. It was a sensible law that worked. But the government of Stephen Harper stupidly, cravenly got rid of it. Leaving us only with the criminal law to fight expressions of hatred.

Expressions of hatred, mainly online, exploded after section 13 was abolished by the Tories.  The government of Justin Trudeau has made no serious effort to bring it back. And, as we’ve seen in the past few days, too many Canadians have taken that as a license to advocate for terror.

Freedom of speech is precious, yes. But sections 318 and 319 of the Criminal Code require the approval of the Attorney General to initiate a prosecution. That is a high bar.  We could do that for a new law that prohibits the willful promotion of terrorism and terror groups.

That would protect Canadians constitutional right to free expression and free speech. But it would also ensure that we finally have a tool to end expressions of support for terror.

It’s time. This has gone on for too long, and it is only going to get worse.

Enough.