A couple of elephants in the room went unmentioned when Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke about antisemitism in Toronto on Monday, writes Steven Wernick.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Steven Wernick is senior rabbi of Beth Tzedec Congregation in Toronto, Canada’s largest synagogue.
Mark Carney chose Holy Blossom Temple – one of Toronto’s great historic synagogues – to deliver what may be the most direct and morally serious address on antisemitism ever given by a sitting Canadian prime minister. For that, he deserves genuine credit, and genuine engagement.
He was unequivocal. He said Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians, who have been “particularly and brutally targeted.” He recognized that when this covenant fails one community, it fails us all. He announced a new Ministerial Advisory Council, committed to a four-pronged approach, and he called on every Canadian to stand up and speak out. He understood, and said plainly, that the hate targeting Jews is not equivalent to the hate directed at others.
All of this is welcome and necessary. And I believe the Prime Minister is sincere.
Carney calls on Canadians to reject antisemitism that is testing country’s values
But there were two elephants in the room, almost completely unmentioned – and they will ultimately undermine everything else he said.
The first: Israel. He never said the word, and in the prepared remarks, it appeared just once, in a carefully constructed phrase about communities being targeted because of “the decisions and actions of a foreign government.” The intention was to bifurcate foreign policy from domestic hate. To say, in effect, that Canada’s position on the war in Gaza is a separate matter from antisemitism at home. I understand the political logic. I do not accept the analytical one.
The second: the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Working Definition of Antisemitism, which Canada adopted in 2019, and its accompanying handbook. The Prime Minister did not commit to implementing that practical guide as a matter of policy. But it is the missing instrument for everything the speech promised to accomplish.
Here is the truth that must be named: Israel has become the International Jew. Antisemitism has mutated, cloaking itself in the moral language of our time: colonialism, apartheid, human rights. It has found a new host: the Jewish state.
Speaking at a synagogue in Toronto on Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said antisemitism has surged to the levels not seen in the postwar period noting recent incidents including the firebombings of synagogues and bullets fired at Jewish schools. Carney said a new national unity council will assess what is driving antisemitism in Canada and improve research and data collection on hate incidents.
The Canadian Press
This is not hyperbole. It is the insight at the core of Natan Sharansky’s framework for distinguishing legitimate criticism from antisemitism – the three Ds. Demonization: portraying Israel in terms reserved for pure evil – Nazi-like, uniquely malevolent. Double standards: applying to Israel demands made of no other country. Delegitimization: denying Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
When leaders – in government, on campuses, in civil society – apply these three Ds to Israel, they paint a target on every Jewish back. Not because Jews are responsible for Israeli policy, but because antisemitism has always worked by proxy. The vessel changes; the hatred doesn’t. Climb aboard the accusers’ bandwagon without evidence or scrutiny, and you have given license to what we are seeing on our streets.
There is an unbridgeable difference between criticizing a government and denying a people’s right to exist. Criticizing Israel’s government is not antisemitism – it is often a moral obligation. Israeli Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have pursued policies that betray Israel’s founding values and make Jewish life harder everywhere. That criticism belongs in the public square. What does not belong there is the denial that Jewish people have any right to sovereign life in their ancestral homeland.
Zionism is not evil. It is a form of Jewish self-determination. And it is precisely here that the Handbook offers what Mr. Carney’s speech did not: a clear, principled, legally grounded line between the two.
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The Prime Minister said antisemitism is not a Jewish problem to fix. He was right. But it is also not a problem that can be addressed while virulent antizionism circulates as acceptable political speech. The surging hate on our streets, the bullets fired at Jewish schools and synagogues, the firebombs hurled at Jewish institutions, the businesses owned by Jews vandalized and their customers harassed, the atmosphere of fear around simply being Jewish in public – these things are incubated in a culture that has decided that one form of Jewish identity is not merely debatable, but evil. Once that threshold is crossed, the distance to violence is shorter than we want to believe.
Mr. Carney gathered the political will to say in a synagogue what needed to be said. Now comes the harder part: helping Canadians understand not just that antisemitism is wrong, but how it has hijacked the language of human rights, and how the Jewish state has become its primary vehicle. He should begin by committing to implement the IHRA Handbook across every federal institution.
The covenant he spoke of is real. So is the need for its repair. But repair requires the whole truth.