With the recent reprehensible arson attack at a Montréal synagogue and shots fired at a Jewish girls’ school in Toronto, the moral panic surrounding antisemitism in Canada is rising to fever pitch. To listen to Jewish-Canadian establishment organizations and an all-too credulous media, you would believe that the second Nazi coming is here. The word “explosion” is regularly employed without question, and only in reference to antisemitism (see here and here and here). The word “unsafe” is also sown promiscuously to describe only Jewish students on campuses (see here and here and here).

Not only does the focus on such incidents draw Canadians’ attention away from the very real official death toll in Gaza, now over 50,000, and the muzzling of Canadian voices condemning it, it also amplifies calls by representatives of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), B’nai Brith Canada and Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center and other prominent mainstream Jewish leaders for more severe repressive measures against peaceful opposition to Israel’s genocide and its apartheid regime and the general curtailment of civil liberties in Canada.

This is not to ignore real threats. Antisemitism is doubtless increasing commensurate with a rising tide of white supremacism and bigotry against numerous target groups. But contrary to the repeated insistence by pro-Israel organizations, their representatives and an increasing number of public figures, there is no evidence that Jews or their institutions are the primary targets. Moreover, there is the (usually unspoken but implicit) toxic suggestion that antisemitism is a more serious form of bigotry than any other, that an antisemitic incident or attitude carries more valence than hatred directed at other groups, that, in fact, Jewish lives matter more than others.

Every year, B’nai Brith Canada produces its “audit” of antisemitic incidents and every year we are told antisemitism is going through the roof. Yet the audit is highly flawed, methodologically unsound, and its data collection opaque, to say the least. To believe the audit, antisemitic incidents in Canada are preposterously 18 times more numerous than in the United States, proportional to the size of their respective Jewish communities. Yet international surveys on antisemitism done over several years by the Anti-Defamation League show Canadians to have among the least antisemitic attitudes in the world. Merely one of the problems with B’nai Brith’s audit is that it includes disapproval of Israel in its list of antisemitic incidents, deliberately muddying the waters.

As the flagship enterprise of the antisemitism hunters, the B’nai Brith audit’s flaws are those of the antisemitism hysteria in general.

Let’s get real.

The panic and false information surrounding antisemitism bears little relation to any actual danger or harm faced by Jewish-Canadians, especially compared to that faced by other ethnic and religious groups.

For example in Canada:

• In a mere four months, Canadian police killed ten First Nations people. While 5.1 percent of people living in Canada are Indigenous, 16.2 percent of people killed in police-involved deaths are Indigenous.
• A study over 22 years of police-involved deaths with force used by race shows the top three recipients are Indigenous (0.321), Black (0.244), and Arab (0.2).
• In 2022, 184 women and girls were killed, mostly by men. This amounts to one woman or girl killed every 48 hours.
• According to Egale Canada, an organization representing queer Canadians, “Statistics Canada has reported that in 2023, hate crimes targeting sexual orientation increased 69 percent from the previous year. These numbers are alarming but unsurprising, as this trend has been ongoing for years. From 2016-2023, police-reported hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation have increased a staggering 388 percent.”
• Twenty percent of transgender people in Ontario have reported experiencing physical or sexual assault due to their identity; 34 percent report being subjected to verbal threats or harassment.
• According to the Government of Canada, “About 7% of persons with disabilities were victims of physical assault compared to almost 4% of those without disabilities… Persons with disabilities were almost 4 times more likely to report being victims of sexual assault than those without disabilities (6% versus 1.4%).”
• The Canadian Encyclopedia concludes: “Indigenous and racialized people experience discrimination when they are stopped by the police or have reduced access to accommodation and employment to a disproportionate degree compared to the rest of the population.”
• The Canadian Labour Congress states that “Indigenous, Black, and racialized workers continue to face barriers to employment opportunities, discriminatory hiring practices, unequal pay, and limited opportunities for advancement.”

Canadian Jews are noticeably and gratifyingly missing from the above kinds of abuse experienced regularly by other equity-deserving groups. Unlike other targeted groups, Jews especially have little or nothing to fear from police and other armed officials of the state. Yet to listen to the official Jewish organizations, Canada is in the middle of another Kristallnacht.

I am a Jewish-Canadian, the child of an Auschwitz survivor. I grew up among people with concentration camp tattoos on their arms. Canadian Jews of my parents’ generation were regularly excluded or subjected to quotas in higher education programs and certain jobs and occupations. Thus I’m well attuned to the dangers of Jew hatred. But that kind of discrimination against Jews by authorities is a thing of the past. We have succeeded in Canadian society beyond our wildest expectations.

However, if I were a member of one of the other equity-deserving groups, often fighting for my very life against attacks by white supremacists, I would be outraged and angry at this hyperbole and singular over-emphasis on the experience of one group to the virtual exclusion of what I face every day. I would be suspicious of and hesitant to unite with my Jewish neighbours (or at least their “official” representatives). At the same time, I would be afraid to speak up publicly lest I be condemned (unfairly) as disparaging or denying antisemitism, or worse, accused of being an actual antisemite.

I would be, quite simply, furious.

I am, quite frankly, furious.

This is precisely what nobody needs. Not Jews, not anybody else in a targeted group. Are we not in this together?

Curtailment of civil liberties

In response to the recent attacks, and spurred on by Jewish communal institutions, the federal government scheduled a “forum” held in Ottawa in February to “discuss the growing public safety threat of antisemitism.” The Department of Justice said, “The Government of Canada recognizes the urgent need for national leadership to ensure Jewish-Canadians feel safe in their synagogues, schools, and communities.” The forum followed an “antisemitism summit” in Ottawa in June 2021. No other equity-deserving group received this kind of attention.

An increasing number of governments, municipalities, educational institutions, and police departments are adopting the Working Definition of Antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which highlights criticism of the State of Israel as a form of bigotry. Already the IHRA definition has been used to curtail freedom of expression on Israel-Palestine and to punish individuals and organizations who speak out on the issue.

Police and public authorities have already gone over the top in repressive measures against those who protest against Israeli apartheid and the genocide in Gaza.

B’nai Brith Canada has published its wishlist of authoritarian actions, a “7-Point Plan to Combat Antisemitism in Canada,” which includes, among other things, the banning of pro-Palestine street demonstrations in Canadian cities, monitoring and reporting of violations of the IHRA definition and the use of the definition to curtail protest activity, and augmenting the current list of “terrorist” organizations to include groups that engage in no terror activities, as was recently done to the group Samidoun.

In addition to advising and encouraging legal authorities to pursue criminal charges against pro-Palestine activists, pro-Israel advocates are ramping up the use of civil lawsuits and injunctions against organizations, universities, unions, individuals, and faculty in what must be called a campaign of “civil terror.”

And, in an example of the criminalization of civil law, Montréal law enforcement officials recently jailed activist, writer, and Canadian Dimension columnist Yves Engler for five days for calling out a pro-Israel blogger.

The establishment Jewish organizations appear to hanker for a Trump-like regime in Canada, where law and government policy shuts down, deports, silences or otherwise engages in “extraordinary rendition” of political opponents—nothing less than the destruction of our fragile democracy.

One initiative already manifested in Montréal and threatened in Toronto and other municipalities is the creation of “bubble zones” where an area around so-called “religious institutions” (Jewish synagogues, schools, community centres) are rendered off-limits to rallies and demonstrations. The precipitating event in many of these cases is the use of a synagogue for political purposes, such as the sale of Palestinian land. According to The Trillium, if bubble zones proposed by Toronto City Councillor James Pasternak were enacted “protests would be banned, for example, near the city’s 1,071 child care centres, 1,407 places of worship or 1,194 schools. A total of 3,937 locations would be affected, though there is some redundancy in that list: for example, a church that rents space to a day care will be counted twice. In many cases, different radiuses overlap.” Indeed, by this initiative, Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square, now host to rallies of all kinds, could be prohibited ground, because City Hall contains a child care centre where some Jewish children may be enrolled.

What we could see is the wholesale diminution of the civil liberties formerly enshrined in the Charter and other human rights legislation. To paraphrase a famous dictum, first they came for the Palestine supporters, then they came for all of us.

Diminishing solidarity among targets of racism by playing “Oppression Olympics”

But worst of all, the impact of the foregrounding and exceptionalizing of antisemitism is the havoc it wreaks among equity-deserving groups and especially the relationship between Canadian Jews and non-Jews.

To Black, Muslim, queer, Palestinian, women or disabled Canadians, familiar with the recurring hatred visited upon their groups, it comes as a slap in the face to see the overweening attention paid to antisemitism and Jews. Far from fighting antisemitism, this attention has the potential to breed at the very least resentment and cynicism and, at worst, the very anti-Jewish sentiment it seeks to combat.

Taking an exclusivist and isolationist approach is exactly the wrong way to fight against antisemitism or any other form of hate. Such an approach can only hurt other targeted groups; it will impair the mounting of a common struggle against racial, religious and ethnic discrimination in Canada; and it will prove harmful to building the essential cooperation that is so badly needed among communities targeted by hate.

First, we must call out the moral blackmail weaponized by pro-Israel groups and put antisemitism in proper context, neither exaggerating nor diminishing its relevance.

Second, only an approach based on building solidarity and focused on creating unity among all targeted groups is needed to combat rising nativism, racism, hatred and discrimination.

Larry Haiven is Professor Emeritus at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and a founding member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada.