Antisemitism petition tabled as anti-Israel intimidation grows

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OTTAWA — As anti-Israel protests in Canada grow, nearly 13,000 Canadians have signed a petition urging the government to classify commonly-used antisemitic chants as hate speech.

The petition, tabled Wednesday in the House of Commons by independent Spadina-Fort York MP Kevin Vuong, comes in response to the increased and overt use of chants such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in anti-Israel protests across Canada.

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Vuong, among the most vocal Parliamentarians on Canada’s antisemitism problem, reported he and his wife were followed and photographed by an unknown woman while out for walks earlier this week.

Aside from being followed and photographed from slow-moving vehicles, their walking route was also lined with posters specifically targeting Vuong for his support for Canadian Jews, accusing Vuong of “supporting genocide,” among other smears.

The incident, as well as photographs of the culprits and their licence plate, were shared with both parliamentary security personnel and Toronto police.

“The petition calls for definitive action from the government to provide clarity to law enforcement agencies and provincial and territorial attorneys general, as well as for it to examine and provide clarity on the legality of other slogans, such as “globalize the intifada” and “long live October 7,” Vuong said in the House of Commons Wednesday afternoon.

“It asks and demands that the government convene a national antisemitism summit focused on taking immediate action.”

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Talia Klein Leighton, from Canadian Women Against Antisemitism and an organizer of the petition, said she was pleased by how many people signed the petition, but lamented growing antisemitism.  

“Since the situation has only gotten worse, and since the rhetoric that we’re seeing has only gotten worse, one of the messages that we’re trying to bring out that it’s not just directed at the Jews,” she said.

“A slogan like ‘globalize the intifada’ has nothing to do with the Jews, has nothing to do with Israel — and has everything to do with western democracy.”

This rising extremism, she said, won’t be limited to just calling for the destruction of Israel.

“The Jews are only the canaries in the coal mine,” she said.

The petition came as antisemitism in Canada reaches new heights, with reports of harassment and intimidation against Canadian Jews and their supporters becoming commonplace.

Casey Babb, a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Institute for National Security Studies, as well as an advisor with Secure Canada, told the National Post that he’s never before seen such levels of antisemitism in Canada.

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“Antisemitism in Canada and abroad is primarily presenting itself through the prism of anti-Zionism, which, in my opinion, is the most pervasive form of antisemitism, and the most perverse in a number of ways,” he said.

“That’s what making it so challenging for senior decision-makers in government, business and academia to address it, because they’ve been taught for decades that it’s okay to be vehemently opposed to Israel. (They’re told) that’s not antisemitic, when in fact, it often is,” he said.

Anti-Zionism, he stresses, does not include legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy.

“It’s something else entirely if you’re chanting slogans that call for the erasure of Israel, or if you are obsessively calling for countries to divest,” Babb said.

While numerous and often convenient interpretations of “from the river to the sea” abound, general consensus agrees the chant calls for the eradication of the state of Israel and its citizens — in favour of a Palestinian-only state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Babb noted a shift in messaging and tactics from Canada’s anti-Israel activists, largely shifting from intimidating Jewish residents from within their own neighbourhoods to well-organized and funded encampments on university campuses.

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“It’s as if Hamas sympathizers within the Arab communities handed off the baton to the far left,” Babb noted.

“Islamists in Canada and throughout the world have really been embraced by the far left, that’s because they share the same perverse ideologies when it comes to the desire to see the state of Israel, the Jewish state, undone.”

Both groups, he said, see Israelis — and by extension Jews — as a “moveable people.”

“Only since being in Israel has that changed,” he said.

“That idea of ‘well, the Jews have fled before, we’ve removed them from the entirety of the Middle East before, we’ve removed them from much of Europe, we can move them again, that’s who they are.’”

Babb likened the “from the river to the sea” chant as as a modern day version of Blut und Boden, a Nazi Germany nationalist phrase upholding government policies of racially pure blood (blut) united on German soil (boden.)

As cases of antisemitic intimidation rise, so do the resolve of those targeted by it.

“No one is going to tell me and my wife how to live,” Vuong told the National Post.

“I stand up for what is right, and we are not going to give up our values in the face of intimidation.”

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National Post

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