When it comes to the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion crowd in Canada it has long been apparent that “Jews don’t count” to many adherents of the woke crowd constantly citing discrimination against other minorities.
This was apparent long before Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 exposed how fully embedded this exclusion has become amongst supposedly learned circles in polite society.
In 2021, for example, British author, comedian and screenwriter David Baddiel examined the phenomenon in his book Jews Don’t Count: How Identity Politics Failed One Particular Identity.
It documented how antisemitism is often excluded from condemnation of other forms of discrimination ranging from racism, to Islamophobia, because the study authors classify Jews as members of the oppressor class rather than as victims of discrimination themselves.
This despite the fact that, in a Canadian context for example, Canada’s Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs recently reported based on police hate crime statistics that while Jews make up less than 1% of Canada’s population, 19% of all reported hate crimes last year were linked to antisemitism and that reported hate crimes against Jews increased 71% between 2022 and 2023.
Given this context, it is shocking, but not surprising that the Canadian Medical Association Journal recently published an external audit meant to improve its diversity efforts that, as reported by Postmedia’s Bryan Passifiume, focused almost exclusively on Black, Muslim and Indigenous issues, excluding any mention of the virulent antisemitism Jewish Canadian physicians and medical students experienced both before and after Hamas’ attack.
Were the authors unaware, for example, of a study the University of Toronto commissioned on rampant antisemitism within the university’s medical school published in 2022 by Dr. Ayelet Kuper, a child of Holocaust survivors, “Reflections on addressing antisemitism in a Canadian faculty of medicine”?
It ran in the Canadian Medical Education Journal.
The CMAJ editor-in-chief said its report about discrimination faced by Muslim, Black and Indigenous medical professionals was done by an outside consultant after an inappropriate letter critical of hijabs prompted a backlash within the CMAJ and it was obligated to publish the consultant’s report as written to preserve the review’s independence.
She said it does not represent the totality of the CMAJ’s views on the issue as evidenced by its other publications.