On Saturday, a self-proclaimed journalist named Samira Mohyeddin posted on X that “tens of thousands” of people were marching in Toronto to mark the one-year anniversary of “Israel’s relentless bombardment and genocide” in Gaza. The new journalism fellow at the University of Toronto’s Women and Gender Studies Institute, and former producer of CBC’s The Current, made no mention of what had prompted the “relentless bombardment.”
I can’t presume to speak to Mohyeddin’s personal politics, but her post reflects the view held by a distressingly large number of young Canadians who have formed an unholy alliance with Palestinian activists.
A new Leger poll for the Association of Canadian Studies suggests one in five 18-24-year-olds support Hamas over Israel. Some of those young people have roots in the region, but the majority have bought into the settler colonialism social theory. It not only questions the right of Israel to exist but also proposes that countries like Canada and the United States are illegitimate, and that all non-Indigenous people are usurpers.
If you accept that idea, it does not take a great leap of faith to believe that all political action should be aimed at avenging past injustices.
Since mass decolonization in North America is not a realistic option, the focus has shifted to a “live” struggle — that between the “Indigenous” Palestinian people and the Jewish European “colonizers.”
In this light, violence is a necessary means to an end.
As Adam Kirsch, an editor at the Wall Street Journal and author of a new book called On Settler Colonialism, put it in a recent Munk Debate interview: “People who have protested the killing of Palestinian civilians are actually very excited about the killing of Israeli civilians” as part of a colonial struggle.
That the settler colonial model is an ill-fit for what is more accurately a clash of two national movements carries little weight with young progressives who accept the paradigm uncritically. To them, Western civilization is an invasion and has no right to exist.
The exhausted majority is forced to watch impotently as the nation’s streets and campuses are seized by the mob dynamics of a noisy, illiberal minority.
That the settler colonial model is an ill-fit for what is more accurately a clash of two national movements carries little weight with young progressives
B’nai Brith, the Jewish community organization, recorded a 109 per cent increase in antisemitic incidents last year, the worst on record. Violence against Jews increased more than 200 per cent.
It is a grim picture, except for the fact that law enforcement seems belatedly to be getting its act together.
Toronto Police noted a spike in hate crimes in 2023 but only made arrests in 18 per cent of cases.
Its figures for the first half of 2024 suggest the number of incidents that led to arrests has risen to around one third.
The country’s largest municipal police force arrested two men for carrying Hezbollah flags last week. Given Hezbollah is a listed terrorist entity, the men were charged with public incitement of hatred. Canada has laws against advocating genocide (section 318 of the Criminal Code), public incitement of hatred (section 319-1) and wilful promotion of hatred (section 319-2), but they have been used sparingly because of freedom of speech concerns.
That’s as it should be. But we have strayed from freedom of expression into terrain where rape and murder are lionized as legitimate tactics.
Section 318 and 319-2 require the consent of the Attorney General to lay charges, complicating any prosecution.
This led B’nai Brith and two other Jewish organizations to write to the justice minister, Arif Virani earlier this month to call for him to bring forward new legislation to criminalize the glorification of terrorism. In particular, they asked him to prohibit the public waving of the flags of banned terror organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.
That may prove less urgent if the existing legislation can be used by police forces.
But Canada should still modernize its anti-hate laws to prevent a repetition of the disgraceful scenes in Mississauga, Ont., last October 7, when a joyous crowd honked horns and cheered the news from Israel, as if they had just won the World Cup.
The B’nai Brith letter noted that other countries like France and Britain have such anti-glorification legislation but Canada has yet to take this step.
“The absence of such laws allows individuals to promote and celebrate terrorist ideologies without facing legal repercussions,” it said. “The oversight is corrosive to public order and serves to enable those who seek to radicalize others and perpetuate hatred in our communities.”
That is an important point. The Leger poll suggests that older Canadians are far less likely to support Hamas.
Younger Canadians may yet grow out of their reckless and misguided support for settler colonialism, but only if they don’t become radicalized in the meantime.
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