OP-ED: Scourge of Anti-Semitism Still Growing in Canada
Anti-Semitism has escalated so much in Canada, 85-year-old Canadian icon, human rights lawyer and former politician Irwin Cotler must go to dialysis accompanied by security, his daughter said recently
Anti-Semitism has escalated so much in Canada, 85-year-old Canadian icon, human rights lawyer and former politician Irwin Cotler must go to dialysis accompanied by security, his daughter said recently.
”Canada should be outraged,” said Michal Cotler-Wunsh, who met recently with our group of 33 Canadian women on a Friends of Jewish National Fund mission during our last days in Israel.
The articulate, smart, inspiring Cotler-Wunsh, a human rights lawyer and free speech expert who was a member of the Israeli Knesset and is Israel’s special envoy on anti-Semitism, told us that since Oct. 7 Jews around the world and in Israel have been fighting what can be called a ramped up version of the eighth front of war — that is anti-Semitism and blood libels about Israel.
Israel is said to be fighting a seven-front war, which includes attacks not just from Gaza but Lebanon, the West Bank, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Yemen.
Anti-Semitism — an “ever mutating lethal hate” — is what Cotler-Wunsh, also the CEO of the International Legal Forum, calls the “most reliable sign of a threatened society.”
Cotler-Wunsh — born in Israel but raised in Canada, where she attended McGill University — said October 7 was the Kristallnacht of our time, perpetuated by savages (harkening back to the Kristallnacht against Jews that occurred during the Nazi era in 1938).
She says — and she’s right — that there was denial about Oct. 7 “even as the barbaric savages were livestreaming their atrocities.”
When people call the rapes “resistance” or worse, deny the rapes that occurred on 10/7, “that is the collapse of morality,” she says.
Some four days after Oct. 7, there were articles in the world press (and comments on social media) accusing Israel of genocide, before the country even entered Gaza.
But Cotler-Wunsh said this war on the 8th front has been waged for 50 years without a ceasefire.
The opening shot and number 1 blood libel of the modern era was the UN claim, “Zionism is racism.”
But as she says, we are not a race, and so Zionism cannot be racism.
The second blood libel—started in 2001 at the UN conference in Durban, South Africa— claimed that Israel is an “apartheid state.”
That mushroomed into Israel Apartheid Week, which has been peddled for 24 years at universities and colleges in North America.
She says Anti-Zionism has become the most recent “mutation” of what is an ever-mutating anti-Semitism.
I have watched these three concepts repeated incessantly in the past two years by the ignorant indoctrinated into thinking Israel is the enemy.
By far one of the most devastating realities for Cotler-Wunsh over the past two years is the “international response” (or lack thereof) to the targeting of Jews.
For example, a father was beaten to a pulp in front of his five-year-old daughter in Montreal on a Sunday afternoon and “not one person walking by did anything.
”It was happening before their eyes,” she said.
When two diplomats were murdered on the steps of the Jewish embassy in Washington, D.C., the world didn’t shake.
”It was barely a blip on the global radar,” she said, noting that if it had been a diplomat from any other country, there would have been far more outrage.
Which brings me back to her father, who needs security to get to his dialysis appointments.
And to Toronto, where the terrorist sympathizers continue to take to the streets unchecked — enabled by a weak police chief, an impotent police force and an anti-Semitic mayor and her Hamas caucus.
This is despite the peace deal.
The Hamasniks continue to march through a Jewish neighbourhood of Toronto, accompanied by the police.
Is that outrageous? You bet.
Recently, the flag of a non-existent Palestinian state was raised at Toronto City Hall, organized by Mohamed Fakih, owner of Paramount Foods.
Another out-of-control protest occurred this past week when four Israelis were involved in a Munk Centre debate in downtown Toronto.
Cotler-Wunsh says these are not “pro-Palestinian protests” because if they were, these terrorist sympathizers would be advocating for the removal of Hamas from Gaza, not telling Jews to go back to Europe or calling them baby killers.
What we’re seeing, says Cotler-Wunsh, is a normalization of lethal anti-Semitism.
It is normalized,” she said. “The ability to normalize anti-Semitism is an indication of a failing society.”