The Hatred of Israel
And the problematic love of Islam
“Religion X is built on genocidal hate. Party Y in the West comes along and says that it wishes to protect its culture from the invasion by X. Millions of Westerners vote against party Y because they ‘are against hate and division.’ It is tough to see how the West can survive…” - Gad Saad, July 8, 2024
By
Jew hatred in this country, and around the world, is something I completely miscalculated. Like so many others, including many Jewish people, I naively thought that antisemitism was a thing of the past. Or at least, it was something that had been greatly diminished to the extent that it ceased to be much of a problem. Tragically, I was wrong about this.
The global expansion of Islamo-fascism and the mixing of pro-Jihadism with leftist critical social justice activism, is something I also, similarly, underestimated.
When I think of October 7th I am overcome with disgust and sadness. The world should be aligned with Israel, and aggressively opposed to Palestine/Hamas (Hamastinians) and the corrupt United Nations Relief and Workers Agency (UNRWA). That in many cases it appears to be the other way around, that many political leaders, media, and insufferable celebrities support Hamas’ terrorist aspirations, their evil nonsensical movement to wipe Israel off the face of the planet, is something that is incomprehensible to me.
In one of the late Rex Murphy’s final National Post columns, he proclaimed that “Hatred of Israel is the great moral disorder of our time.” Placing the blame for the “red-ignorant core” of the post-October 7th rise in antisemitism on “woke campuses,” Rex wrote the following concerning the legitimacy of the state of Israel:
“Dear Israel is but a spit of earth on a huge globe. Three years after six million Jews were put to torture, humiliation, whippings, rape, medical experiment, starvation, and vile death, was it not surely time — time for all the nations of the Earth who had reached some moral understanding of life and government — to allow Jewish people time to rest, time to mourn, time to see what and who might be left of them.”
While I’m the first to admit that no nation, including Israel, is beyond criticism, I feel there is both a time and place, and an appropriate proportionality that should be reflected in a fair critical analysis of any nation. When Douglas Murray made the point at the recent Munk debate that no serious person ever questions the legitimacy of the nation of Pakistan - a nation founded in a way similar to Israel - like they question and challenge the legitimacy of Israel, so-called anti-Zionists claimed that the audiences’ embrace of Murray’s logic was simply evidence of their Islamophobia.
Murray expanded on his Pakistan/Israel comparison by asking the audience to imagine someone who feels that Pakistan is not legitimate and therefore should not exist at all. Imagine also, that this person holds no antipathy directed at the Pakistani people. Preposterous! Yet the anti-Zionists ask us to believe this in regards to Israel. The anti-Zionist will look you straight in the eyes, and with all the sincerity in the world, express their belief that Israel should not exist, and absurdly, implore this does not mean they hate Jews (the majority of Israelis). Why in the case of an analogy where Pakistan is at stake, is it so clear which position is the correct and moral one? Alternatively, why are such questions involving Israel so difficult to answer?
In Canada, the increase in antisemitism has been going on for years. Record levels of antisemitism were recorded in 2021, with dramatic increases in Quebec and British Columbia.1 B'nai Brith Canada reported the number of antisemitic incidents across the nation more than doubled from 2022 to 2023, now reaching an unprecedented high.2
In February of 2024, Global Media reported that “Homes, businesses, schools, places of worship, neighbourhoods and institutions have all been targeted in what community leaders are calling an unparalleled spike in hate crimes against Jews.” And the Toronto Police warned the following month that “56% of reported hate crimes in 2024 have targeted Jewish people.”3
None of this distracts Canadian Islamists, like Younus Kathrada, from what they feel are the important social issues. Kathrada has been known to the government's Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre since at least 2020.4 He preaches to his Islamic followers in British Columbia, “I want our children to understand this well: the non-Muslims are the enemies of Allah, therefore they are your enemies.”5
In January of 2024 the National Post reported on 1600 hundred Canadians who were surveyed about the Israel/Palestine conflict. “46.2 per cent reported seeing a recent increase in ‘hateful comments’ against Jews, while 37.8 per cent reported the same thing for Muslims.” However, in the 18 to 24 cohort, “62.8 per cent reported that they’d seen an ‘increase in hateful comments’ against Muslims in the media, while just 20.8 per cent said the same about Jews.” All other age groups felt that Jew hatred has increased in greater proportion to hate directed at Muslims, illustrating how the 18 to 24's are out of step with the rest of Canadians. Not surprisingly, they were the only group “to consistently report trusting Palestinians more than Israelis in reports about the Israel-Hamas conflict.”6
On Sunday, the National Post reported on a poll that found that “One-quarter of Canadians believe the Holocaust is exaggerated.” It should come as no surprise that those between the ages of 18 and 34 were most likely to doubt the official death toll of the Holocaust.7
I digress. If one were speaking about the “Zionist entity” engaged in “Apartheid” in the weeks after October 7th, during our Israeli allies' hour of need, they are likely ignorant on Middle East politics, and know next to nothing of Islam. Or maybe, they are afraid of Islam? Rightly so, but if they are, then that makes them Islamophobic. So maybe they are more afraid of being Islamaphobic than of Islam itself? I wonder though, if they might consider what it was like for the 1200 Israeli citizens who were tortured, raped and murdered on October 7th, can they imagine their fear?
If one channels enough ignorance of Middle East issues, and rejects basic principles of morality, by choosing to protest the state of Israel in a Jewish neighbourhood in Toronto, or by chanting “from the river to the sea,” or calling for “intifada,” then they are complicit in supporting a leftist, Islamo-fascist, anti-Western, Jew-hating movement that has been expanding its reach and increasing it’s hateful energy for years.
Does this movement simply involve an exceptionalism that disadvantages Jews? Or is it an exceptionalism that advantages Islam? In my view it is both. The former is the long sad history of antisemitism, and the latter manifests through a creation of the modern world. Through the advent of the term “Islamophobia,” Westerners have been manipulated into believing a large, aggressive, expansionist, radical religious ethno-culture (Islam), is somehow a persecuted marginalized group in need of protection. On the contrary, the Jews have always been the world's most persecuted minority group. Jihadist sympathizing social justice activists have completely inverted the history of Jewish/Islamic relations.
The great Roger Scruton said, “[Islamophobia] was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue which we are all worried about.”8 Indeed, and not only was discussion stopped, it was subverted, redirected, and ultimately turned upside down. We in the West have nothing to fear from Jewish people or Israelis in general. Jews are outstanding citizens of any country they have citizenship in. They value human rights and liberal democracy. On the contrary, since 9-11, when Islamic terrorists hi-jacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, killing thousands of Americans, there have been over 45,000 acts of Islamic terrorism around the world (also known as global Jihad).9
Gad Saad, in the quote at the top, is of course referring to France where Marine Le Pen’s party, the National Rally, which was projected to win a majority, came in third due to the political games played by the leading leftist parties that essentially collaborated by dropping out candidates that would split the vote in favour of Le Pen. Even though Le Pen, and her hardline stance on immigration and Islam, won the majority of the popular vote, the “coalition of Socialists, greens and Communists” manipulated the system in order to prevent her victory. To make matters worse, it appears as though the leftists who rigged the election are now deploying lawfare against Le Pen, accusing her of embezzlement, forgery & fraud during her 2022 presidential campaign. If convicted, La Pen could face ten years in prison and be banned from running for president. The illiberal lawfare tactics of the left are completely transparent, but they shamelessly carry on with them regardless of perceptions, hell-bent on maintaining their unpopular grip on power. This in part, explains their derangement concerning the blanket support given to Islam in the face of rising global Jihadist terrorism.
Professor Saad, who lived through antisemitic persecution in Lebanon before his family was forced to flee from murderous Islamists, is often lumped into the same “far right” Islamophobic boat as Douglas Murray. Tommy Robinson, a British citizen and critic of Islam is even more outspoken than Murray and Saad. Because of this, the Jihadist infiltrated left will deploy all the stops to prevent Robinson from traveling and speaking at free speech events (where he criticizes Islam). The British government has deployed lawfare against him.10 He faces a prison sentence for a documentary film he produced. Even in Canada, Robinson is so severely smeared by our woke terrorist sympathizing elities, that Doug Ford, the conservative premier of Ontario, recently removed MPP Goldie Ghamari from his caucus for simply meeting with Tommy Robinson over Zoom.
Ghamari is an Iranian-Canadian immigrant. She is concerned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) which was recently been listed as a terrorist entity in Canada. She has been “speaking out on behalf of human rights violations by the Islamic Regime in Iran against Iranians…and their attempts to spy and threaten Iranians in Canada.”11 That a conservative premier so quickly cancelled an MPP critical of Islam tells us much about the privileged and protected status and “equity-deserving” category our leaders have placed Muslim extremists.
None of the recent antisemitic outbursts, mostly in Toronto and Montreal, should be tolerated in Canada. And no Canadian should question the legitimacy of our ally, Israel, in response to others who are disgusted by and thoroughly opposed to Hamas’ terroristic savagery. How can one change the conversation to Zionism, when the topic is atrocities, crimes against humanity, against women and children, committed by stateless Islamic terrorists? Palestine, by choice, is not a state, because Palestinians cannot conceive of or accept a state that occupies anything less than the entire area, “from the river to the sea,” that fully encompasses Israel. The terrorist-supporting social justice activists and Jihadists stinking up the streets of Toronto and Montreal, who obsessively accuse their opponents of genocide, are the leading proponents of a greatly desired and fantasized genocide against Jews.
The October 7th attacks against Israel were genocidal. Full stop. If Hamas had more combatants and military equipment, they would have killed, tortured and raped many more innocent people. Every breath wasted in support of the Hamastinian “resistance,” contributes to the confused global public opinion that Israel is somehow oppressing the Palestinians. Why? Because they are more powerful, and that automatically makes them immoral and incapable of being victimized by the less powerful? Nothing could be further from the truth. Palestinians are overwhelmingly captured by Islamic fundamentalism which means they can never accept a Jewish state on former Muslim lands, and Westerners are overwhelmingly captured by antisemitic/anti-Israel propaganda that comes in the form of anti-Zionism/social justice activism.
There is no legitimate anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism means Israel should not exist. If one feels Israel should not exist, but has nothing to say of Pakistan and the dozen or so other countries that were created after the post-World War One dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, than one is engaging in gross exceptionalism that holds Israel to a set of moral and geo-political standards others are not held to.
Western people who have not critically studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have an impossible time grappling with the preponderance of anti-Israel media bias and the sheer abundance of propagandistic antisemitic and/or pro-Islam messaging, in everything from movies to high school textbooks, which have thoroughly confused the issue. This is both deliberate and tragic. Things should not be so hopelessly convoluted when the simple truth is that the majority of Palestinians, and of Islamists in the Middle East and around the world, have souls utterly rotten to the core with Jew hatred. They cannot accept a Jewish state; Any Jewish state. They will never live in peace with Jews. How can Westerners demand that Israelis negotiate, appease, make peace, share land, when none of these things, not one, comes even close to the actual desiderata of the Palestinians and the Islamists who back them: to wipe out Israel and the Jews, for good.
But alas, at seemingly every turn, a Woke activist-favoured equity-deserving group is said to be subjected to some obscure form of genocide. The leftists tell us the indigenous of Canada suffered cultural genocide, but that was later upgraded to unqualified plain old murderous genocide. In the Middle East, the “Israeli genociders” are somehow responsible for providing aid to the Gazan’s they are supposedly genociding, even though on October 7th, Israelis were the victims of a genocidal Hamastinian terror campaign. It’s not genocide when Israel is the victim of genocide, it’s genocide that Israel perpetrates when they defend and strike back against the genocide they suffer. When I write it like that, it clearly makes no sense. Yet, this nonsensical word salad represents leftist thought. The word itself, “genocide,” and the way activists have contorted its meaning, and manipulatively deployed it with astounding frequency and misguided sincerity, is now a meaningless jumble of random phonetics. It is nothing more than an incoherent political term used to manipulate public opinion. I implore the reader not to fall for it.
What is it about the Islamic mind, or of the antisemitic Woke mind virus found in the West, that prevents the reaching of obvious and correct moral positions? Yes, Hamas terrorists targeted Israeli civilians, they rape tortured to death innocent young Israeli girls, they bound together families (including young children) and burned them alive. Some of the girls who were raped to death were left with tangled bodies, broken bones and hips, leaving coroners’ struggling to close their legs in a vain attempt to restore some respect to their lifeless desecrated bodies. In spite of this, how can any woman on God’s green earth proclaim their support for the Hamastinians?
How can any father support those who burned babies, children, mothers, fathers and grandparents alive to the point where charred remains were unrecognizable? How can parents show anything but disgust and hostility to the Islamic terrorists who committed these vile inhuman acts of pre-civilizational barbarity?
How can any Westerner who has ever cared for or loved someone support terrorists who abducted innocent people from their homes and communities, and continue to hold them in subhuman conditions? How can any of us sleep at night, safe in our homes with our families, knowing that hundreds just like us, were taken from their children or parents. And where, with each day that passes the likelihood of them ever returning becomes heartbreakingly less?
How can anyone think that the abduction of babies and the elderly, the rape torture to death of young girls, the binding and burning of families, the cold-blooded executions at point blank range, the decapitations, the purely hate-motivated destruction acted out with orgiastic glee by the most vile human scum imaginable, can somehow be rationalized as resistance? It cannot. It is not. If one thinks that torturing, murdering and abducting innocent civilians is somehow less awful, or marginally acceptable, when it involves Jews and Israel, it is because they are a foul Jew hater. There are so many of them it is shocking. And, I’m utterly ashamed that some of them are old stock Canadians that should know better, and be better.
To be fair, and I’m not entirely convinced I should be, some of them don’t hate Jews. Some of them may not actually be the vile hateful people referred to. In those cases, they are just ignorant. Not just a little though, they are boundlessly ignorant and ill-informed. They don’t understand or appreciate Islam. They don’t seem to get that this expansionist religion is coming after every single non-Muslim. The Jews are simply first, the Christians are next.
They also don’t understand or appreciate Jewish people. And, they don’t understand how special and exceptional Jewish culture is. Any nation that is serious about survival and prosperity would want to have many Jews contributing to it. All Westerners should be emulating those aspects of Jewish culture that have resulted in its disproportionate success, not giving ill-informed opinions about the illegitimacy of the world's only desperately needed Jewish state.
On that note, it is political opinions, things related to the encroachment of settlements, and other contentious social issues in Israel, where people hide their antisemitism. As mentioned above, they call it anti-Zionism. But they convince only the ignorant and their fellow antisemites. If Hamastinians in the West Bank or Gaza had legitimate grievances concerning what they viewed as the incursion of Jewish communities into Palestinian areas, they have thoroughly lost any and all moral standing and legitimacy on these matters after supporting and participating in the atrocities of October 7th. Killing and abducting hundreds of innocent people should never be normalized as an act of resistance.
In reality, aside from the fact that political disputes over Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the blockade of Gaza, have been distorted and conflated into acts of colonialism, Palestinians have given Jews and the world more than enough reasons to want them kept away permanently at a safe distance. However, the anti-Zionist’s would have murderous Hamastinians moving into every Jewish area possible, with either no knowledge or concern of the fact that most prefer their Jewish neighbours dead.
The developed and moral world should have rallied around Israel on October 8th. That the exact opposite has happened, to the horror of legions of good Westerners, illustrates how much the enemy is actually within and driving elite opinion. Which points to the great need of Westerners to break the spell and learn the facts about the Middle East, Islam, and Israel. Our words have weight, and our voices have power. But we must get the details straight, we must not inadvertently use our words and raise our voices supporting things we don’t understand, and wouldn’t support if we did. We must get this right.
There are no correct leftist positions. There are no moral leftist positions. The left is entirely captured by critical social justice and jihadist supporting activists. The same woke idiots who want to sexualize children, and chop off healthy body parts of confused kids, who want elementary students indoctrinated into racist identity politics, who call white Canadian’s, “settlers” guilty of genocide against the indigenous (based on false claims of clandestine graves), who want open air drug scenes in public places where addicts receive free access to government provided narcotics, who want public pride celebrations that include naked adults performing sex acts in front of children, who want open borders and mass immigration, and want historical statues of Canada’s founding fathers desecrated and removed, are the same idiots who support Islamic terrorism and oppose Israel. Screw them! And, please, I implore you to get this right. Understand the words of professor Gad Saad, of the late great Rex Murphy and Sir Roger Scruton. Support Israel, our ally, and our dear longtime friends, the Jewish people.
Thanks for reading. For more on this topic, read the recent guest post by National Post columnist, Barbara Kay, called Lord Arthur James Balfour: The Accidental Zionist Who Changed…Everything
In addition, James Pew has written to extensively researched long-form essays on Israel, that were previously published in The Turn. The first is The Case for Israel. And the Second is Israel, A Promised Land.
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James Pew contributed a chapter to the best-selling book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers
A long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy
For evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!
 | A guest post by
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Thank you for this, James.
I think what most of fail to understand is that when radical Islamists tell us they're going to kill us, we should believe them. Their stated intent is to i) annihilate Israel / Jews, ii) Christians, iii) anyone / everyone living in a democracy.
The people of Israel are the front line and of course deserving of our support on moral grounds alone. On the basis of the survival of all who are not Muslim (and perhaps a number of non-radical Muslims agree), we should be firmly behind Israel as well as Jews around the world.
The current situation is unconscionable. How do we stop the spread of this hatred?
The love affair with the Hyprocritical Lefty Social Activist Woke Do-gooders and the Radical Racist Islamo Nazis is very telling, as both narratives are based on lies. IE, keep repeating and forcing lies and propaganda until they’re accepted. Allowing the normalization of antisemitism to fester into social acceptance (through education, in institutions, by government) is wrong, Without calling out the real occupiers, the real colonizers, the real violent mob, and other academic mumbo jumbo. This does not represent the Values of Canada!
The Fault lies with Weak politicians, appeasing radical groups, and organizations and leaders who buy into these untrue narratives and current trends-du-jour.
My mother told me a story, when she met a young teacher starting out years ago in BC, who was trying to get a full time job in a district. He ended up being hired by a Muslim private school in the Fraser Valley. He told my mother he worked there about a year, but felt so uncomfortable, that clearly anyone with any moral compass knew what they were teaching children at the school was wrong, to hate others, to justify violence, that lying was acceptable, medieval thinking, etc. He quit the job, with a clear conscious.
The Trojan horse is within and the Frog is boiling. It's time for Canadians with Moral Values to Stand up!