BOMB CANADA, THE CASE FOR WAR: The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Canada.
Jew-hatred was a phenomenon of the fringes, she reckoned. “It wasn’t on my radar,” she told me. Now, it’s everywhere. “Every week there is a major incident in Canada, and multiple minor ones every day in my neighborhood.”
It was what was happening inside her university that disturbed her the most.
York’s student unions issued a declaration just after the attack calling the barbarism of October 7 a “justified and necessary” act of resistance against settler colonialism, genocide, and apartheid. The student groups found widespread support among York’s professors—some of whom Rugheimer considered friends.
A politics department faculty committee demanded the university enforce a definition of “anti-Palestinian racism” that encompassed any expression of sympathy for the right of Israelis to exist within their own state: “Zionism is a settler colonial project and ethno-religious ideology in service of a system of Western imperialism that upholds global white supremacy.”
She was shocked by the declarations, and the defaced posters, and the swastikas. But for Rugheimer there was something worse. “The denial is what’s painful,” Rugheimer said. The denial of the rapes and savagery of October 7, 2023. The denial of the pervasive antisemitism in “anti-Zionist” polemics. The denial of Jewish history itself. “Reasonable people can disagree about what to do in an intractable conflict, but the denying of what should be uncontroversial facts makes it impossible to have hope.”
This sort of despair has become a feature of everyday life for Jews across Canada who are experiencing open hatred—and yet are living under a government that appears either blind to it, paralyzed by it, or indifferent to it. Law enforcement in Canada is not blind. Quite the opposite. Officers want to do their jobs. What they say is that they lack the moral support from the political class to enforce the law. And that they cannot keep up with the volume of hate crimes—crimes that arise from a widespread ideology that has normalized the idea that “Zionists” anywhere are a fair target for attack.
Perhaps nothing captured Canada’s dark new reality better than a split-screen story from late last month.
On November 22 in Montreal, at the 70th annual session of the NATO parliamentary assembly, rioters organized by the organizations Divest for Palestine and the Convergence of Anti-Capitalist Struggles wreaked havoc on the city. They ignited smoke bombs, threw metal barriers into the street, and smashed windows of businesses and the convention center where the NATO delegates were meeting. The rioters torched cars. They also burned an effigy of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
While Montreal burned, Trudeau was dancing and handing out friendship bracelets at a Taylor Swift concert in Toronto. It took 24 hours for him to weigh in with a single tweet.
Don’t worry Canadians, Trudeau is now laser-focused on solving his nation’s woes: “Trudeau calls Harris election loss ‘attack’ on women’s progress: ‘And yet, just a few weeks ago, the United States voted for a second time to not elect its first woman president. Everywhere, women’s rights and women’s progress is under attack. Overtly, and subtly.’”
(As Pradheep Shanker asks in response, why doesn’t Trudeau resign and allow a female to take over Canada?)
(Classical reference in headline.)