One year on, Jews in the West have had time to process the primary shock of Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel and the secondary shock of hateful blowback against Israel and Jews worldwide. We learned in a span of hours that where lethal antisemitism is concerned, “never again” was for us a mere objective, not a guarantee against those consumed by a mission of “again and again and again.”
But should we have been so surprised? Gaza was riddled with tunnels, their sole purpose to prepare for a war of extermination against Jews. The West’s intellectual “tunnels” have been operating in plain sight for many years. Under the aegis of “Israel Apartheid Week” and the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, vicious anti-Zionism has been a campus fixture since 2001, when the World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa erupted into a “festival of hate” against Jews. After decades of aggressive Israel-bashing, Palestinians have been elevated throughout western educational systems to the summit of intersectional victimhood. Those indoctrinated in this hierarchy over the last 25 years consider it a duty and a virtue to demonize Zionism as an original historical sin. October 7 popped the cork on that long-seething volcano.
Throughout the past year, we’ve seen hostage posters vandalized, Jewish schoolchildren bullied, Jewish-owned businesses attacked, Jewish neighbourhoods tormented, Jewish institutions burned and shot at. Downtowns are routinely plagued by foul-mouthed protesters shrieking mantras that call for Israel’s elimination. University campuses have tolerated long-term encampments, Judenrein except for Jews who earn their laissez-passer with a denunciation of Israel.
It’s getting worse. On Saturday in Toronto, a demonstration featured Hezbollah flags, banners extolling violence against Israel and portraits of the (recently eliminated) Hezbollah leader and arch-terrorist Hassan Nasrallah. Last Sunday in Montreal, a band of black-garbed protesters attacked Concordia University and smashed several downtown store windows. During a foot chase, one even threw Molotov cocktails in the direction of police, an ominous escalation.
More ominous in my opinion: Post-October 7, we saw the emergence at rallies and on western social media of the image of a Jewish star being dumped into a trash can accompanied by the words “Keep the world clean” — for years a meme favoured by Hamas, inspired by the Nazis.
The Nazis used the image and words in their propaganda to normalize the idea that Jews, like vermin, were a hygiene threat requiring drastic action to preserve the nation’s health. That such messages are tolerated in the public forum points to a growing acceptance of outright eradicationist antisemitism as a “respectable” opinion to hold, even among supposedly enlightened people in fields such as mental health, as evidenced by anti-Zionist blacklists targeting Jewish members of the profession.
No institution has played a more pernicious role in enabling Jewish scapegoatism than western media. In long 2014 articles for The Atlantic and Tablet, Canadian-Israeli journalist Matti Friedman famously chronicled the mutations in reportage and commentary that reflected “a change not in the news but in the newsroom,” when political activism usurped the principle of objectivity in Israel coverage.
In a Free Press piece last month, Friedman reprises his ever more relevant theme of near industry-wide subversion of professional journalism by anti-Zionist activism. Through the cherry-picking of facts, deliberate exclusion of necessary context and “reversing cause and effect,” left-leaning media determined that Israel was to be portrayed as a country “whose motivations could only be malevolent, and one responsible not only for its own actions but also for provoking the actions of its enemies.”
Media like the BBC and the CBC don’t make “errors,” Friedman says, and sending them “corrections” on their anti-Israel coverage won’t help. “Those aren’t errors,” Friedman writes. “They’re the result of the press doing a different job correctly.” The “different job” he refers to is the perpetuation of the myth that Jews are inextricably bound up with the human rights evils of our era — racism, apartheid and colonialism. There is no question in Friedman’s mind that over the last decade, “the growing derangement about Israel and the plummeting credibility of the press … are related phenomena.”
To conclude this October 7 first-year anniversary column on a personal note, I cannot overstate my gratitude, in these turbulent and dismaying circumstances, for my affiliation with the National Post, one of the few national newspapers in the West that has never succumbed to the far-left mind virus that battens on scapegoatism. Freedom to vigorously defend Zionism and Israel in my columns has been an enormous comfort to me over the past year.
I owe this freedom to our editor-in-chief, Rob Roberts. Rob has demonstrated intellectual independence and moral courage in standing up to many of the irrational mass delusions of our era, including anti-Zionism. And so it is fitting that on Oct. 15, Rob — also representing Postmedia, which has backed his editorial policy to the hilt — will receive an award for his professional integrity from the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation. It will be my privilege to present him with this much-deserved laurel. Kol ha kovod, Rob. All honour to you.
National Post
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