The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada

From Geoffrey Clarfield from The Free Press

Terry Glavin is one of Canada’s most honest and independent journalists.

We rarely run pieces this long. But today’s investigation—the story of how antisemitism became deeply embedded in Justin Trudeau’s Canada—called for it. This is a piece worth reading carefully. It is relevant not just to our many Canadian readers, but to anyone invested in the future of the West. —Bari Weiss

The Denial Is What’s Painful’

For Sarah Rugheimer, a professor of astronomy at York University in Toronto, the first sign of the virulent strain of antisemitism now embedded in Justin Trudeau’s Canada appeared on a lamppost.

It was a few weeks after the Hamas massacre of last October 7. Rugheimer, 41, was walking in a park near her home in the city’s quiet Cedarvale neighborhood when she saw a poster of the Israeli hostage Elad Katzir, a 47-year-old farmer from Kibbutz Nir Oz, covered with swastikas.

In the days that followed, as the war raged in Gaza, swastikas turned up all over Cedarvale. They also started appearing on the York campus, where Rugheimer serves as the Allan I. Carswell Chair for the Public Understanding of Astronomy. As fall turned to winter, a swastika showed up in the snow outside the campus building where she works.

An astrophysicist with a particular interest in the origins of life on Earth and the possibility of life on other planets, Rugheimer tended to confine her worldly concerns to scientific matters. So the swastikas came as a shock. But worse was to come.

She grew up in Montana, and her academic career took her around the world—from a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard University to Scotland, England, and now Canada. But until taking up her post at York University two years ago, Rugheimer said she’d never encountered any overt antisemitism. Nor had she given much thought to her identity as a Zionist: Like the vast majority of Jews around the world, Rugheimer believes in Israel’s right to exist.

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

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.

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.

The impression that the violence unfolding around them is somehow invisible to the state responsible for their protection has overwhelmed not only relative newcomers to Canada like Rugheimer, but also Jews who have lived in Canada for decades.

People like Robert Krell, 84, the former director of postgraduate education in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia.

A pioneer of Holocaust education in Canada and a specialist in survivor trauma, Krell immigrated to Canada at the age of 11, after having been hidden by a Catholic family during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Krell was not as shocked by the unspeakable barbarism of the Hamas massacre of October 7 last year as by the jubilation the atrocities elicited from within the “progressive” milieu across Canada—and by the total silence from the “social justice” scene.

“On October 7 I was horrified,” Krell told me. “I was shocked to the core by the cruelty, the rapes, the mutilations, the killing of children, the gouging of eyes . . . but I could believe it.”

What he found impossible to fathom was what he saw on October 8, and in all the days that followed.

“It was like a dam burst. I can’t describe the emotional blow. I guess I thought there would be a cry of outrage about what happened, you know, from the human rights people, Black Lives Matter people, the MeToo people. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I just couldn’t grasp the concept, that when people heard and saw what had been done to those Jews, there was nothing except celebrations of Hamas as liberators.”

Since last October 7, there have been several drive-by shootings at Jewish schools in Montreal and Toronto. A coordinated bomb threat targeted more than 100 Jewish institutions from Halifax to Victoria. Synagogues in British Columbia and Quebec have been firebombed. One synagogue in Toronto, Kehillat Shaarei Torah, has been vandalized seven times since April—its doors and windows smashed; rocks thrown through the windows.

Jewish businesses across the country are routinely vandalized. Jews are besieged by “pro-Palestinian protesters” in their own neighborhoods. Jewish parents worry about sending their children to kindergarten. Jewish university students from one end of the country to the other report being afraid to attend classes.

There are now an estimated 1.8 million Muslims in Canada—twice as many as 20 years ago. Brym’s study found that more than 40 percent of the Muslims surveyed said that suicide bombing targeting Israeli citizens is justified. More than a third said Jews are not entitled to a state of their own. A majority—54 percent—described Israel as an apartheid state. A full 60 percent said Zionism is racism.

“It would be insanely naive to think people would come here and abandon long held, pre-existing, religiously motivated, and culturally ingrained beliefs about Jews just because they’re now in Canada,” Casey Babb, (a national security expert,) told me. They haven’t. And those toxic ideas about Jews have merged with critical-theory leftism to bring the country to a frightening juncture. Canada has now entered what Babb called “a dark and terrible period of systemic, normalized, and institutionalized Jew-hatred.”

The statistical evidence suggests that Babb is correct.

It’s hard to know who exactly is even in Canada these days.

Over the past year, as violent anti-Israel protests and attacks on Jews have become a regular feature of Canadian life, police have said they cannot keep up.

There have already been some very close calls.

Last December, two Ottawa youths were arrested on terrorism charges involving a bomb plot intended to target the local Jewish community. One of the boys’ fathers said the family had been concerned that the boy was being “radicalized” online.

On July 22 this year, a Canadian from Airdrie, Alberta, arrived at a checkpoint outside Netiv Ha’asara, a village in southern Israel, and lunged at a security detail with a knife, shouting “Free Palestine.” Zachareah Adam Quraishi, 21, is believed to have been “radicalized” by the anti-Israel hysteria in Canada. He was shot and killed.

Also in July, acting on a tip from French authorities, the RCMP in Richmond Hill, Ontario, arrested 62-year-old Ahmed Fouad Mostafa Eldidi and his 26-year-old son Mostafa on six terrorism offenses related to an ISIS-inspired plot to carry out a mass-casualty attack. The Eldidis had passed several Canadian Border Security Agency and Immigration and Citizenship screenings to enter Canada, even though the senior Eldidi allegedly appears in an ISIS video from 2015 dismembering a captive with a sword.

“There are times when even someone like me, who has been around for a while and has seen a lot of stuff, gets despondent,” said Shimon Koffler Fogel, the CEO of Canada’s preeminent Jewish advocacy organization, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. “But I am as much concerned for society writ large as I am parochially for the Jewish community,” Fogel told me.

“People really fail to understand the nature and the scope of the challenges we’re facing and what we’ve experienced over the past number of years,” he said. “It’s really about the way the fundamental values of Western society are under assault in a way that they never have been. Many of us are sleepwalking through this challenge. I fear that we’re going to wake up in the not-too-distant future and say: ‘What the hell? How did this happen?’ ”

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