“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?”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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