HANNAFORD: Why won't Canada's progressives speak up for Canada's Jews?

What's happened to Canada's left is appalling. There was a time, not that long ago, when the NDP was a safe place for Jewish people. So, for that matter, was the Liberal Party of Canada. I’m speaking of the 1970s, 80s, 90s, even the first years of this century. Any public comment from anybody that might be construed as bringing Jews in particular into disrepute and by extension Israel, was a career ending move. On this, the left was in the lead. Conservative parties had constantly to be careful who was supporting them or giving them money, lest that person fail a leftist antisemitic morality test. That has changed; Opposition House Leader Melissa Lantsman is Jewish, and former Prime Minister Stephen Harper is remembered for his strongly pro-Israel stance.However human rights commissions were progressive institutions of control from their start in the early '60s, and as their role expanded, went after holocaust deniers, anti-semites, journalists across the country, even if what was construed as an antisemitic comment by the latter was correct in point of detail. In a foreshadowing of today's Critical Theory, truth was not the issue or a defence; what mattered was did the remark or publication expose an identifiable group to hatred or contempt? That alone was the question the commissions existed to decide.And they did so with the full support of governments of all stripes, including the NDP — British Columbia’s NDP in fact.But now it's apparently the left that's losing the morality test. Nathan Rotman, at one time Rachel Notley’s chief of staff, has gone on record on X (Twitter) to say that the NDP is riddled with antisemitism.Not just in Alberta, that he has personally observed. Not just in BC, where Jewish MLA Selina Robinson recently stepped down as Minister of Post-Secondary Education and quit the party, after NDP Premier Dave Eby conspicuously failed to defend her after a gauche-but-true comment about Palestine.No, says Rotman on X, “This is not a BC problem, it’s a national one. It’s become more uncomfortable to be Jewish in the party and that’s an understatement. I haven’t left the party but it’s certainly leaving me.”What just happened here? Upon the matter of antisemitism within the Alberta NDP, I defer to his personal knowledge. But not for nothing may we ask how it is that pro-Hamas mobs can parade, chant hate slogans, invade Jewish residential areas and businesses, harass Jewish university students and even interrupt the functioning of Government of Canada events, and Canadian governments — an NDP government in BC and the most leftist Liberal government we've ever had in Ottawa, do nothing about it?It is frankly a national scandal. There is a line between the legitimate exercise of free expression and the promotion of racial hatred. It’s been crossed and things are getting worse, not better. If the police and the justice system are not ordered to act, somebody could get killed.There’s a lot going on here, but I offer you two thoughts.1) Fifty years ago, Canada's antisemites were to a man, white and politically powerless. They had no constituency and no doors open to them. They circulated their thoughts among themselves and whoever would listen on crudely reproduced newsletters. But prosecuting this fringe was an easy way for progressives to score moral points.Above all however, they were relatively few in number; they could barely mount a corporal's guard. They were not a significant voting bloc, and nor did they really know what they wanted.None of that is true today. Few of those are white today, who perpetrate the vicious antisemitism we see on our streets. The most visible are in fact from immigrant communities, there appear to be a lot of them and (significantly) they do have the power to turn elections and the desire to do so.It’s easy to talk tough to, and about, skinheads or elderly men living in the past and nourishing old resentments.It’s a lot harder to deal with people who can actually show up to your campaign meetings, trash them and would be happy doing it, and make the difference between you winning or losing an election.So there's some cowardice in high places, going on here. Nobody who should be dealing with it, wants to.2) These days, politics is not about issues you can argue over, but about the identity you were born with. People are not dividing on economic policy or national defence, or even pharmacare, health and education. Critical theory — the woke-ism you hear about, and all its outworkings across every political decision that we deal with — is now the dividing line. Critical Theory separates Canadians into Oppressors and Oppressed. Oppressors are white. Everybody else is by definition oppressed.If you’re oppressed you can do no wrong. You can even do what Hamas terrorists did to hundreds of innocent Israelis on 7th October last year, and still claim victimhood. On the other hand, if you’re an oppressor, you can do no right. Even defending your own life is an act of oppression. This by the way is not just the politics of Palestine. In blue states further south, robbers get bail, people who resist them get jail.In November 2000, the notable journalist and commentator Barbara Amiel argued in the National Post that the Holocaust legitimized the state of Israel, thus: "When only 50 years ago six million Jews were murdered, all doubts about the necessity for a homeland were swept aside in the horror and in 1947 the United Nations voted Israel into existence. By that world vote it became arguably the most legitimate nation-state in modern times, created by ballot rather than bayonet."That would seem to elevate the argument beyond discussion. Yet what makes Jews fair game now for so many people is that whatever their heritage of real oppression, from the Assyrians to the Nazis, they mostly present today as white European. None of the horror matters. And so, to the critical theorists by whatever name they do politics by, the grandchildren of the oppressed people who died in the camps are — oppressors. Even the option of living peacefully side by side is unavailable: The 'oppressed' will suffer no two-state solution that would make it possible.And this is the political issue that in Rotman's view, the NDP can't and won't handle. Rotman didn't mention it, but with the Government of Canada advocating the impossible 'two-state solution' and to the amazement of all, reinstating funding to the terrorist-riddled, Hamas-controlled UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA,) it is clear that the Trudeau Liberals can't/won't either.It used to be said that 'first they came for the Jews but I wasn't a Jew etc, then they came for somebody else' and in the end there was nobody left when they came for me. It's become a cliche.However, if Canadian politicians decide to 'let it go, because there's more pro-Palestinian voters than Jewish voters,' Canadians themselves will find that when they're up against the demands of 'woke,' that's how their situation will be judged as well. Nobody will be coming to help.I'll never be an NDP well-wisher. But today I have some sympathy for the NDP-er Nathan Rotman. Like many Canadians, he happens to be a Jew at a time when — amazingly — it's hard to be Jewish.

HANNAFORD: Why won't Canada's progressives speak up for Canada's Jews?

Related Stories