Reflections on the Meaning of Hate

This past week, B’nai Brith Canada demanded that Premier Wab Kinew of Manitoba make a full apology for his statement that Trump’s war in Iran is being used as a mass distraction from the fallout of the Epstein files.

B’nai Brith insisted that the premier’s statement was so outrageous that he needed to publicly agree to undergo rehabilitation training directed by their organization.

His crime? Spreading conspiracy “tropes” about a “sinister” global elite.

It doesn’t get much more sinister than the actions documented in the Epstein files or any more elite than the princes, diplomats and presidents named in these horrific accusations.

As B’Nai Brith was targeting one of the most popular political leaders in the country, Canada’s influential Israeli lobby declared that the New Democratic Party of Canada “has become a hostile place for the vast majority of Jewish Canadians.”

The reason for this denunciation was the election of Avi Lewis as leader, only the second Jewish leader of a national party in our nation’s history. The party delegates also elected party president Niall Ricardo, who is Jewish.

What set off the Israeli lobby is that both men have had the courage to criticize Israel’s war in Gaza.

I write this piece as Jewish people around the world celebrate the Passover. It is one of the great resistance tales of history, the defining story of the oppressed facing down the power of an unjust state.

On this Passover, we are witnessing a dark inversion. Talk about the hard heart of Pharaoh? It would be difficult to find anyone more heartless than indicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu.

In the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon, the oppressed are calling out for deliverance.

And in homes across Europe and North America, this Passover is being celebrated amidst an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear.

These are real fears. Hate is on the move.

But the overuse of the term antisemitism to shut down legitimate criticism of Israeli policy has totally devalued the word. This has allowed dangerous new forms of antisemitism to feel free to walk among us.

In the United States, the MAGA movement is splintering as extremist Neo-Nazi elements move from the fringe to the political engine room of the online influencers and rabble rousers. Witness Trump’s attempt to curry favour with Nick Fuentes — a vicious hater who would have fit right in as a columnist for the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter.

Tucker Carlson amplifies similar tropes through his mass media machine.

In Europe, far-right extremists are actively undermining democracy, and yet Trump’s foreign policy is focused on ensuring their “freedom” to amplify hate. He has consistently attacked democracies that have legislated limits on hate speech. Europeans have seen this movie before and are terrified about what an emboldened extremist movement means for the future.

In Canada, members of the Conservative movement have been welcoming neo-Nazi AFD politicians. Neo Nazi gangs are forming in cities across the country.

And yet the focus of the mainstream establishment has been to overlook dangerous antisemitism and target those who criticize the policies of the Israeli state.

Hence, the huge overkill in response to peaceful student rallies on campus regarding the genocide in Gaza.

I have met with students whose futures have been impacted for speaking up against the genocide. Many of the leaders of the student movements are Jewish. I have spoken with Palestinian-Canadian students who are being tracked in real time by the administration of Canadian universities as if they pose a terrorist threat.

In the UK, the Labour government uses a policy of mass arrests against people who join the protests against the genocide in Gaza.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s government has gone from outrage to outrage. There has been little or no action from the West. People see through the hypocrisy.

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I have been reading the book Architects of Terror: Paranoia, Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain. In the 1930s, there were only 6,000 Jews in Spain. They posed no threat to the overwhelming power of the Catholic establishment, but Franco’s fascists used paranoia about Jews to justify a murderous war on intellectuals, union activists, democrats and the political left.

I am researching the story of Spain as part of a larger historical project — writing a history of the 1930s with a particular emphasis on how those dark years played out in the multi-ethnic mining camps of Northern Ontario.

Part of my research is on the efforts of the Jewish community in my hometown of Timmins to alert people to the increasing dangers posed by the Nazis. For much of the 1930s, the local press either gave favourable coverage to the Hitler regime or treated Hitler as a comic figure.

At one Halloween Ball in Timmins, special prizes were given to those who came dressed as the best Hitler or Mussolini. It was all funny until it wasn’t.

The Canadian Jewish community was very aware of the increasing violence and threat in Europe. Families were desperate to get their loved ones out. But Canada had closed its borders to those fleeing the hate.

A July 24, 1939, article in the local Porcupine Advance newspaper reported on 13-year-old Donia Yagendorf who travelled alone from Poland to be “adopted” by a family in Timmins. She was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Yagendorf of Czerchów, Poland.

The Yagendorfs gave their child up to Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sloma, who ran the local laundromat. A local priest, Father B. Klochkoff, played a role in helping the family.

Donia arrived one month before the murderous invasion of Poland and the mass killing of the Jewish population, which was nearly 3 million in 1939 and is only 17,000 today.

A similar case was that of Mr. and Mrs. Gross of Seattle, who adopted a young Jewish girl named Margaret from Germany on the eve of the outbreak of the war.

The family travelled over the Canadian border for a day trip with their adopted daughter to Vancouver, but the U.S. border guards refused to let the child cross back. They said she would have to apply for access to the United States like any other German.

Given the huge barriers facing Jewish refugees, local Jewish communities began forming local Zionist committees to encourage emigration to Palestine. In my hometown, two local merchants, Sam Bucovetsky and C. Abrams, were elected to the National Zionist Council of Canada in 1935.

Today, the term Zionist has become synonymous with Israel’s illegal actions in the West Bank and Gaza. In the 1930s, it meant helping Jewish families find safety from the increasingly dangerous realm in Europe.

When I was growing up, there were people who had lived through this nightmare. My friend Eddie Duke of Kirkland Lake used to tell me stories of the rich Jewish cultural community in the north and of the family members who died in the murder pits at Babi Yar. I had history teachers who insisted we learn the lessons of the holocaust so that such crimes wouldn’t happen again.

That generation is gone.

A young generation has not learned that history, but they are learning a new history in a time of genocidal war and online disinformation. Their eduction is not being helped by the overreach of B’Nai Brith and the Canadian Israeli lobby to tarnish popular politicians and attack credible political parties.

We need to put the history of what came before in the context of the history we are living today. This means learning to differentiate between real hate and false moral panics that are used to shield a state engaged in serious human rights violations.

To know the real history is to understand that hate is a playbook and to recognize how this fascist playbook is being used across North America and Europe.

It is about standing with our neighbours — both Palestinian and Jewish.

It is about remembering the powerful story of the people who resisted the oppression of Pharaoh and that timeless call for liberation from oppression. A tale as important today as it was when it was first told.

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