The Bloodbath of Simchat Torah

Celebrating the slaughter of all those Jews isn't evil because it's antisemitic. It's antisemitic because it's evil. A gathering darkness surrounds us.

I don’t like using words like “evil,” but sometimes, words fail me. And I don’t like being dreary because it’s not my nature, and I avoid being alarmist as best I can. Besides, the civilizational precipice where we now stand calls for pluck and resolve, a steady eye on the horizon, and a clear view of the path that brought us here.

This much isn’t new:

There always comes a point when manic devotion to a “narrative” becomes so unhinged from reality, so impervious to the evidence of the real world, that it mutates into a fanaticism that can quickly degenerate into something more closely resembling a dangerous mental illness.

This is new:

Police patrols have become necessary around Jewish schools and synagogues. Mezuzahs are torn from the doors of Jewish homes. Yobs threaten Jewish businesses in Toronto and Vancouver, and any lunatic belief and any bloodcurding exhortation is permissible, so long as it conforms with the “narrative” that has led us here.

There comes a point when we can’t pretend any longer, not for the sake of our sense of security or for votes or for newsletter subscribers. We have now reached that point in Canada, in the United States, in Britain and Ireland and much of Europe, and of course, in Israel.

That’s the point I’m trying to get across in the observations I make in my column in the National Post and Ottawa Citizen this week, What we can learn from the obscene celebrations of Hamas brutality

So what can we do?

We can all do some small thing. I hammered this mezuzah into the wall beside my front door this week.

Having covered this story for the past 20 years, and having the opportunity of my columns in the Post and the Citizen, and this newsletter, I’m in a fortunate position. I’ve been using this opportunity to try to make use of myself by setting out the following, as clearly as I can:

A fashionable high-society antisemitism has been central to a cultural and political epoch that has been evolving in Canada in recent years at the same tectonic scale as the emergence of a distinctly Canadian democratic socialism in the 1930s, the Quiet Revolution in Quebec in the 1960s, and the rise of libertarian prairie populism in the 1990s. In this Weekend Special Real Story edition, I’ll trace its trajectory and outline its disfigurements as thoroughly as my subscribers’ patience will allow.

Not to pick a fight, but a word to my fellow journalists:

It’s commonplace during such dramatic cultural moments for journalists to be the last to notice, or the last to comprehend what is happening. It hasn’t helped that in Canada, a great many journalists have simply preferred not to notice at all. And now here we are.

A word of advice: stop making things worse.

It's a complicated story. We’re all overworked. You’re trying to be fair. You're both privileged and burdened with the responsibility to report the news and explain events. You possess valuable, important and necessary skills. Clairvoyance isn't one of them.

So, please do not do this: Protesters call for freedom for Palestine at City Hall.

Maybe some of the rally-goers would want that. But according to your own reporter, rally organizer Qamar Bader said the point of the rally was to express support for Palestinians “who are courageously fighting for the liberation of their homeland.” Bader meant Hamas, and Hamas is doing no such thing. The demonstration you covered was a call for Palestinians to remain in the chains Hamas has put around their necks.

So start with the little things. Start with adherence to the first rules of reporting you should have learned somewhere along the way: report what you witness, report what you can say you know. Report facts.

Here’s another example of what I mean.

Marchers supporting Gaza, Israel stage two demonstrations in capital. “The protesters want to stop the rapidly increasing death toll in Gaza. . .”

It may be that some marchers think they are supporting Gaza, and it may be that some or even most want to stop the rising Gaza death toll. But you can’t know these things because you’re not a mind-reader. You can’t report what the protesters want. You can only report what the protesters say they want.

Here’s what the Palestinian Youth Movement protest organizers say they want, which you didn’t report: “We call on our people in Ottawa and in the far diaspora to celebrate the resistance’s success, to uplift their calls. . .”

It would have helped if you had arrived at that October 15 rally in Ottawa at least vaguely informed about the Palestinian Youth Movement’s intentions with its rallies. A week earlier, the PYM described the point of its October 9 demonstration in Toronto as a rally “to uplift and honour our resistance and martyrs.”

I could go on.

I don’t know what you want to call these events, but “pro-Palestine” strikes me as odd, because it’s impossible to be pro-Palestine and in favour of the “resistance.” Hamas does not want two states. Hamas wants dead Jews. You can look it up.

To their credit, Israeli journalists and the Israeli “Left,” for the most part, understand that there can be no peace, no two states, unless and until Hamas is crushed. That will not likely happen with yet another “ceasefire” of the kind Hamas had agreed upon and broken too many times to count. But set all that aside.

It’s not easy to get the story “right,” and you shouldn’t have to pass some test to determine whether your subjective assessments of the Israel-Palestine story are “correct.” But at least try not to get the story wrong.

At least try not to devote yourself to that entire, full-metal category of error and misreporting the Canadian news media committed during the first two decades of this century, when an explicitly “anti-Zionist” Left-Islamist alliance was presented to the public as an “anti-war movement.”

That was an entire journalistic genre of inaccuracy. It should have been obviously wrong with those “We Are All Hezbollah Now” placards, as far back as 2006, but nevermind.

Not to pick another fight, but a word to my subscribers.

Some people get so angry about mainstream journalism that they reach the point of dismissing or ignoring legacy media entirely. Don’t. You’ll just end up getting your “news” from axe-grinding grifters who run webzines that purport to expose “MSM lies.” You’ll get sucked into the vortex of disinformation that Elon Musk has made of “X,” his rebranded Twitter hellsite, which was bad enough to begin with.

This is an image that was shared on Twitter millions of times on Saturday. It’s completely fake.

This does not depict Gaza. It’s a painted rendering of this photograph taken in the aftermath of Bashar Assad's destruction of the Palestinian community of Yarmouk, in Syria, nine years ago. It was posted on ‘X’ by Omar Suleiman of New Orleans, an adjunct professor of Islamic Studies at Southern Methodist University, where he serves on the university’s Ethics Center advisory board.

Suleiman's lies and distortions on Musk’s ‘X’ are routinely reposted millions of times. On Friday, Suleiman posted several horrific photographs that he claimed were of the Israeli Defence Forces’ bombing of Gaza on Friday night, except none of them were. As the BBC’s Shayan Sardarizadeh noticed, the photographs were re-posted 60,000 times, to 1.6 million views.

It has reached a point in the explosive diffusion of digital information media that ‘X’/Twitter may even be a necessary evil, but just one example of the worst liars among its more popular inhabitants is Jackson Hinkle. A “MAGA communist” and a trafficker in Putinist propaganda who has lately taken up the cause of “exposing Zionist lies,” Hinkle has 1.7 million followers, most of whom are stupid enough to re-circulate his falsehoods as though they were true.

On Saturday, Hinkle claimed that the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz had reported that the October 7 events resulted in only 900 deaths, that half were Israeli soldiers, that most were killed from tank shelling, that all the burned Jews occurred from Israeli attacks, that there were no beheaded babies, that the corpses of dead Hamas fighters had been defiled, and that Hamas had shot and killed fewer than 100 Israeli settlers and most were “settlers with guns on them.”

Ha’aretz was forced to issue a statement: “This post contains blatant lies about the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. It has absolutely no basis in Haaretz’s reporting, then or since.”

The “War Monitor” account, personally recommended by Elon Musk himself, has been posting poorly-disguised Hamas and Hezbollah propaganda since October 7. With more than 837,000 followers and posts that have been viewed millions of times, War Monitor appears to be the creation of an 18-year-old Lebanese student living in London, according to the Washington Post.

Then there’s TikTok, which is now the go-to Generation Z search engine. If you’re shocked by last week’s Harvard-Harris poll that showed 51 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 say the Hamas atrocities of October 7 were “justified,” now you know why.

That’s not the whole explanation for Gen Z’s moral and political illiteracy in the matter of Israel and her enemies. What is being taught in schools and colleges across North America is a big part of it.

Over the years, some of Canada’s highest status universities have become decidedly unfriendly to Jews. York University and its students union, for instance, are now facing a $15-million class-action lawsuit related to an atmosphere of antisemitism that has encouraged a surfeit of incidents in which Jews were targeted, going back to 1998.

Earlier this year, Charlotte Schallié from the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria and Wassilis Kassis, Professor of Educational Sciences at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, published a comparative study of antisemitism in Germany and Canada: The dark side of the academy: antisemitism in Canadian and German students.

The findings from their assessment of students at UVic and Osnabrück: Nearly four in ten students either partially or fully endorse antisemitic statements. Six out of 10 blame Jews for “Holocaust memory,” in other words, for preserving the public and historical memory of the Shoah.

“Such findings appear to affirm Hannah Arendt's idea of antisemitism as a pervasive and powerful force, one that cuts through all social and educational strata,” Schallié and Kassis conclude. “It is therefore reasonable to state that the majority of students at the sampled universities in Canada and Germany appear to be - despite demographic and regional differences - united in their expressions of antisemitic prejudices.”

These prejudices are not confined to campus.

Here are some useful accounts to follow on social media: Documenting Antisemitism in Canada, Honest Reporting Canada and Jonathan Kay, who somehow keeps a sense of humour about it all.

Also, Hansard Paraphrased is always worth keeping an eye on. One of its more illuminating contributions is its #DeadBabyTruther hashtag, arising from an effort to maintain a running list of every such ghoul in Canadian media and academia.

I can barely believe I wrote that sentence, but as I said, here we are.

All that matters is the “narrative.”

At Toronto Metropolitan University’s Lincoln Alexander law school, at least 74 students signed a letter claiming that Israel doesn’t even exist, but is rather merely the “brand” of a genocidal colonial-settler entity that is solely responsible for the bloodiest pogrom in Jewish history, on October 7.

“We condemn any statement that denies or shifts away from the narrative of colonialism,” the statement read. “Palestinians are the subjects of Israel’s colonization and genocide.”

That was helpfully candid.

Canadians have been understandably astonished by all this. Over at The Line, in a personal, pleasantly anecdotal essay, my former National Post colleague Jen Gerson writes: “The shockingly broad support for Hamas is a full mask-off moment for a big chunk of the modern North American left, and I think most ordinary people are recoiling from what the self-styled progressive movement has revealed itself to be.”

I think so too. But having watched this “progressive” movement evolve, and having documented its degeneration and its betrayal of the liberal-left’s most noble principles over the past couple of decades, I’d say there’s a lot more going on, and it’s crucial that people understand it, because it’s a really big deal. So, since the Bloodbath of the holy day of Simchat Torah, that’s the use I’ve been trying to make of myself here at The Real Story.

What I’ve been trying to document for quite a while now is the way the fault line between global democracy and the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis runs straight up through the Liberal caucus. Something is broken. The Trudeau Liberals just can't stop attracting antisemites.

Some resources to have on hand:

Everything has changed. It's not just about Israel. It's about civilization and its enemies. And its enemies are among us.

In front Of One’s Nose: A shadowy alliance of Islamist antisemites and Canadian "progressives" goes back two decades, to a founding gathering in Cairo. . .

'How could this be happening?' Bloodcurdling oaths of allegiance to Hamas, faculty-lounge conflations of mass murder with "resistance," Jews from Paris to Vancouver afraid for their children. This did not come out of nowhere.

A reckoning is long past due. Long guarded by taboo and "progressive" manners, left-wing antisemitism has been incubating in Canada for years. This can't go on.

Back to it.

We’re All Genocidal Settlers Now

On the far side of the country from Toronto, even among speech-makers who were pleased to admit that Hamas was responsible for the October 7 savagery, their “resistance” was positively exhilarating. The Vancouver protest fixture Harsha Walia shouted into a microphone to the cheers of hundreds at the Vancouver Art Gallery: “How beautiful is the spirit to get free that Palestinians literally learned how to fly on hang gliders.”

Walia was referring to the motorized paragliders some of the Hamas terrorists used to cross the border from Gaza.

Walia might be remembered for having disgraced herself as the head of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association for her “burn it all down” commentary in the summer of 2021. She spoke those words when dozens of churches across Canada were being vandalized and burned to the ground during the hysteria arising from the “narrative” that a mass grave of children had been “discovered” at the site of a former Indian residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

In that narrative, Kamloops was just one of several sites of secret unmarked graves discovered that summer that contained the corpses of 1,300 children murdered by priests and nuns. It wasn’t true. It didn’t matter. That was the narrative.

The same activists and pseudo-journalists and academic frauds who were shouting the loudest back then are among the activists and pseudo-journalists and academic frauds screaming now about an Israeli “genocide” underway in Gaza. The “narrative” is what matters, and any departure from it means you’re an Israeli shill.

In the matter of the agonies that Israelis and Palestinians are being forced to endure at the moment, the “narrative” that must be upheld against all evidence to the contrary is that Israel is an illegitimate, racist, genocidal, colonial settler-state.

That’s all we’re supposed to be talking about, and if the subject of Hamas happens to come up, any “resistance” to Israel, no matter how barbaric, must be problematized as justifiable, and even celebrated.

In the matter of Canadian history and Canada’s shambles of Indigenous-relations policies, the “narrative” that must be upheld at all costs is that Canada, too, is an illegitimate, racist, genocidal, colonial settler-state. We’re all uninvited guests here, trespassing on something called Turtle Island. And Indian residential schools were the equivalent of concentration camps where children were made to bury their murdered classmates by the thousands, in secret moonlight rituals.

Anyone who suggests that perhaps it’s not quite true, perhaps the media got the whole story wrong, and that maybe things were quite a bit more complicated than that, is to be demonized as the equivalent of a Holocaust denier. That’s exactly what happened to me, and to Frances Widdowson and several other observers.

Rooting out and attacking “residential schools denialism” is the way the “narrative” is protected from rational inquiry. It’s an imaginary transgression that’s intended to end inquiry and to patrol what knowledge we're entitled to possess. This isn’t just the plaything of crank academics at campus struggle sessions. The Trudeau cabinet ministers Marc Miller and David Lametti have publicly toyed with the idea of giving the anti-heresy sanction the full force and effect of the law.

Terrorist atrocities: all our fault.

As settler-colonialists, Adam Kirsch explains, we were all born in sin, and it is only in our commitment to allyship with redemptive “resistance” that we might be redeemed. It’s not the quite the same as blood-and-soil fascism. But it’s close.

The thing about anticolonialism is that it “contains all the elements needed for moral derangement: the permanent division of the world into innocent people and guilty people; the belief that history can be fixed once and for all, if violence is applied in the right way; the idea that the world is a battlefield and everyone is a combatant, whether they realize it or not.”

The celebratory outbursts that have so shocked the conscience of Canadians in the wake of October 7 are not depraved and obscene simply because they are antisemitic. Antisemitism is merely the most obviously depraved telltale sign of a political and cultural milieu that is post-truth, objectively fascistic, confidently incurious and unconcerned with genuine human suffering.

One of its signature masquerades is “anti-Zionism.” Just for the hell of it, I’ll return to the observation written by the imprisoned Antonio Gramsci during another tectonic period in history, the 1930s: The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

The Interregnum We’re In

That fascistic, post-truth milieu, the thing that is every bit as significant as the Quiet Revolution in Quebec and so on, had found a comfortably secure home for itself in Canada long before October 7, in all the circles of power and privilege associated with “the Left.”

Its features are comparable to the Naziism and Stalinism of the 20th century in the way it subjectivizes everything, in the same way that there was “revolutionary truth” and “bourgeois truth” for the Leninists, and “German science” and “Jewish science” for the Nazis.

It’s a 21st Century antisemitism peculiar to a subculture that has been incubated, nourished and nurtured within a distinctly highbrow ideological package that has almost entirely supplanted the historic mission of the Left, which was all about the uplifting of the poor and the working class, and the proposition that human rights are universal rights.

Shulamit Volkov, professor emerita of History at Tel Aviv, took a long hard look at it back in 2006 in Readjusting Cultural Codes: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism. Volkov had long applied the notion of antisemitism as a ‘cultural code” in analyzing the antimodernism of late 19th century Germany, and she used that analysis to review contemporary western antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Long story short:

“From the 1960s, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism formed part of a larger ideological package consisting of anticolonialism, anticapitalism, and a deep suspicion of US policies. In the eyes of members of the developing countries, Jews became a symbol of the West and legitimate targets for hatred.

“Thus, the position on the Jewish question, even if not in itself of paramount importance, came to indicate a belonging to a larger camp, a political stand and an overall cultural choice. The question is whether the position towards Israel today, which has become a central issue for the European left, can still be considered a cultural code or whether it rather indicates a more direct anti-Jewish attack, above all as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

I’d say yes, that ideological package has now degenerated into a direct attack on the Jews.

September 11, 2001 - October 7, 2023.

By the day of Al Qaida’s mass atrocity in the United States - which is readily comparable to the October 7 trauma Israeli society is now suffering - the “Left” had already become enfeebled by identity politics, counterculture exhibitionism and post-colonial “theory.”

Having abandoned the difficult work of universal emancipation, the Euro-American Left had almost wholly retreated into a nihilistic morass of cultural relativism, a jumble of white guilt, identity politics and a proclivity to “problematization” in place of dialectical resolution, class analysis and rational inquiry.

If you jettison the capacity to criticize or even comprehend “other” cultures by resort to universal and objective criteria, you can’t easily articulate standpoints in opposition to cultural practices that privilege the public stoning of adulteresses, or to anti-imperialist “resistance” that consisted of deploying mentally-handicapped boys as suicide bombers in crowded markets.

You don’t even need to do anything much to demonstrate your left-wing bona fides. You just have to be anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and of course, “anti-Zionist.”

Our friend James Bloodworth, author of The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working Class Kids Still Get Working Class Jobs, had a go at remembering September 11 in the context of October 7 the other day.

The Socialist Worker gleefully described the murder of 2,977 people on its front page as the ‘Bitter Fruit of US Policy’. ‘They can’t see why they are hated’, ran the headline of a piece by Seumas Milne in the Guardian published 48 hours after the attacks. Seumas knew why though, and it was all the things he already disliked about the United States.

Peter Wilby, then editor of the New Statesman (and today a convicted sex offender) wrote that dead American bond traders deserved it, at least a bit, for preferring ‘George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader’. ‘The subjects of the Empire had struck back,’ wrote Tariq Ali in his 2002 book The Clash of Fundamentalisms. Meanwhile the sainted Oxford academic Mary Beard wrote in typically chin-stroking fashion in the London Review of Books of the ‘feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming’.

Sound familiar?

By September 11, 2001, much of the “Left” had lost its ability to comprehend any enemy more foul than the United States of America. By October 7, 2023, much of the “Left” had lost its ability to comprehend any enemy more foul that the State of Israel.

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards,” preached the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, pastor to a congregation that included the young Chicago senator Barack Obama. “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

In The Left at War, his survey of post-911 liberal-left politics, the American cultural studies professor Michael Bérubé observes that by September, 2001, the needle was already in the groove, and the counterculture “narrative” was locked down: September 11 was really about American imperialism, about Third World resistance to global capitalist hegemony. And as always, it was about those wicked Zionists.

Bérubé situated himself among those on the American left who were still opposed to theocratic fascism. Looking to identify the moment things went so sideways, Bérubé cites the post-modernist Michel Foucault ’s enthusiastic verdict on the Khomeinist counter-revolution in Iran and the western left’s strange quietude about - and sometimes apologetics for - the death sentence by fatwa ordered by the Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses.

By the time of September 11, Foucault had become one of the most influential philosophers in left-wing academic circles in the west, and it showed. The Foucauldian cultural relativists simply couldn't recognize in Muslims the same rights and duties that they happily recognized in one another, in their own well-to-do class.

This is core of what has come to be called “woke ideology.” Bérubé saw it for what it was, before it was given a name: “It involves a mode of belief, a way of believing rather than a set of beliefs; it is the work of a countercultural left that sees politics as a game rigged by corporations and the process of winning popular consent as a form of ‘selling out’.”

Bérubé saw too that it was the reflection of an ugly thing lingering on the Left from long before Foucault or the 1960s counterculture.

It’s a cold cynicism, not something that derives merely from anti-capitalist antagonism or undead nostalgia for the Soviet Union. It’s a persistent loathing for democracy itself. George Orwell observed it in his day.

There was something suspicious about the avowed socialism of many of his contemporaries, Orwell said, whose "real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism."

It’s a type of politics that stands for nothing in particular. It requires the enunciation of no real alternative. Its “anti-colonialism” charade requires the role of the aggressor to be played by either the United States or Israel, preferably both. No matter what calculus you apply there is nothing genuinely “progressive” about it. If Israel is in the wrong then Hamas must be right.

The arrangement allows liberal Canadians to say: We are peacemakers, Americans are warmongers. Canadians have lots of health care, Americans have lots of guns. It works very nicely, and after 9-11, something new was emerging in the New Democratic Party, the trade unions, the university faculties, the student movement andin all the national activist organizations of the “Left.”

In 2006, the year of the frightully heartbreaking Second Hezbollah War, an emboldened New Democratic Party set out to take over the Canadian conversation on Afghanistan. “Canadians are not warmongers,” NDP leader Jack Layton declared. Across Canada there were marches and parades, die-ins and teach-ins, just like in the 1960s.

The Taliban were not the Vietcong, but the familiar conception of Third World resistance to American hegemony was close at hand, and the tropes and memes of the counterculture were there for the taking. All that was required of Canadians was to succumb to the reflexive habits and the beckoning appeal of the transgressive. All that mattered was to appeal to Canadian vanity and the liberal-left Canadian hierarchies of virtue and its postures towards the United States.

Canadians are peacemakers. Americans are warmongers. By 2006, Canada had become an active proving ground for the most sordid of the collusions between the white, middle-class “left” and the Islamist far right. It was the phenomenon that Ely Karmon of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Israel called "a growing trend of solidarity between leftist, Marxist, anti-globalization and even rightist elements with Islamists."

In the pages of New York’s venerable Dissent magazine, Canadian linguist Shalom Lappin, a devoted social democrat, cautioned that the phenomenon was no mere strategic marriage of convenience:

“For this part of the left, its peculiar notion of anti-imperialism does not so much take precedence over progressive political concerns as replace them. Anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism have exhausted its content to the point that it has become ripe for merger and acquisition by militant Islamic jihadists posing as the representatives of the third world poor struggling against Western domination.”

And that’s exactly what happened (see In Front of One’s Nose). Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad teamed up with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to establish a "global progressive front," and in Canada, Jack Layton’s NDP drew deeply from the lexicon and the vocabulary that had come to prevail in all the places where the principled Left once was.

Going into the national NDP convention in Quebec City in September 2006, Layton’s own Toronto-Danforth constituency brought a resolution calling on the party to demand that Canada withdraw all its soldiers from Afghanistan, withdraw the RCMP specialists training the Haitian National Police Force, abrogate the North American Free Trade Agreement and pull out of the World Trade Organization.

Several NDP-affiliated union locals submitted a resolution that called on the NDP to adopt a policy that explicitly “rejects the use of military intervention as a tool for peace.” The resolution was based on the fantasy that Canada was being drawn into an American plan to use tactical nuclear weapons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Syria. Another resolution dismissed the Canadian-devised “responsbility to protect” doctrine at the United Nations as a ploy to justify American oil wars against Sudan and Venezuela.

There were resolutions calling for the NDP to issue a public declaration of solidarity with Venezuela’s “Bolivarian revolution,” to fight for a free trade deal with the Venezuelan government and demand that Canada “cease all liaisons or cooperation with members of the Venezuelan opposition.” American military deserters should be welcomed into Canada, now and in the future. Canadian navy ships should be stopped from “policing the shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf.”

There was a roster of demands on the “Zionist state” of Israel that mirrored the eliminationist demands of Hamas, moderated only by by a plausible-deniability caveat urging the NDP to “make clear its opposition to the use of suicide bombings against civilian targets.”

And here we are.