Don’t like antisemitism? You’re a racist.

So says Canada’s Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia

Today we welcome back Brian Henry with a sharply written rebuttal to a federal official who said that calling out the antisemitism in pro-Hamas protests somehow makes you a racist. The world seems to be shifting under our feet these days and we don’t know what will come next. But we should be aware of how quickly the public discourse is shifting. Thanks to Brian for doing this.

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(Almost) everybody from the Prime Minister on down condemned the obvious antisemitism of the recent “pro-Palestinian” protest at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

Mount Sinai was founded a hundred years ago (back when Canada actually was a racist country) to give Jewish doctors a place to work and Jewish mothers a sympathetic place to have their babies. These days, all sorts of doctors work there and it serves all of Toronto – and indeed beyond Toronto, as it’s a world-class hospital.

But Mount Sinai is still associated with the Jewish community. It still has a Star of David in its logo, can still provide in-patients with kosher meals, and still has a Jewish chaplain on site. Indeed, Mount Sinai’s association with the Jewish community is right there in its name.

What does Mount Sinai Hospital have to do with the Israeli government’s conduct of the war against Hamas? Nothing. Obviously. The only possible way to understand the protest in front of Mount Sinai is as an anti-Jewish protest.

No, no, no! say the organizers. The hospital just happened to be on their route to the U.S. consulate.

Right. They just happened to stop in front of this building, this particular hospital for twenty minutes. (There are other hospitals along that stretch of University Avenue.) They just happened to scale the front of this building to wave a Palestinian flag (right next to the Star of David logo), just happened to (allegedly) rough up the security guards, push their way inside, and intimidate staff, just happened to waylay a Jewish doctor attempting to leave the hospital and start banging on the car

.Image: Protester waves a Palestinian Flag above the entrance of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto — Photo from Brian Henry

Right. Most likely they didn’t even notice it was a hospital. They probably thought it was a gas station.

Some people claim to believe this nonsense, most notably Amira Elghawaby. She’s Canada’s Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia. On her X account, Elghawaby tweeted that “the rush to label protesters as antisemitic and/or terrorist sympathizers” is “troubling and wrong.”

What’s troubling is that Elghawaby can’t see the antisemitism and the terrorist sympathies.

Toronto4Palestine organized the Mount Sinai protest. In a post on their Instagram page advertising their first rally on the day after the October 7 murder of 1,200 Israeli men women, and infants, the mass raping and mutilation of women, and the kidnapping of 253 innocent people, Toronto4Palestine asked attendees to bring their flags and said, “Let’s celebrate.” 

Toronto4Palestine also noted that some people might give out sweets, as Hamas does in Gaza whenever they succeed in killing a Jew. 

This is the same group that harassed diners at Café Landwer, a Jewish-owned, Israel-based restaurant with a few locations in Toronto. They banged on the windows and chanted, “Boycott! Boycott!” The Landwers are familiar with this sort of intimidation and with calls for an anti-Jewish boycott, having been chased out of Germany by the Nazis in the 1930s. (More here.)

So the group’s antisemitism and terrorist sympathies are well known. Plus, the protesters stood outside Mount Sinai Hospital screaming for an Intifada.

The last intifada in Israel was a terror war that saw numerous suicide bombings, including the slaughter of 21 people, mostly young teen girls at an all-ages disco, the murder of elderly Jews at a Passover Seder, the bodily shredding of families at a pizzeria jointly owned by a Jew and Arab, numerous attacks against shopping malls and aboard city buses, and at other locales throughout Israel. Altogether, Palestinian terrorists murdered over 1,000 innocent Israelis. They injured and maimed thousands more. 

This is what the protesters were calling for outside a hospital. A Jewish hospital.  

Yet Elghawaby can’t see the problem. Or rather the problem she sees is Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism. She writes:

There should be no excuse for the indiscriminate killing of any and all innocent men, women, and children – which is what demonstrators were actually protesting. Anyone who condemns one but not the other is demonstrating to all of us how Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism operate to devalue the lives of those deemed less than human.

She’s saying no one should condemn the Toronto4Palestine crowd for antisemitism unless they also accuse Israel of something; specifically, indiscriminate killing of innocents. And indeed, if you call out antisemitism and terrorism without also calling out Israel, you’re an anti-Palestinian racist.

To be clear, Israel isn’t indiscriminately killing anyone. It’s fighting a war of self-defense against a Nazi-like terror group that’s embedded itself deeply within the civilian infrastructure of Gaza. But let’s leave that aside.

We’ve seen the Elghawaby’s rhetorical move before. In 2021, Javier Dávila, a teacher with the Toronto School Board’s equity department was discovered distributing a list of “resources to educators” about Palestine. These “resources” included links to obviously antisemitic material, promotion of suicide bombings, and glorification of terrorists.

He wasn’t disciplined. But school board Trustee Alexandra Lulka was accused and investigated for Islamophobia and anti-Palestinians racism because she’d objected to Dávila’s material at a board meeting.

The school board’s human rights expert concluded Lulka was guilty of racism. Not because what she said was false, but because she’d failed to praise items on Dávila’s list of Palestinian resources that did not promote terrorism and Jew-hatred. (More of this story here.)

The expert’s conclusion shocked many, because back in those days of innocence, three years ago, most people hadn’t realized how deeply antisemitic the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion industry is. Indeed, for many people, I’m afraid it still hasn’t sunk in.

As with Elghawaby, the idea was that it’s Islamophobic to fight antisemitism or to object to Palestinian terrorism – unless you simultaneously agree to some aspect of the Palestinian “narrative.” So, according to Elghawaby, it’s Islamophobic to call out the antisemitism of the Mount Sinai Hospital protest unless you also call out Israel for a crime it’s not actually committing.

Of course, this demand of “not one unless also the other” goes only one way. The Toronto4Palestine crew haven’t ever called out Hamas’s atrocities – they’ve celebrated them – but Elghawaby isn’t calling that antisemitic. For Elghawaby, it’s only Jews who must first admit guilt before being permitted to decry antisemitism. And even then, we’re not to be believed. 

And for this we pay her more than $160,000 a year.

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Thanks again to Brian for writing this important article. The threat to the Jewish community from the pervasive influence of DEI ideology is becoming ever more apparent as the uproar against Canadian Jews over the events in Israel continues. Our community institutions are speaking up and challenging it wherever they can, but some days it seems like trying to hold back the sea by putting a finger in the dike.

As long as it continues we should all speak up whenever we see people normalizing antisemitism in the name of being “pro-Palestinian”.

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