\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAn anti-Israel march through the streets of Toronto took a moment to linger outside Mount Sinai Hospital chanting for \u201cintifada.\u201d After condemnations from Toronto\u2019s mayor, Canada\u2019s prime minister and other top officials, protest organizers insisted there was no antisemitic intent in targeting a hospital with a Jewish name founded by Jewish doctors.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Mount Sinai Hospital] just happens to be along our regular rally route, which we pass by on a usual basis, as we head to rally in front of the U.S. consulate,\u201d they said in a statement.<\/p>\n
If any form of racism was at play, they insisted, it was on the other side.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe irony is that portraying the raising of the Palestinian flag as a hate-motivated act of antisemitism is itself perpetuating anti-Palestinian racism,\u201d they contended.<\/p>\n
Days later, an anti-Israel rally at McGill University in Montreal blockaded the Samuel Bronfman Building on campus, home of the university\u2019s management department, accusing the faculty of a \u201clong history of complicity in the occupation of Palestine.\u201d The choice of location had nothing to do with the famous Jewish name plastered on the front of the building, they said.<\/p>\n
Closer to home, Muslim organizations in British Columbia threatened that representatives of the NDP provincial government would not be permitted in Muslim spaces as long as Selina Robinson remained in cabinet because she made an offhanded remark about the arability of desert land three-quarters of a century ago. As one of the country\u2019s most prominent (and only) Jewish elected officials and one who has unashamedly defended Israel, Robinson\u2019s expulsion was a big coup for the activists.<\/p>\n
These are all of a piece with similar reported events and, doubtlessly, many more such incidents unreported.<\/p>\n
The Jewish-American singer (American, note, not Israeli) Matisyahu is currently in the midst of a kerfuffle in which concerts in Arizona and New Mexico were canceled. The venues assured the public that the concerts were canceled because of security concerns and short staffing, not because he\u2019s a Jew.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nComedian Jerry Seinfeld was recently subjected to chants of \u201cgenocide supporter\u201d and \u201cNazi scum\u201d while leaving the State of World Jewry address by author Bari Weiss at New York\u2019s 92nd Street Y. He got, perhaps, a better sense of the state of world Jewry outside the event than he did inside.<\/p>\n
The group Art Not Genocide\u00a0<\/span>Alliance is calling to exclude Israel from this year\u2019s 60th Venice Biennale. Officials at the Eurovision Song Contest are fine-tooth-combing this year\u2019s Israeli entry to make sure there are no hidden political messages. Soccer governing bodies from 12 countries \u2013 almost all of them among the world\u2019s worst human rights violators \u2013 are calling for Israeli teams to be excluded from FIFA, the international football entity.<\/p>\nIn each of these instances, there is an argument to be made that the targets were not chosen because they are Jews (or are institutions founded or funded by Jews) but because they were at a Zionist event, or they made an impolitic remark or the people in the building are guilty of some unspecified Zionist infraction. This, though, is to unjustly justify their actions.<\/p>\n
Whether Israel is being fairly or unfairly untreated is not the point here. Goldstein\u2019s cancelation and the raft of similar examples are not targeting a country but Jewish individuals and entities. Yes, we are assured, these Jewish individuals and entities are also Zionist people and groups, a differentiation that is presumed to excuse this extraordinary singling out. Yet, we do not see performing artists from China, a country that is holding hundreds of thousands of Muslims in concentration camps, denied admission to Canadian or European cultural festivals. Citizens of Saudi Arabia, which holds mass public executions and subjugates the female half of the population, is not excluded from world soccer events. Citizens of the 50 or so other countries in the world that (unlike Israel) are categorized as \u201cnot free\u201d or \u201cpartly free\u201d are not subjected to slanders on the streets of New York or banned from speaking in Peterborough.<\/p>\n
Never mind human rights abominations like North Korea or Iran. The brutalities perpetrated by their governments are almost entirely ignored by commentators and activists fixated on Israel. Again, though, that is only part of the problem. What we are seeing here is not an attack on official representatives of those countries. Rather, it is akin to screaming at people leaving an exhibition of Iranian art or boycotting a Chinese-Canadian-owned business. It is the sort of guilt by proxy that led apparently millions of otherwise decent Canadians to see little wrong in interning \u201cenemy aliens\u201d during wartime \u2013 except even that parallel fails because Canada is not at war with Israel but has longstanding and justifiably friendly relations and shared values with that country.<\/p>\n
Agree or not with the approach, movements targeting a country and its official representatives operate in a realm of legitimate political discourse. There is something parallel but significantly different happening here. People and organizations perceived even remotely as associated with Israel are being targeted for boycotts \u2013 in some cases, to all appearances, merely being Jewish is enough to earn condemnation and cancelation. This is a textbook case (well, a codified illustration) of antisemitism.<\/p>\n
Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel is one of the examples accompanying the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism. This is largely moot, though, because the very people who employ these tactics explicitly reject the definition because it is accompanied by precisely examples like these. (If you don\u2019t like being accused of xyz, redefine the meaning of xyz.)<\/p>\n
Ultimately, there is no way to prove motivation. We can say the people shouting outside a Jewish hospital or calling Seinfeld \u201cNazi scum\u201d are antisemitic, they can say they\u2019re not, and no one is any further ahead.<\/p>\n
There is something irrefutable, though. The Overton window, the spectrum of ideas that are deemed acceptable in a political discussion, is widening. Every time a Jewish speaker is targeted or a Jewish singer is subjected to cancelation and the public responds with a yawn, the bounds of what is acceptable broadens. It is by no means hyperbolic to suggest that this is precisely the way a society begins a slide into despotism or mob rule.<\/p>\n
The context or content of the complaints cease to really matter. Organizations issue diktats demanding the ouster of a Jewish politician, thugs threaten to disrupt a concert, a religious group threatens a governing party\u2019s standing in a few swing ridings and political leaders, event producers and concert venues capitulate. Pretty soon, activists and malcontents of all sorts see that threatening violence or boycotts is the easiest way to silence their targets because middle-of-the-road people fold instantly behind valid concerns for safety.<\/p>\n
Motivation and intent probably matter less than outcome. These targetings have the effect of isolating, sidelining and menacing Jewish people \u2013 call them Jews, call them Zionists, call them whatever.<\/p>\n
This is, without overstatement, a dangerous threat to bedrock ideas of a democratic society.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leah Goldstein was supposed to speak today at an International Women\u2019s Day event but her invitation was rescinded. (photo from Leah Goldstein) Leah Goldstein, a BC woman who is a professional road-racing cyclist and inspirational speaker, was supposed to be sharing her story with an audience in Peterborough, Ont., today, International Women\u2019s Day. Instead, first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43743,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[801,23021,5389],"class_list":["post-43741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-op-ed","tag-antisemitism","tag-international-womens-day","tag-leah-goldstein"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a>\u201cI\u2019m not political,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve been speaking for 11 years. Not one time has anyone ever come up to me, my manager or the organization I work for and said they felt offended by anything I said. Not one time in 11 years. I speak about my athletic career, about my crashes, my recovery, some of the hardships that many women go through. That\u2019s it.\u201d<\/p>\n