Canadian Jews are facing a wave of hate unlike any they have seen in decades. Jewish schools have been shot up. Synagogues have been firebombed. In Toronto, police say, 45 per cent of the hate crimes recorded this year have been antisemitic. Only this week a mass bomb threat targeted dozens of Jewish institutions across the country, including community centres and hospitals.
Demonstrators have streamed through the streets of Canadian cities accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a vicious slur against a nation founded in the aftermath of the most notorious genocide in modern times. Encampments have sprung up on Canadian campuses to accuse Israel of being a brutal colonial oppressor and demanding universities break financial and academic ties with the Jewish state. All of this has left many Jews feeling profoundly shaken.
Fully aware of what they are facing, union leader Fred Hahn reposted a video on his Facebook page on Aug. 11. The digitally altered video shows a diver with a Star of David tattoo on his arm jumping off a diving board at the Paris Olympics and turning into a bomb as he falls, leaving bleeding children and clouds of dust in his wake.
Any thinking person could have seen that this was like throwing gasoline on a bonfire. Jewish groups were rightly outraged. The national executive board of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) has called on him to resign. Mr. Hahn refuses, saying that he has taken down the video and apologized for circulating it. That, in his view, should be enough.
That might be true if this were a one-off, a case of hitting “share” in a momentary lapse of judgment. In fact, it is part of a consistent and deliberate pattern. Just a day after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Mr. Hahn put up a post cheering “the power of resistance around the globe.” Resistance, he said, is “fruitful,” and “no matter what some might say, resistance brings progress.”
This, remember, was after the attackers had killed about 1,200 people and abducted 250 more in a murderous rampage that showed no mercy even to old women and little children. And of course, it was before the Israeli counterattack that has killed so many thousands and stirred so much international condemnation. His mind was made up from the start.
Opinion: Why does this union leader tweet so much about Gaza, and so little about wages?
Mr. Hahn says that none of this makes him an antisemite. He is attacking the Jewish state, not the Jewish people. It is a commonly made distinction and often a fair one.
But, in these times, those who make it need to consider their words. Calling Israel a fascist, imperialist, genocidal or apartheid state, as many of its fiercest Western critics do, breeds an atmosphere of bitter hostility that has a real effect on Jewish people, wherever they are and whether or not they support Israel.
Though it may not be the same as antisemitism, anti-Zionism shares many of its characteristics. It depicts Israel as a unique source of evil in the world, crafty, rich and powerful despite its small population and size in the vastness of the Middle East. It focuses obsessively on the supposed crimes of this one state, passing over atrocities in places such as Sudan or Myanmar. (Where are the campus occupations over what is happening there?)
Antisemites claim that Jews have wheedled their way into a position of great influence, making shadowy alliances designed to advance their selfish interests. Anti-Zionists say that Israel has taken a chokehold on U.S. politics to enlist Washington as its protector.
Antisemites paint Jews as subhuman, outcasts among the decent peoples of the world. Anti-Zionists paint Israel as an illegitimate nation established on stolen land – “so-called Israel,” as some of today’s protesters call it.
Mr. Hahn simply will not see the harm his poisonous rhetoric does. Even as he was apologizing for his diver post, he was repeating his opposition to Israeli “genocide” in Gaza.
Like many of those who vilify others, he claims that it is he who has been vilified, smeared merely for expressing his well-known, perfectly reasonable views. When Ontario Labour Minister David Piccini confronted him over those views, he retorted: “I’m representing 290,000 workers.”
But is he? Do his rants about Israel reflect the thinking of CUPE’s members? Wouldn’t they prefer him to focus on things like – I don’t know – workers’ wages and benefits?
Many CUPE members have in fact joined in calling for him to quit. If he had the welfare of his union in mind, Mr. Hahn would stop playing the hero of the masses and listen to them. Rather than further divide the union movement, he would do the decent thing and step aside.