EDITORIAL: Jew hatred is Canadian, for some

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the wave of hatred aimed at Jews across Canada, “is not who we are as Canadians”.

So does Minister of Public Safety Dominic LeBlanc.

Ditto Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who says, “there is no place in Canada, or anywhere, for anti-Semitism.”

But at a time when hate crimes against Jews are increasing exponentially, when Jewish day schools are being shot up, when Jews are being told to go back to Europe and that Hitler didn’t finish the job, isn’t it time for our leaders to stop kidding the troops?

That’s because in the real world, Jew hatred is as Canadian as maple syrup, hockey and medicare for some.

Not everyone. We still live in a country where most people are decent.

But let’s not pretend this hatred of Jews came out of nowhere since the start of the Israel/Hamas war on Oct. 7.

It was always there. It’s just that the Jew haters now feel emboldened to say what they always believed, out loud.

What’s changed is that the visible displays of hatred are no longer confined to white supremacists and neo-Nazis that the Trudeau government always found so easy to condemn.

Now it’s coming from inside the house of what we used to describe as our most enlightened institutions, ostensibly dedicated to academic freedom and civil debate.

This week alone, the presidents of McGill University, Concordia University, University of British Columbia and University of Toronto testified before a parliamentary committee that anti-Semitism is a major problem on their campuses.

Unspoken was the fact that having failed to address its rise on university campuses for a generation, they have no idea of how to counteract it.

Many Canadian universities now have what are laughably called “pro-Palestinian” encampments on their campuses reviving the discredited “Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” movement (BDS) against Israel.

Trudeau has described BDS as a form of anti-Semitism.

Canada’s House of Commons voted overwhelmingly in 2016 to condemn BDS for promoting “the demonization and delegitimization of the State of Israel” and called on the government, “to condemn any and all attempts by Canadian organizations, groups or individuals to promote the BDS movement, both here at home and abroad.”

But that was then and this is now.