Those are the opening words to Spike Lee’s Fight The Power, one of the most important movies ever made.
It’s about racist hate and violence, and how quickly it can spread when left unchecked. It’s about how it can lead to destruction and even murder.
This is a short and simple video by Facts Matter, the group I lead to fight antisemitism in Canada.
There is a fire raging all around us, now. WAKE UP.
What happens when the oppressed become the oppressor?
Because – make no mistake – that’s what has happened since October 7, 2023.
At the start, the pro-Palestine contingent protested the actions of Israel’s government. They protested against Israel’s military, the IDF, and its use of force in the Gaza strip. All of that was constitutionally-protected. While their rhetoric could be excessive – alleging “genocide,” for instance, without any proof whatsoever – they were allowed to do what they did. It wasn’t antisemitic, per se.
As the weeks and months went by, as the war dragged on – mainly due to Hamas’ refusal to lay down their arms, and due to their refusal to release the hostages – Palestine’s acolytes in the West grew impatient.
They started to advocate for a global revolution (“Intifada”). They started to demand that Jews be removed from their ancestral homeland (“From the river to the sea”). They started to use symbols (the red hand, the red triangle) that literally advocate murder.
And they, themselves, changed. They devolved into a dark, dangerous pro-Hamas adjunct. They fully became what they had so often accused Israel of: a violent, intolerant cabal of thugs. Capable, even, of murder, in places like Washington, D.C. or Boulder, Colorado.
Along the way, they started to terrorize kids and families who had gone to see Santa Claus in a shopping mall. They blocked major roads. They vandalized. They started to attack places linked to Jews – even hospitals. And some of them even started to firebomb or shoot up synangogues and Jewish schools. (All in Toronto.)
At that point, they became what they had claimed to always oppose. They had become haters who use force. Against everyone, anyone, who got in their way. To get their way.
Which is the literal definition of terrorism, by the by: using force to achieve some political end.
On the weekend, on a sunny and beautiful Sunday, a bunch of them shut down Ottawa’s big pride event. They actually did that: they blocked the road on which LGBTQ people were peacefully walking. They did that right on Parliament Hill, at the centre of our democracy, demanding that Ottawa Pride “boycott” Jews. In culture, in academia.
The event was cancelled.
If the haters possessed any self-awareness at all, of course, they’d take a look in the nearest mirror, and see that they have changed. They would see that they have become something else. Something bad. But they won’t.
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Meet Davide Mastracci…Jew hunter?
Mastracci is the opinion editor at something called The Maple. It publishes opinions with titles like these:
And so on; you get the picture. There are many more such articles on The Maple, all of which go after Jews, the Jewish state, or what the federally-incorporated publication – like many antisemites do – call “the Zionist lobby.”
Along with his Israel-loathing Maple web site, the Montreal-based writer is now a bounty hunter of sorts: he and his friends at The Maple essentially target Jews. Their new web site is called “Find IDF Soldiers.” Its obvious goal: name and shame Canadians who allegedly served in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
As of today’s date, 163 men and women are named on Mastracci’s web site. It links to detailed biographies of those people, describing where they work and live, and even what they do in their spare time. In many cases, Mastracci and The Maple provide hyperlinks to information about those named.
We are not going to link to “Find IDF Soldiers,” however, because it may run afoul of Canadian law. In Canada – unlike in some American states, but like most democratic countries in the world – you cannot offer an incentive to track down individuals because someone thinks they have done something wrong.
Bounty-hunting, in Canada, can lead to all sorts of legal trouble – charges for assault, battery, kidnapping and criminal harassment. The practice can attract civil liability, too, and result in lawsuits.
Mastracci and The Maple insist they aren’t bounty-hunting. They claim they aren’t doing anything wrong. They say they are only doing it because it “is of interest to the public.”
“This project exists because these soldiers and/or their family members willingly shared their status and other details about their lives with public sources,” they say on the site. “Yes, all of the soldiers on the list are at least partially Jewish, and we have not shied away from acknowledging this fact.”
The web site targets Jews who have allegedly served in the IDF, and not any of the many Muslims who have served in it. Why? “[It’s] because Jews are the only ones able to immigrate to Israel as citizens due solely to their ethnoreligious background,” Mastracci and The Maple claim.
Mastracci’s own writing suggest the motivation isn’t nearly so benign.
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PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY – Barack Obama called it the “empathy deficit” – which the former U.S. President defined as “being able to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes.”
Obama didn’t invent the concept, of course – Jesus Christ did, per Matthew 7:12: “Do to others what you would have them do to you” – but it’s a really important one, politically.
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre showed some overdue political empathy on the hustings in Alberta’s Battle River-Crowfoot by-election, and it paid dividends. He won in landslide on Monday night. Said Poilievre before the vote: “I am a born and bred Albertan, with strong Alberta values.
“As leader, I can take the fight for farmers, oil and gas workers, firearms owners, soldiers, for Albertans to the national stage. That means strong, forceful, representation for the people of Battle River-Crowfoot.”
The social scientists remind us that people develop empathy for other people when – like Poilievre, like people who travel abroad a lot, like people who move from one province to another – they uproot themselves and develop something called “neuroplasticity.” That happens when the human brain literally reorganizes itself through new connections throughout life.
This writer’s neuroplasticity moment happened a few years ago, when I moved to rural Canada (Prince Edward County, PEC) from a lifetime in big cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Dallas, Ottawa). The pandemic was the impetus, but the payoff was almost immediate: “Why didn’t I do this years ago?” I asked my labs, out loud.
PEC is a wonderful, beautiful, amazing place to live, an hour and a bit outside Toronto. But, in the past few months, no small amount of sadness and anxiety have crept in. Drought is the reason.
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Have our cultural icons lost their collective minds?
Across the cultural landscape – music, film, books – it certainly seems that way. Musicians, filmmakers, authors have apparently persuaded themselves that they alone can solve the Middle Eastern crisis from their distant perches in Canada or the U.S. or Europe.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, most politicians generally know they lack the superpowers to single-handedly end wars like the one raging between Israel and Hamas. But some self-important culture types clearly think they do.
Take TIFF for example (please). In the past few days, as the entire world knows by now, TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey and his Toronto International Film Festival adamantly refused to screen a documentary based in Israel by acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Barry Avrich – after having previously promising that they would.
Why? Well, many suspected latent antisemitism played a role with unseen forces at TIFF. This writer wondered if Hamas’ banker – Qatar – had put pressure on TIFF, with whom it has quietly partnered since 2019.
TIFF’s stated reason? Avrich and his fellow producers had failed to secure permission from Hamas – to show some Hamas footage in the documentary! (We are not making this up, as much as we wish that we were.) It was absurd and insane: Bailey and TIFF wanted a terror group’s approval first.
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Unlike Hamas, which still maintains an office in Qatar, the Doha Film Institute (DFI) operates out of a post office box in the oil-rich Middle Eastern country. But the institute – which proclaims that it is “independent” and merely interested in promoting film and culture – wields a lot of clout.
With the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), in particular.
DFI came into existence in 2010. It is led by Fatma Hassan Alremaihi, a telegenic Qatari woman. Alremaihi has not hidden her disdain for Israel, in her public remarks or in the films she funds.
Just days after Hamas murdered, raped and wounded thousands of Israelis on October 7, 2023, for example, Alremaihi spoke at a conference in Doha promoting “voices from Palestine.” The DFI CEO called for “resistance,” quote unquote, presumably against Israel.
She called for a minute of silence for Palestinian “martyrs,” and, according to at least one news report, attacked “ongoing Israeli aggression” and “the Israeli war machine.” Said the report, in The Peninsula:
“Alremaihi pointed out [Israel’s] violations of international and ethical laws, as well as humanitarian standards and values, by the Israeli colonial occupation. She highlighted the importance of the ‘Free Palestine’ slogan, noting that it represents a defence of not only Palestine and its people but also our universal principles of freedom and humanity.
Alremaihi called for “resistance…through various means,” said The Peninsula’s reporter.
Watching the circus that was the Toronto International Film Festival this past week, one can be forgiven for wondering: does that “resistance” extend to TIFF? How much influence does Qatar exercise over the celebrated Canadian film festival? Both are fair questions, particularly after TIFF refused to screen The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, a Canadian film that showcased one Israeli’s family’s experiences on October 7.
Among other things, TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey had told the film’s makers their documentary would be barred from TIFF because they did not obtain “legal clearance of all footage” – essentially, from Hamas, a terror group. A massive controversy ensued, with Bailey and TIFF being pilloried on front pages around the globe. On Thursday afternoon, Bailey and TIFF completely reversed their idiotic decision. Sources say “heads will roll” soon at the organization, this newspaper has been told.
Bailey is not an antisemite, those same sources say. So, what persuaded TIFF to bar the film? Was it Qatar?
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“It is not the pain and the wounds that are the worst,” the Swiss philosopher Pascal Mercier wrote, many years ago. “The worst is the humiliation.”
The Nazis knew that. After Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, widespread public humiliation of Jews commenced. In one notorious case, a young Jewish man named Julius Wolff and his non-Jewish fiancé, Christine Neeman, were taken by the Nazis’ brown shirts – the Sturmabteilung – in Norden, Germany, and forced to parade through the streets wearing signs.
Wolff’s said: “Ich bin ein Rasseschänder” – that is, “I am a race defiler.” Wolff and Neeman were later taken to concentration camps.
For the Nazis, public humiliation of Jews, and those who would consort with Jews, wasn’t something that just happened by chance. It was something that was central to their program of oppression of the Jews and non-Aryans, from the very start. It was all designed to inflict suffering on Jews.
But – and this is key – it was also how the Nazis drew a distinction between Jews and non-Jews. Ritual public humiliations were a way to remind ordinary Germans that Jews were not human – they were, as the Nazi propaganda of the time repeatedly proclaimed, parasites. They were vermin, ungeziefer, infecting the corpus of the Third Reich and the world.
We don’t know what the man who assaulted a Jew in a Montreal park a few days ago was thinking, at this point. We likely never will – his defence lawyers will be working overtime to ensure that the judge, or the jury, never hears a solitary word about antisemitism.
So, we will be left to wonder: was it an argument that simply escalated? A case of mistaken identity? Just an unstable person, assaulting a man in broad daylight, in front of his children?
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When a Canadian Jewish man is viciously attacked and beaten for being a Jew, in front of his child, the response should not be to tweet about a fucking cat.
The Prime Minister I worked for wouldn’t have done that.