Antizionists and Antisemites

Crap by any name, smells the same

Today, we are delighted to publish a new article by frequent contributor Brian Henry. Brian is here with a report on the controversy surrounding the adoption by the Toronto District School Board of a report on antisemitism at Toronto schools. It reveals a lot about contemporary antisemitism on the left, as Brian explains here. Please check it out.

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It’s strange how being identified as an antisemite makes most antisemites completely lose their minds.

Witness the Toronto District School Board’s recent adoption of a report on antisemitism in Toronto schools. Antisemites organized a fierce opposition. But after a marathon 14-hour meeting, stretched over two days to give all those antisemites a chance to voice their objections, the School Board finally voted to accept the report. All that opposition over simply accepting a report the School Board itself had commissioned!

The authors of the report on antisemitism spoke to 125 students, canvassed every mainstream Jewish organization in the city, including our national organizations, and confirmed what parents have been screaming for 18 months now: Ever since the October 7, 2023, terrorist invasion of Israel, antisemitism has shot up everywhere, including (especially!) in our schools.

Thirteen Trustees voted to accept the report. But five others apparently believe the school board should ignore what Jews have to say about antisemitism. Neethan Shan (Chair of the Toronto School Board), Malika Ghous, Yaline Rajkulasingham, Zakir Patel, and Matias de Dovitiis (federal NDP candidate for Humber River–Black Creek) all voted against the board accepting the report.

Image: Twitter post by Neethan Sham, Chair of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB)

Here’s testimony from a Toronto kid who those five Trustees voted not to hear:

During my five years at CH Best (Middle School at Finch and Dufferin), I have been targeted and marginalized by antisemitism. On multiple occasions, people have thrown money at me and said, ‘Go get it, Jew.’ I have had other students give me the Hitler salute, I have been sent Holocaust denial memes on Snapchat, I was told, ‘You should have been gassed with your ancestors, Jew”, and “Free Palestine, kill Israel.”

Apparently, the antisemites who organized the opposition to the report, and their allies on the school board who voted against the report, don’t think this sort of antisemitism is worth worrying about. For them, the real issue – the issue that gets them all worked up – is that the report notices that antizionism “has recently re-emerged as a contemporary form of antisemitism.”

For example, it’s the kind of thing children are hearing from other kids at middle school: “Free Palestine, kill Israel.”

This isn’t antisemitic, say the antisemites. Jews aren’t even mentioned! At least, not in that little bit, but they do have to block their ears to miss that these “antizionists” are also saying, “you should have been gassed with your ancestors.”

Antizionists want to deny it, but everywhere we see antizionism, we also see old-fashioned antisemitism.

For example, a number of years ago, I objected to the Toronto School Board and other school boards across the province encouraging kids to read a novel: The Shepherd’s Granddaughter.

The author clearly meant this book as anti-Israel propaganda; that is, as antizionist. But it depicts Israelis – and Jews more generally – as child killers, which is one of the most familiar and most vile of antisemitic tropes. (More here.)

Another example: The University of Toronto’s medical school commissioned Dr. Ayelet Kuper to investigate the faculty’s rampant antisemitism. As always in “progressive” environments, the antisemites at the U of T medical school present themselves as antizionist. But Dr. Kuper also found old-fashioned antisemitism everywhere.

She especially found students and faculty invoking the “the longstanding myth of ‘Jewish power.’” Among other things, Dr. Kuper heard that Jews “control CaRMS (the Canadian Residency Matching Service, which manages the residency selection process), Jews control faculty hiring, and Jews control … promotion decisions” (here).

Antisemites pretend that “antizionism” is merely criticism of Israel. The fact that traditional antisemitism always shows up alongside antizionism makes nonsense of this claim. Besides, the biggest critics of Israel are actually Israelis – if “criticism” means criticism of particular Israeli governments or policies.

But that’s not what antizionists are about. Even without the obvious presence of traditional anti-Jewish myths, antizionism goes off the cliff into antisemitism when it shows itself as hatred.

Antizionists claim to “only” hate Zionists. But 90% of Jews are Zionists – that is, they support Israel’s continuing existence – and for Jews who care about being Jews, that percentage is much higher. So while they claim to not hate Jews, antizionists admit to hating almost every Jew.

Indeed, most people in most places support Israel continuing to exist. In Canada, for example, an Oct 2024 poll found that “most Canadians agreed that the Israelis have the right of self-determination: 56 per cent, yes; 9 per cent, no” (here).

But although all of Canada supports Israeli self-determination by a margin of six to one, antizionists get worked up about the Jews in particular. Try walking by an anti-Israel demonstration wearing a kippah as I have. You will be accosted. (Though probably not assaulted, as there’s always a heavy police presence.)

Or try being a Jewish kid in a Toronto school. It’s the Jewish kids who get told, “Free Palestine, kill Israel.”

And that after all is the goal of the antizionists. They want Israel wiped off the map. Killed. At best they’re indifferent to the lives of the seven million Jews who live there. And since October 7, we’ve seen much worse than indifference. All over the world and in Canada, too, we’ve seen outright jubilation over the murder of 1,200 Jews in that October 7 terrorist attack.

Antizionism is antisemitism. It simply transfers the traditional hatred of the Jewish people to a hatred of the Jewish nation. But it’s the same hatred. It reproduces the same anti-Jewish myths.

Moreover, Antizionists feed off their hatred in the same way antisemites do – they feel exactly the same joy in their hatred, the same sense of self-importance because of their hatred, plus all the other emotional rewards that feed antisemitism (see here).

And Jews (or almost all Jews) remain their target.

This raises the question: Where did this ploy of disguising antisemitism as antizionism even come from? And why?

We have to go back to the 1950s. After WW2, “Zionologists” in the Soviet Union simply took Czarist-era antisemitic propaganda and substituted the word “Zionist” for “Jew,” and voila! antizionism was born (here).

Once it became clear that Israel wouldn’t fall into the Soviet orbit and especially after the Six Day War of 1967, the KGB and other apparatus of the Soviet state took over. They further developed this new form of antisemitism and used it to forge bonds with third world nations, especially Arab countries.

Beyond that, far left groups around the world adopted this new antisemitism. Eventually it made its way from the far-left fringe to dominate many university campuses here in Canada and elsewhere throughout the West.

Image: Rebranding antisemitism as antizionism allows haters to virtue-signal while attacking Jews

Why the new face for a very old hatred?

Because antisemitism was associated with the Nazis. Until WW2, many respectable people were proudly antisemitic. But the Nazis forced much of the world to notice that hating Jews was a bad thing. (At least in the West; the Islamic world didn’t go through a post-Nazi rejection of antisemitism.)

Also, the world had changed. After two thousand years of utter powerlessness, Jews now had our own state.

Particularly on the left, antisemites needed to evolve a new variety of Jew-hatred adapted to their progressive sensibilities and reflecting the new world and a “progressive” idea of ultimate evil. Traditional notions of Jews as Christ killers or puppet masters or race polluters needed updating. The Soviets answered this need.

Progressives identify the great evils as racism, fascism, Nazism, genocide, imperialism, colonialism, militarism and apartheid, so the Soviets assigned all these to Zionism and Zionists. (More on the Soviet origins of antizionism here.)

None of this resembles actual Zionism in any way.

Actual Zionists came in many different varieties across the political and the religious/non-religious/anti-religious spectrums, and contemporary Israeli political parties are the descendants of some of these many strains.

All Zionists shared and still share the goal of having a Jewish state – in part because we need one! Centuries of persecution, both in the Christian and Islamic worlds, have made this painfully clear. And the place for a Jewish state is in the land where Jews originally come from, the land where our people have lived for 4,000 years – in Israel.

And yes, of course, it gets complicated, as Israel aims to be a Jewish state while respecting the equal rights of its non-Jewish citizens. But arguably it’s less complicated than Canada, where we aim to have one united country with shared values, but composed of French, English and Indigenous nations, plus a mosaic of countless cultures.

Antizionists ignore all this. They have zero interest in the reality of Israel and Zionism. For them, Israel and “Zionists” are simply Satan. That is, “Zionists” are the great evil, and this hallucination allows antizionists to feel self-righteous and heroic while indulging their anger or hatred.

This is how progressive antisemites maintain their certainty of their own moral purity while bathing in antisemitism. They agree antisemitism is bad. But antisemitism for them is something on the right. Since they’re on the left and they’re morally pure; they cannot be antisemites.

Thus, for example, Neethan Shan, Chair of the Toronto School Board, will signal his virtue by posting a Tweet for Holocaust Remembrance Day (here).

But Shan will also Tweet the claim that Israel is a criminal state occupying “Palestine” (a country which we might want to exist but as of yet never has).

He’s also Tweeted his admiration for Sarah Jama, the Ontario MPP who has called for Israel’s destruction, denied Hamas’s crimes, and took part in a demonstration that celebrated Hamas October 7, 2023, murder of 1,200 Israelis. The NDP kicked Jama out of its caucus because of her statements widely taken as blaming Israel for Hamas’s terror attack (here).

Image: MPP Sarah Jama, ejected from the Ontario NDP caucus for antisemitic statements

Shan presumably misses the contradiction in his Tweets, because Nazis were evil far-right antisemites, while his “antizionism” is virtuous and pure and progressive.

To progressives, it’s simply impossible they can be antisemitic. They see the notion as a monstrous (Jewish) lie – a lie that defames their (imaginary) virtue – a lie that must be defeated! Hence, we end up with a fourteen-hour hearing on whether or not the Toronto School Board should listen to Jews about antisemitism.

Similarly, at the NDP’s 2021 policy convention, the policy issue NDP activists most wanted on the agenda was how to define antisemitism. Weird, yes? Considering close to 0% of these activists are Jews.

They brought forth, not one resolution, but three of them, sponsored by 42 different riding associations, all dedicated to defining antisemitism – or more specifically, to rejecting the definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA, an association of 34 countries, including Canada, that seeks to counter antisemitism).

Canada’s Ministry of Heritage has adopted this definition. So have the governments of almost every democracy the world over. So have innumerable subnational governments, associations, and even some schoolboards. It’s the gold standard. But this definition notices that contemporary antisemitism often shows itself as obsessive hatred of Israel, Israelis and “Zionists.”

Please note, the large majority of people who simply vote NDP don’t share this obsession about “Zionists.” But unfortunately, the IHRA definition of antisemitism does describe many NDP activists, some members of the Toronto School Board, and many others who call themselves “progressive.”

This is where our world is at. The Soviet Union fell decades ago, but visit any anti-Israel rally today, and you’ll hear protesters using the same slurs the Soviets wrote for them 60 years ago – slurs about colonialism, genocide, and Naziism – slurs that invite progressives to project all their hatred onto “Zionists” and to feel virtuous for doing so.

Alas, antisemitism doesn’t die; it just migrates from place to place and morphs from one form to another. Alarmingly, right now, antisemitism is showing up in our schools and is being defended at our school boards.

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