So hate is cool now. They’re not even hiding it any more.

“I’ve always wondered why we did nothing about Hitler…but by midday on the 7th of October, I knew exactly why…” Poignant words from @EricPickles @CFoI. To do something - critical to identify & combat ALL strains of ever-mutating Jew hatred, w/@TheIHRA def of antisemitism. #NeverAgainIsNow

Prime Minister @MarkJCarney’s speech yesterday addressing the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing Canada included many pertinent points. The problem is that it largely avoided fundamental issues: why antisemitism has surged, how it has mutated, who is fueling it, and what concrete actions will be taken to confront it. The Prime Minister stood in one of Canada’s largest synagogues and admitted that “Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians” and that “if that covenant fails for one of our communities, it fails us all.” He highlighted the important role that the @TheIHRA definition plays in identifying and addressing antisemitism - for if you can’t define it, you can’t combat it. While the Prime Minister may have hit some of the right notes, he ultimately failed to deliver where Canadians needed leadership most - to name and shame those fuelling and peddling antisemitism in Canada’s streets. There is no need for a Council to investigate this - five years of overt antisemitism, with the past two and a half featuring incessant hate rallies, shootings, and violence targeting Canada’s Jewish community and anyone who supports the Jewish nation state has made the perpetrators of anti-Jewish hatred known to all who wish see. Not once did the Prime Minister mention liberal values that have been hijacked, redefined, inverted, and weaponized to normalize ever-mutating lethal antisemitism. Not once did he refer to Islamic extremism and its role in the antisemitism crisis across Canada. He failed to mention the progressives who boast about diversity, equity, and inclusion yet keep Jews out of their spaces. He touted his own policies and praised police, instead of calling for the most basic laws to be upheld, and for perpetrators of crimes to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And he did not commit to utilizing his own government’s IHRA Handbook. He failed to look inwards, and consider the role his own government is playing in funding organizations guilty of peddling antisemitism, including terror-affiliated entities. While talking about “not importing foreign conflicts,” he failed to recognize the affect his government’s obsessive anti-Israel policies have on the Jewish community in Canada - from claiming Israel has a right to self defense even while cutting export permits for military equipment, to rewarding Palestinian leadership with recognition of a state in the wake of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust without requiring any reform. Significant and troubling concerns have already emerged regarding the identities and backgrounds of several named members of the Council - one of the Prime Minister's flagship proposals. Most poignantly, while standing in a synagogue speaking about the 3,000 year old history of the Jewish people, he failed to mention the Jewish people’s millennia-old connection to the land of Israel, effectively attempting to erase Israel from Canadian Jewish identity. By missing these points, the PM’s statement will serve to continue the normalization of antisemitism. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z”l warned: “Antisemitism is a virus that mutates so that new antisemites can deny that they’re antisemites at all because their hate is different from the old. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were hated for their race. Today they are hated for their nation state, Israel. What all three have in common is that they are different ways of saying that Jews have no right to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights of other human beings… Anti-Zionism, denying Jews the right to their one and only collective home by misrepresenting Judaism, is the new antisemitism.”