Jewish group calls on Ottawa to launch commission on antisemitism

2026/01/27 2 Comments

Not convinced that having separate envoys for antisemitism and islamophobia improves understanding and integration. Former envoy Deborah Lyons was candid about her experience and frustrations:

Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith is calling on Ottawa to launch a commission on antisemitism and appoint someone to the envoy role that has been left vacant since July.

The group is holding a midday press conference on Parliament Hill today, a day before the annual remembrance ceremony at the National Holocaust Monument.

It’s asking Ottawa to fill the role of special envoy for combating antisemitism that has been vacant since Deborah Lyons resigned in July, three months before her term was set to expire….

Source: Jewish group calls on Ottawa to launch commission on antisemitism

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“Jack Jedwab: Reducing the Holocaust to yet another story of colonialism distorts history”

2026/01/27 Leave a comment

Needed reminder:

…“Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate the late Elie Wiesel warned repeatedly against precisely such historic revision and the distortion to which it has given rise. For Wiesel, the Holocaust was not merely one genocide among others, nor simply another chapter in humanity’s long record of cruelty. Rather, it was a singular event rooted in a uniquely European legacy of antisemitism, culminating in the systematic and industrialized attempt to murder Jews.

Wiesel’s insistence on this point was not at all about being indifferent to other victims of mass violence. On the contrary, he affirmed the sanctity of all human suffering. His concern was that careless comparison between genocides risked cancelling the very things that distinguished each horrific tragedy.

Today there is real need to heed Wiesel’s warning, as colonialist framings of the origins of the Holocaust gain traction with influencers and many academics. Recognizing the historical specificity of the Holocaust is in no way an obstacle to broader empathy or compassion for victims of other genocides. Rather it is essential in identifying the key lessons needed to prevent future atrocities. When it comes to the Holocaust, one hard truth must not be blurred: reducing it to yet another story of colonialism”

Source: “Jack Jedwab: Reducing the Holocaust to yet another story of colonialism distorts history”

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List of suspected Nazi war criminals welcomed in Canada should stay secret, information watchdog rules

2026/01/26 Leave a comment

Seems a bit too precious given not released earlier prior to the Russian attack on Ukraine:

…LAC had told Caroline Maynard, the Information Commissioner, that disclosing the list would result in significant injury to Canada’s relationship with a foreign government. LAC also told her it would “cause significant injury to the defence of a foreign state allied with Canada,” Maureen Brennan, an investigator in Ms. Maynard’s office, said in the e-mail. 

The e-mail said the harm would extend “beyond Canada’s relations with the foreign government in question” and would adversely affect Canada’s relationships with other allied states.

“I reviewed LAC’s consultation materials and note that there was an overall consensus that, in the current political climate, disclosure of the information would give rise to serious concerns about reasonably expected harm,” Ms. Brennan said. 

Dozens of leading scholars from around the world, including Sir Richard Evans, former Regius professor of history at Cambridge University and author of 18 books, including Hitler’s People, have called on Canada to declassify the report.

On Friday Canada’s Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, named after the famous Nazi hunter, reacted with dismay that the information watchdog had upheld Ottawa’s decision to keep the list secret. 

“The government’s claim that revealing the truth about Nazi war criminals living in Canada could somehow be a threat to national security or international diplomacy is an insult to the intelligence of the public,” said Jaime Kirzner Roberts, senior director, policy and advocacy at the center. 

“It is long past time for the facts to come out about the Nazi perpetrators of genocide and war crimes who were allowed to escape justice and live comfortable, protected lives in our country.”

A research team led by UCLA historian Jared McBride, an expert on war crimes in the Second World War, last year unearthed what he concluded was an earlier annotated version of the secret list.

The Information Commissioner’s office argued that this list had been released through an access to information request in 2019, “at a time which predates the relevant current global context.” 

Among the names on this list, seen by The Globe, was Helmut Oberlander, a member of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squads during the Second World War. The Canadian government spent years trying to strip him of his citizenship, but he died at the age of 97 in 2021 while the matter was still before the courts.

Professor Per Rudling of Lund University in Sweden, who has researched the settlement of alleged Nazis in Canada, said he found the decision to keep the list secret “curious.” He said Ukraine had opened up its own KGB archives and the U.S. has released the bulk of its documents pertaining to alleged Nazi war criminals. 

“Of all comparable Western liberal democracies, Canada stands out as being particularly restrictive on archival materials in regards to purported war criminals,” he said in an e-mail. 

Source: List of suspected Nazi war criminals welcomed in Canada should stay secret, information watchdog rules

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Robson: Canada’s prevention gap grows wider the more complacent we become

2026/01/21 2 Comments

Thorny lines to draw and not easy to implement but needed given the nature of some of the protests and protestors:

…Diaspora dynamics, therefore, require institutional maturity. The challenge is not to cast suspicion on whole communities. It is to distinguish legitimate protest from intimidation, and political grievance from early-stage radicalization cues—especially when imported conflicts are weaponized inside Canadian information spaces.

Prevention doctrine has to be able to say, without flinching, that a small minority within some diaspora and newcomer populations—including naturalized Canadians—carry or adopt illiberal and extremist ideologies, and that those ideologies can express themselves as targeted hatred toward Jews. Treating that as an institutional design problem—triage rules, evidence standards, and earlier handoffs—avoids both naïveté and collective blame.

It also means using international tools without outsourcing Canadian standards. Many subjects who could fall within the scope of a promotion offence did not begin their political trajectory in Canada. Some may have prior histories of supporting extremist organizations, being investigated abroad, or coordinating across jurisdictions.

Canada already has mechanisms to seek corroborating information while preserving due process through the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act. The aim is not to “import” foreign decisions. It is to avoid assessing a suspect’s online activity here as if it exists in isolation—especially when trusted partners can corroborate a pattern of propaganda production or cross-border coordination that should inform Canadian risk assessments for bail, peace bonds, and sentencing.

So what does “prevention” mean when radicalization cycles move faster than case-prioritization and reassessment? Canada has conceptual building blocks: the RCMP explicitly acknowledges the linkage between hate crime and violent extremism and stresses prevention alongside enforcement in its hate-crime overview. The gap is operationalization—multilingual capability, faster evidence capture, clearer handoff triggers, and disruption that treats a heightened hate environment as a security condition, not a communications problem.

Canada cannot prevent every attack. But it can choose whether to keep treating antisemitic extremism as a late-stage file—something we condemn after it becomes violence. If we continue to manage weak signals as “not urgent,” we will eventually face the question other democracies face after tragedy: What did we notice early, and why did we decide it was not urgent enough?

Daniel Robson is a Canadian independent journalist specializing in digital extremism, national security, and counterterrorism.

Source: Canada’s prevention gap grows wider the more complacent we become

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Regg Cohn | Anti-Israel protests expose the lack of leadership at city hall and Queen’s Park

2026/01/10 1 Comment

Indeed, sad example of passing the buck back and forth:

…The minister who oversees law enforcement says more needs to be done. The mayor says she’d like to see more arrests and has spoken to the chief about it.

The chief would like to clarify. Speaking the next day on Moore’s radio show, Demkiw said it wasn’t so simple.

“Listen, I do not know where she’s getting that narrative,” he countered. “The Crown attorneys guide us on the prospect of conviction.”

If these three community leaders are still talking past each other, it’s hardly surprising that protesters are still shouting and chanting at other residents of Toronto who have nothing to do with the issue at hand.

The Toronto Police Association issued its own statement after Kerzner’s missives appealing for “clear and consistent direction to our members and the public about what is lawful and unlawful when it comes to protest activity.”

Clarity amid ambiguity isn’t easy. But that doesn’t mean the crown prosecutors who are paid and educated to make these decisions shouldn’t be rising to the occasion — and pursuing test cases as needed.

For two years, protesters have been showing up outside the homes of Canadian Jews to loiter and litigate a conflict a world away — and a country away. That transgresses the universal value that a person’s private home is a private sanctuary — akin to a castle, not a consulate (the Israeli consulate is fully 15 kilometres away from that neighbourhood).

For two years, protesters have been free to hold their own demonstrations on the streets and squares of Toronto, where the right to assembly and peaceful protest is protected by the Charter of Rights. But the right to free speech is hardly unlimited, and freedom of assembly does not confer a right to trespass on private property — let alone empower people to wade in with megaphones to disrupt, drown out or trample on other people’s holiday celebrations in shopping malls (just as unionized workers, even in a lawful strike, cannot picket in a shopping centre).

To be sure, the policing of protests is always a balancing act. But trespass isn’t especially ambiguous on private property; and there’s a difference between peaceful protest (protected under the Charter) versus disruptions that escalate to harassment and hatefulness.

Interestingly, Jason Kenney, a former federal minister of multiculturalism (and ex-premier of Alberta) waded into the debate after the Boxing Day disruptions at Eaton Centre, asking why the authorities (notably his fellow Tories) couldn’t get their act together. Good question.

Kenney suggested they could invoke Ontario laws against trespass. Or apply criminal code laws on mischief; mischief “motivated by bias, prejudice or hate;” causing a disturbance; and unlawful assembly.

A better question is why, if the solicitor general is so vexed by the lack of action, he doesn’t send a letter to his cabinet colleague, Attorney General Doug Downey, suggesting that his ministry provide clearer guidance to Crown attorneys about how to proceed.

The only certainty is that we have a solicitor general who is publicly wagging his finger, a chief who says his hands are tied, a mayor who is washing her hands of the situation, a police union that is throwing up its hands, and an attorney general who may be sitting on his hands.

And no one pointing the way forward.

Source: Opinion | Anti-Israel protests expose the lack of leadership at city hall and Queen’s Park

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Lederman: The antisemitism you might have missed over the holidays 

2026/01/09 Leave a comment

Depressing list:

…There is no question that the war in Gaza has been catastrophic. But Jews around the world deserve to live without discrimination. No other form of racism would be justified in this manner. Nor should it. All Jews are not responsible for the actions of the Israeli government. Nor are all Israelis. Just like all Americans are not responsible for what Mr. Trump is doing in Venezuela (which the acting Venezuelan president, by the way, said had “Zionist undertones”) – and may be about to do elsewhere.

Back to Winnipeg. Two days after the synagogue incident, a Palestinian-owned restaurant was also hit with hateful vandalism. Its front windows were smashed, and there was a disturbing note: “Leave our country terrorists.” 

I wish I was in Winnipeg right now so I could walk through the front door of the Habibiz Café, order a hummus and shawarma plate and tell its owner, Ali Zeid, how sorry I am that this happened. We Canadians need to have each other’s backs and stand up against hatred of the other. As the world around us darkens, this is one thing we can do together.

Source: The antisemitism you might have missed over the holidays

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Polansky: The uncomfortable reason antisemitism is festering in Canada

2026/01/07 2 Comments

Hard to imagine these protests, intimidation and disruption being tolerated if against another religious or ethnic group:

…It is only an emphasis on hatred, however, that would conflate these two disparate cases. Moreover, if there are specific threats against Jews that have arisen within Canada (as it seems there are), that is the result of policy failures. And all of these public gestures in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack represent a refusal to attend to those failures.

This refusal produces a number of externalities. The first is the substantial constriction of both public and private Jewish life within Canada. For cultures do not flourish under police protection. The second is the diminution of Canada’s sphere of genuine liberalism. For liberalism entails the tacit promise that disagreements can be managed peaceably via the political process. Not just violence, but the persistent threat of violence, is (as Hobbes would remind us) merely warfare by other means.

The problem then is not the hatred that lies in the human heart (except perhaps in the most generic sense). The problem is the attenuation of genuine liberalism within liberal societies, and this is a general problem. For Jews do not require special protection; they require the ordinary protections that liberalism is already designed to confer.

Meanwhile, the cause of this problem is not hard to identify: favoured groups, either on ethnic or political grounds, have declined to accept the impositions of liberal norms of behaviour, as both Muslims within Toronto and leftist fellow-travelers have taken to harassing Jewish institutions (and general passersby) as a kind of expanded theatre of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

This is an uncomfortable fact for those who have committed themselves to multiculturalism or general progressivism, and political authorities are understandably wary of the optics should they finally crack down after months of inaction. As a result, both municipal and provincial authorities have declined to enforce the relevant public square laws in the absence of compliance. This is, in other words, a profound failure to uphold basic liberal protections under the guise of liberalism.

That failure, in turn, has downstream effects as increasingly ugly and antisocial behaviours become normalized. Indefinitely occupying public areas opens the way for marching through Jewish neighbourhoods, which in turn opens the way to ripping down mezuzahs from the doorways of Holocaust survivors.

To blame all this on hatred is to avoid the hard choices of governance. It is plain that the reigning governments find it either politically inconvenient or merely bothersome to enforce their mandate to keep public order. But they, too, ultimately answer to their constituents.

The larger question is whether ordinary citizens themselves will continue to suffer rulers who defer the real obligations of ruling to committees, legal counsel, and so on. And it is ultimately the avoidance of those political obligations, rather than the power of amorphous hatreds, that has led to our present situation.

To paraphrase Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, these daily outrages stand in our weakness, not their strength.

Source: The uncomfortable reason antisemitism is festering in Canada

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Robert Brym: Avi Lewis and Independent Jewish Voices are gaslighting Canadians about antisemitism

2026/01/06 Leave a comment

Needed dose of reality:

…Some white people use the N-word, despite the fact that doing so is deeply offensive to Black people. Black people are entitled to call such individuals racists. By the same token, anti-Zionists may think it’s legitimate to call for the destruction of the Jewish state in Israel. However, most Jews are entitled to call such people antisemites because, for them, support for the existence of the Jewish state is part of what it means to be a Jew.

Finally, based on the results of a 2024 survey, Lewis and Balsam assert that 49 per cent of Canada’s Jews are not Zionists. This claim is misleading. The poll found that 51 per cent of Canadian Jews consider themselves to be Zionists, 15 per cent express ambivalence about referring to themselves as Zionists, seven per cent say they “don’t know” and 27 per cent say they are not Zionists. However, the survey also found that 94 per cent of Canadian Jews support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

According to standard dictionaries and general encyclopedias, Zionists are people who support the existence of a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland. Such supporters remain Zionists even if, like me, they favour the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state, oppose the extent of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, express outrage at Jewish settler attacks on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and support equal rights for all citizens of Israel, including Arabs. 

What, then, does it mean when 94 per cent of Canadian Jews are Zionists by the dictionary definition yet 49 per cent of them decline to call themselves Zionists? 

I decided to find out by conducting a follow-up survey in 2025 asking the participants in the 2024 poll to clarify the matter. The follow-up revealed that many participants are reluctant to call themselves Zionists because the term has developed a strongly negative connotation, under the weight of frequent and often extreme attacks against everything connected to Israel in the media, schools, universities, workplaces and in the streets. 

Nearly all Canadian Jews are Zionists by the dictionary definition, but nearly half of them don’t want to be called Zionists because the term has become a pejorative. According to the poll, a mere one per cent of Canadian Jews say they are anti-Zionists like Lewis and Balsam.

It seems clear that Lewis and Balsam’s interpretations are guided by ideological animus. Antisemitism is a major problem in Canada. Rhetoric and actions denying the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state are antisemitic according to the great majority of Canadian Jews. With the exception of a tiny minority, including Lewis and Balsam, Canadian Jews remain steadfast in their support for a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland.

Source: Robert Brym: Avi Lewis and Independent Jewish Voices are gaslighting Canadians about antisemitism

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Khan: We have to confront what Ahmed al Ahmed fought on Bondi Beach 

2025/12/22 2 Comments

Of note:

…The Muslim community in Sydney has taken a clear stand: it will not receive the body of the deceased terrorist, nor perform funeral rites over it. Dr. Jamal Rifi, a prominent Muslim leader in the city, said: “We don’t see [the offenders] as inside the fold of Islam or as Muslims,” adding, “what they have done is not condoned by any of us and it is killing innocent civilians. We know it is a verse in our book, killing an innocent civilian is the same as killing all humanity.”

Australian authorities have yet to indicate if the attack was related to Israel’s violence against Palestinians. Nonetheless, this is an opportunity to clearly delineate the actions of a government from those of Jews worldwide. It is not antisemitic to criticize and oppose the Israeli government’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians in Gaza and its brutal military occupation of the West Bank. The war crime of Oct. 7, 2023 cannot justify war crimes in which tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children are killed and populations are starved. It is antisemitic, however, to blame all Jews for the actions of the Israeli government. It is antisemitic to vandalize Jewish institutions, businesses and communities in protest. It is antisemitic to instill fear in Jewish communities – and Muslims know all too well the danger of being blamed and targeted for the actions of a few.

After the terrorist attack at a Quebec City mosque during which six worshippers were gunned down in cold blood, and after the murder of three generations of the Afzal family in London, Ont., by an Islamophobe, Canadian Muslims understandably feared for their safety. And while government and law enforcement responded to assure a shaken community, it was grassroots support and love by ordinary Canadians that helped in the healing process. 

Our Jewish friends, colleagues and neighbours are hurting and fearful. Let us all reach out with wings of mercy and compassion, to build stronger communities – and to build a stronger Canada.

Source: We have to confront what Ahmed al Ahmed fought on Bondi Beach

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Various commentary on antisemitism following Sydney

2025/12/18 Leave a comment

Globe editorial: The fight against the growing darkness of antisemitism

…The groups that march in Jewish-Canadian neighbourhoods, as was the case last month in Toronto, are not mere protestors trying to convince their fellow citizens. They are engaged in an act of aggression and intimidation, an echo of the Ku Klux Klan marching through a Black neighbourhood. They are fueling antisemitism.

Holding regular rallies that demand the eradication of Israel, make unproven assertions of genocide and thirst for a global intifada is not an act of mere protest. It is antisemitic, it fuels radicalism and it clears a path for violence. Demand an intifada often enough, and you will get one.

The right to protest, even in a loathsome way, is a constitutional right. But there are laws that can be, and should be, enforced more vigorously. Canada has a hate-speech law on the books. Crown prosecutors should use it, with particular attention to section 319(1) of the Criminal Code, which prohibits the public incitement of hatred. And police need to abandon their preoccupation with maintaining public order at all costs. A deescalation strategy does not make sense when dealing with protestors looking to assert control of the streets….

Source: The fight against the growing darkness of antisemitism

Cotler: Condemnations of antisemitism are necessary. But they are simply not enough

…Canadians often look at the gun violence that plagues the United States with scorn and disbelief; its predictability and preventability make it especially tragic and senseless. The U.S. refuses to address the underlying cause – the proliferation of guns – and in 2023, nearly 50,000 Americans died from gun violence, and it was the leading cause of death for minors. After mass shootings, American politicians and public figures almost ritualistically offer their thoughts and prayers. Then they move on, until the next time – and then the pattern continues.

Yet, our approach to violent antisemitism in Canada and throughout the West has been almost identical to America’s approach to gun violence. Antisemitic attacks and incidents have become similarly routine and predictable across liberal democracies. After each incident, politicians issue condemnations, but fail to adequately address the underlying cause: antisemitic incitement and disinformation….

Source: Condemnations of antisemitism are necessary. But they are simply not enough

Regg Cohn | The antisemitism that exploded in Australia has long been brewing in Canada

..The more sophisticated protest leaders understand that these dog whistles send different signals to audiences of differing sophistications. All under the flag of free speech and fair criticism, a flag of convenience.

Consider “Zionism is racism.” Nothing against Jews, just everything against “Zionists” — whoever and whatever and wherever they may be.

It so happens that the vast majority of Jews would see themselves as Zionists of one description or another. They simply support self-determination for the Jews of Israel, as for the people of other lands.

And so if almost every Jew is a Zionist, it turns out that the newly permissive and vicious anti-Zionism is a distinction without a difference. In reality, on the street, online, the truth is that “Zionism is racism” is antisemitism by another name.

“From the river to the sea” is another loaded phrase, long ago embraced by Palestinian nationalists and now imported by sympathizers around the world. What does the slogan really mean?

What river, which sea?

Answer: From the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, which translates into one land for one people — Palestinians — not two states for two peoples. It would leave no trace of Israel or its nearly 10 million citizens (roughly 8 million Jews and 2 million Arab Christian and Muslim citizens).

“Globalize the intifada” means what, exactly?

Protesters have parsed the phrase, insisting that intifada merely means “shaking off” in conventional Arabic. Are we to believe that all who hear the chant, native Arabic speaker or not, are grounded in this grammatical understanding?

Check the Oxford or Merriam-Webster dictionaries: intifada refers to armed “uprising” or “rebellion” against Israeli occupation.

To “globalize” an armed “uprising” is not an invitation to a tea party. It has a violent context and a confrontational subtext, which is perhaps why New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a darling of progressive protesters, has belatedly agreed to stop using a phrase that unsettles so many in New York, as in Toronto.

Against that backdrop, should we be surprised that father and son — armed with these incendiary slogans and coded chants and antisemitic dog whistles — would load their weapons and take aim at a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, slaughtering 15 people? Conditioned and incited by propaganda and prejudice that now travels online and echoes on the streets, it is inevitable that impressionable souls will make illogical leaps that transport their minds from Gaza to Australia or Canada.

Antisemitism, like anti-Zionism, has long predated the Hamas massacre that burst out of Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli counterattack and overkill. It will persist long after peace finally comes to the Middle East.

I spent four years as a foreign correspondent covering the hatreds of the Middle East. There was a time when I thought Canadians — Jews, Muslims, Christians, people of all faiths and no faiths — could set aside the prejudices of the past and chart a path to a peaceful future.

Back then, I imagined we could transplant our goodwill from Canada to the Middle East, but I had it backwards: Today, the ill will of the Middle East has come to Canada, as it has to Australia.

Source: Opinion | The antisemitism that exploded in Australia has long been brewing in Canada

Lederman: Ahmed al Ahmed showed the world what heroism looks like. What we need now is leadership

…It is tempting to go tribal in difficult times, to keep with our own. This is one of many dangers of a time so dark that lessons passed down from generation to generation might be hatred and violence, rather than love and wisdom. 

Is this massacre a wake-up call? Maybe. But in its wake, my social media feeds still offered up grotesque antisemitism. On a Facebook thread about a new Toronto-area Uber-type service for Jewish people (following reports of Uber drivers shunning certain customers), one guy wrote: “I thought they were called train cars.” In the hours immediately after this massacre, it wasn’t the only Holocaust-related comment on there. When I reached out to the person who wrote it, he told me: lighten up, it’s a joke. He’s from Newfoundland, he replied, where self-deprecating humour is the norm. 

This is very small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. But antisemitism has crept into socially acceptable territory. Would anyone make that kind of public “joke” about any other minority’s deadly persecution? 

I’m so sick of it. The mezuzahs ripped off doorways, the swastikas in public schools, people telling us to go back to Europe. This is happening in Canada.

Sorry if I sound angry during this Festival of Lights. But I am angry.

We can placate ourselves with stories like Mr. Ahmed’s. But we have hit a dangerous place. One man’s heroism is not going to save us. World leaders, Canadian politicians, law enforcement, anyone who has silently stood by while allowing this normalization to happen: it’s your turn to step up and intervene.

Source: Ahmed al Ahmed showed the world what heroism looks like. What we need now is leadership

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