Divided

The war in the Middle East will end. But I no longer think that the divisions seen everywhere will end anytime soon. They feel permanent.


Decency beats hate

On our side of the street: PEC folks from all faiths and all walks of life, there to demand the release of hostages, and an end to the terror of Hamas. It was a cold and miserable day, but nothing dampened the spirits of the people who favor decency.

On the other side: “people” who brought children to hold up signs attacking Jews, paid organizers and protestor$ screaming epithets against the Jewish state, and desecration of a place that was dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives fighting Naziism.

Our side won. Our side always will.


My latest: words that kill

Genocide.
 
Apartheid. Occupation. Settler-colonialism.
 
Those are words we are all hearing a lot, lately. They get thrown around like confetti.
 
After October 7, when 1,200 men, women, children and babies in Israel were tortured and slaughtered – and when more than 200 were kidnapped, to be raped or killed or both – a professional and coordinated global campaign of anti-Semitism was unleashed.  Its objective was to deny or justify the horrors of October 7 and thereafter.  
 
Protestors were paid to protest, organizers were hired, slick posters and banners were generated.  The objective was to intimidate Jews and their supporters into silence with epithets and libels.  In many places, it’s worked.
 
Because, as in any pogrom, as in any act of hate-fuelled violence, language is critical.  Every historian knows that violent hate is caused by hateful propaganda. The barbaric acts of the Holocaust always first needed the horrific words in Mein Kampf.
 
So, every skinhead this writer ever interviewed had a well-thumbed Holocaust-denying tract nearby, usually memorized.  Every Jew-hating Hitler freak I’ve ever interviewed – and I’ve interviewed plenty, over the years – was radicalized first by hateful words and images. Online, or in a book or pamphlet.
 
That’s why we need to pay attention to words.  Because hateful words always precede hateful deeds.  Always.
 
Ask Justin Trudeau.  His meeting with a G7 leader in Toronto was shut down by hate-spewing Israel-haters, principally because Toronto police did nothing to stop them.  And then, a few days later, Trudeau was confronted by a man – on an Ottawa-area ski slope.  While he was snowboarding, Trudeau was followed by the skiing Israel-hater who threw angry words at him.  
 
Trudeau snowboarded away, presumably on his way to restoring funding to the Hamas-loving UNWRA.
 
More words: last week, again, a Toronto lawyer wore a hoodie to a Raptors game with the words “FREE OUR HOSTAGES” and a little Star of David on the back.  MLSE security kicked him out.
 
This week, the lawyer and some of his supporters showed up wearing the same sort of messages on their clothing.  MLSE’s response? They handed the Jews cards containing warnings – you know, kind of like how the actual Nazis used to hand out stars for Jews to wear on their clothing.
 
And, another recent example: a group calling itself “Health Workers for Palestine” has created a secret (until now) petition aimed at words in common use.  Specifically, to stop healthcare workers – doctors, nurses – from using the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s working definition of anti-Semitism: 
 
“Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
 
Sounds pretty accurate, right? Well, the Canadian “Health Workers Alliance for Palestine” want to kill that definition – because it’s being used against anti-Semites.  In their secret petition, the pro-Palestine health workers say they’re being “silenced” by those who object to the foul anti-Semitic words they use.  So, their solution? Change the definition of “anti-Semitism.”  Make it okay to accuse people of “genocide,” “apartheid,” “occupation,” and  “settler-colonialism.”
 
Even though their petition is still under wraps, 142 people have signed it, most of them with what appear to be Arabic names.  None appear to be Jewish. 
 
One Jewish doctor, who fears retribution and asks that his name not be used, says: “The Health Care Workers Alliance for Palestine [have been] harassing an array of Jewish Mount Sinai physicians online. They and their collaborators are trying to tell the hospitals what counts as anti-Semitism, including by trying to bully them into denying obvious anti-Semitism.”
 
And that, as with all fights about language, is the key objective: to control the narrative.  To dominate.
 
Jews and their allies are fighting back (this writer, full disclosure, is suing a neighbor who falsely accused me of supporting genocide).  The media are looking more critically at the false claims of the Israel-haters.  So the haters are responding as propagandists always do: by trying to change the true meaning of the words we use.
 
It’s what Hitler and his propagandists did: they told big lies, over and over. And they did for the same reason: 
 
To eliminate Jews and those who would oppose them.


My latest: the ghost of Bill Blair


NEW YORK – Bill Blair haunts us still.

He’s not dead or anything. In fact, he’s still the Minister of National Defence. He’s alive.

But his legacy as Toronto’s Chief of Police haunts us, as noted. And not in a good way.

Remember the G20? International leaders coming to Canada, to agree on things that few can can remember, and literally no one now cares about?

Bill probably wishes you wouldn’t. The G20 took place in Toronto at the back end of June 2010. More than 1,100 people were arrested, many of them illegally, just like in they do in Russia or China.

As media and others looked on, Blair’s G20 police force used excessive force, teargas, pepper spray and rubber bullets against protesters – but also people who weren’t protesting at all. They beat and brutalized people who had done nothing wrong. They turned Toronto into a mini-police state, basically.

Litigation dragged on for a decade, but the Toronto Police Service was eventually forced to pay almost $20 million in damages to citizens who had been illegally detained or beaten. And the courts forced them to acknowledge their mistakes, as well.

Here’s what they said; “We understand and acknowledge that in attempting to preserve peace and safety during those two days, there were times when matters were not addressed in the way they should have been and many hundreds of member of the public were detained or arrested when they should not have been and were held in detention in conditions that were unacceptable. We regret that mistakes were made.”

That word – “mistakes” – doesn’t quite cover it. Not even close. This writer, for example, would drive along Eastern Avenue every day before, during and after the G20, and see scores of incarcerated citizens behind chain link fences, looking out. It was like our very own Guantanamo North.

Also: a mother and veterinarian I knew woke up, mid-G20, to find men in black standing above her in the dead of night. They yelled at her to take her screaming baby, and go outside, where she saw her husband – also a professional – hogtied on the front lawn. They did not identify themselves as police.

They were, however. And they were in the wrong place. Without so much as an apology, they untied the woman’s husband and left. They had the wrong address.

And: one day I agreed to drive my teenage daughter to the MTV video awards on Queen Street West. Back then, we had a toy crow on the front dash of our family van. Another van, full of burly men in civilian clothes who were clearly police, pulled up close beside us and stared through the open windows.

They loudly demanded to know the significance of the crow. Seriously, they did that. I told them it was a toy. They glared some more, then sped away, in the direction of some sirens.

And: a lawyer friend was near a barricaded street downtown, and alongside a young woman who was blowing bubbles, like kids do. As my friend looked on, a burly cop demanded that the young woman stop blowing bubbles – or he would have her arrested.

She pointed out she wasn’t hurting anyone with soap bubbles. He arrested her.

Those are just the things I experienced myself. Across Toronto that June, many people heard and saw similar things. Bill Blair’s G20 police force essentially lost their minds, and unleashed the biggest violation of civil rights in Canada in living memory.

Which brings us to now, and why the Toronto Police Service is really doing nothing about the wave of anti-Semitic crime targeting the city’s Jews.

Jewish businesses have been firebombed. Jewish businesses have been vandalized and attacked. Jewish citizens have been assaulted and vilified and threatened. Jewish places of worship, and Jewish neighborhoods, have been targeted for intimidation campaigns.

There has even been attacks on places – like hospitals – simply because anti-Semitic thugs considered them to be too Jewish.
And, after all of that, the Toronto Police Service have been essentially invisible. They have done little or nothing to prevent Jews from being attacked in the city of Toronto.

Why? Well, there are three possibilities.

One, they don’t care. I have heard from enough rank and file police officers, however, to know this is not true. Many do.

Two, they have been told to do nothing by the city’s political leaders. But this isn’t true, either. Most uniformed Toronto police are not fans of Mayor Olivia Chow or her city councilors. And besides: politicians are not allowed to direct police, ever.

Three – and this is the likeliest possibility: it’s the ghost of Bill Blair, haunting us like some Dickensian nightmare.

More than a decade after they were humiliated for their conduct at the G20, Toronto police have gone to the opposite extreme: having once been accused of doing too much, they have now decided to do too little.

The message to Toronto’s Jewish community has been clear: you’re on your own, folks. Unlike in places like New York City, where I now am, Toronto’s police don’t seem to give a sweet damn about the fact that Toronto in 2024 sometimes resembles 1938 in Berlin.

For that, I think we can thank the ghost of Bill Blair.

Too much policing has given way to none at all.


My latest: Toronto’s police farce

NEW YORK – This is a tale of two police forces.

One police force knows how to deal swiftly and effectively with pro-Hamas thugs breaking the law.

The other is a Police Farce.

Here in New York City on the weekend, we witnessed a police force that is competent. Toronto police – whose budget just got a big boost – should watch and learn.

But they won’t.

Every Saturday, New York City’s Washington Square Park is the weekend gathering place for musicians, dog-walkers and produce vendors. This Saturday, the park was filled with what can only be described as a mob.

They called it a “Millions March for Palestine.” There weren’t a million of them, but they certainly started to march. They headed towards Times Square.

Police watched them every step of the way, forcing them onto the sidewalk. By the time they reached Times Square, near 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue they were angry and ugly.

Right around then, my partner and I were a couple blocks away, heading to see a play at the Samuel Friedman Theater called A Prayer for French Republic. Which, ironically enough, is about generations of a Jewish family facing violence and persecution – for being Jews.

Also happening right around then: an Uber driver somehow got close enough to drop off a passenger in Times Square. Who had left a hand grenade in the back seat of the Nissan Ultima.

It wasn’t a real hand grenade, thank God. But it certainly looked real.  The Uber driver called the police. The cops immediately deployed the bomb squad – a unit of the New York Police Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, located pretty close to Times Square.

The bomb squad couldn’t get to the Uber because the Israel-haters were actually and actively blocking them. Chaos ensued. The mob was chanting and surrounding police cars.

So, New York’s finest did what police are supposed to do: they took action. They promptly shut down access to the area, and they pushed up against the mob to create a perimeter around the Uber. And then – pay attention, Toronto “police” – they started to make arrests.

You know: using their legal authority to take persons into custody. NYPD Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry tweeted what happened next: “Happy Saturday to all! Except the people who thought it was a good idea to block an NYPD ESU vehicle on the way to a bomb threat call. They will be spending their Saturday where they belong – in jail.”

Eleven of the thugs were dropped into a jail cell that night. In the meantime, the hand grenade was found to be “inert,” police said.

Now, Times Square is always a circus, jammed with people and vehicles and noise and lights. That’s certainly what my partner and I observed on Saturday, right near the spot where police were dealing with a real riot and an unreal bomb. We saw and heard the sirens and the cops, but Times Square was never, ever shut down.

But in Toronto, the meeting place of two G7 leaders was. By a similar mob of Israel-haters – and a totally ineffective police force.

On the very same day, right around the same time as the Times Square melee, there was supposed to be a meeting of the Prime Ministers of Italy and Canada at the Art Gallery of Ontario. You know, the elected leaders of two G7 countries.

As in New York, an Israel-hating mob descended on the AGO building. As in New York, they chanted calls for violent revolution and blocked access. As in New York, they screamed and attacked people.

Unlike New York, the Toronto police effectively did nothing. They essentially let the bad guys win.

One of Justin Trudeau’s caucus members, pro-Israel MP Francesco Sorbara, tweeted what happened. Wrote Francesco:

“Last night members of the Italian-Canadian community from across Canada came together in anticipation to greet PM Meloni & PM Trudeau but instead were spat on, physically assaulted, and verbally abused. It was absolutely disgusting and unacceptable.”

Now – full disclosure – Francesco is an old friend of mine. As such, I can tell you that he is a moderate and sensible guy, not given to overstatement. When he says that was what happened, you can rest assured: that is what happened.

So, in a bit of karma or kismet, Toronto was experiencing the same sort of thing the New York was experiencing, on the very same day, at the very same time: Israel-hating mob, violence, intimidation, abuse.

The difference: New York cops dealt with it. Toronto cops didn’t.

The usual dance ensued: the Prime Minister’s Office quietly suggested that the cops were to blame for shutting down the meeting. The Toronto police subtly suggested the PMO was to blame.

For once, I believe Trudeau’s PMO. I’ve worked for a Prime Minister. When it comes to matters of security, we always listened to what the police say. We did what they told us to do. Period.

Since October 7, for months, the Toronto Police Service has distinguished itself with one thing: total incompetence. In dealing with the Israel hating-thugs that have threatened Jewish neighborhoods, attacked Jews and Jewish businesses, firebombed Jewish delis, they have been an abject failure. They have been a joke.

Jews won’t say that, because they’re scared and don’t want to lose what little police protection they’ve received. But I’m a pro-police Irish Catholic, and that’s what I think: Toronto’s Police Service has become a joke.

Want proof? Take a look at what happened in New York City on Saturday. Then take a look at what happened in the city of Toronto on Saturday.

Here in New York, the cops did and do their job.

In Toronto, they don’t.


My latest: the global campaign of Jew hatred

It started on October 8.  Literally, the day after.

Think about that: a slick, global, and professional-looking propaganda campaign – one that would promote violent anti-Semitism, and deny the horrors of October 7 –  was underway the very next day.  October 7: the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

October 8: a campaign immediately starts to deny October 7, or justify it.

This writer has been involved in politics in the Americas and the Middle East for a long time.  It is impossible – literally impossible – to develop and deploy a coordinated global propaganda campaign in a single day.  It can’t be done.

But if you have millions of dollars to pay for it, and bot farms in Egypt, Britain and America to push it out – and, most importantly, if you knew October 7 was going to happen before it did – then you could do it.  And thereby reach, and manipulate, millions upon millions of people, in multiple languages.

That, along with other disturbing revelations, comes out of our latest discussion with the brilliant Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, Executve Director of CyberWell, an Israeli tech nonprofit that targets and combats the spread of anti-Semitism on social media.  Speaking from Amsterdam, Cohen Montemayor shared some startling, and disturbing findings from CyberWell’s latest report.

“We found evidence of October 7 denials – and support and celebration of it – as early as October 8, 10 and 11,” she says. “And we have evidence of accounts on X’s platform with only 3,000 followers tweeting out October 7 denial and misinformation – and getting three million views.  That’s highly suspicious.”

Other disturbing findings: there are specific anti-Semitic messages showing up on each of the major social media platforms.

•Facebook: “Jews control the world – or are dominating the world order.”
•Instagram: “The Rothschild conspiracy theory”  so named after the well-to-do Jewish family that has long been targeted by Jew haters
•TikTok: “Jews are the enemy.”
•X (or Twitter): “Jews are the enemy.”
•YouTube: “Jews are the synagogue of Satan.”

Anyone who has ever worked on a political campaign knows what that is: micro-targeting.  That is, pushing out messages that are targeted to specific demographics, based on age, gender, geography and education.  That just doesn’t happen organically.  It requires money and organization.

Now, more than 150,000 examples of that sort of anti-Semitic propaganda were flagged by CyberWell for removal by the main social media platforms.  And (some good news) the platforms are getting somewhat better at removing hate.

Cohen Montemayor says that the removal rate is now around 32 percent across all the social platforms – an improvement of almost ten per cent from 2022.  And Elon Musk’s X, where some of the worst stuff is found, has finally bowed to pressure, and is hiring 150 new employees at his Texas headquarters to identify and remove online hate.

But the bad stuff is still getting through, turbo-charged by algorithms that make the anti-Semitic content a little bit worse every time someone sees it.  CyberWell took the hateful postings and presented them to the social media bosses.  Their responses were not helpful, she says.

“X threw out the rulebook entirely when it came to content moderation, [when they decided] to no longer remove hate speech,” she says.  Thereby making X one of the worst places for anti-anti-Semitism on Earth.

This past week, the Trudeau Liberals rolled out a massive and controversial legislative package to curb online hate and harm.  But, to experts like Cohen Montemayor, the problem goes far beyond mere words.  Because the harmful words are resulting in violence, she says.

“We’ve seen this with the 9/11 bombers.  We’ve seen it with January 6 insurrection. YouTube was the number one platform cited by January 6 insurrection participants as their source of information. These very smart algorithms are meant to grab your attention, and get you addicted…the content is meant to stir emotions, to make people upset, to isolate them socially,” says Cohen Montemayor.

“Mainstream social media platforms are being used to radicalize people, leading to very violent results. October 7 was the largest-ever hijacking of social media platforms by terrorist groups.  It should’ve indicated to every Western democracy that these platforms will be exploited by terrorist groups.”

In conclusion, Cohen Montemayor makes one point several times – which is that the problem goes far beyond words. It’s an issue of national security, too.

And not just Jews will be the victims, Cohen Montemayor says, adding:  “After the October 7 massacre by Hamas, the following weekend, 800 Christians were massacred in Sudan. That massacre was uploaded directly, and streamed directly, onto Facebook.  Why? They’re learning.  These terrorist groups are learning from each other.”

It’s a chilling report, and one that all civilized nations should heed.

Because the haters are getting better at what they do.  And they’re winning the propaganda war.