'I didn't know' is no excuse

Visiting the Collingwood art and street fair in September, my wife and I did not expect to find anti-Israel slogans stenciled into the sidewalks and an anti-Israel Defense Forces message chalked in front of the CWOOD sign in front of City Hall.

It felt unnerving and out of place that the pitch of standard slogans rallying against Israel would be underfoot on this sunny day in downtown Collingwood, which calls itself “a progressive community” in Ontario, Canada, with not one person seeming to be bothered enough to question the message’s offensiveness.

I made my concerns clear to the town organizers, where I met Tim Fryer, the deputy mayor, by chance, and expressed my concerns. I felt unsafe and threatened by these messages that had no place on the city’s walkways. I asked that they be removed. The response I got is what prompts me to write this article.

“These messages are an expression of free speech,” was one city official’s response, to which I countered, in an effort to educate, “No, these messages are an incitement to hatred, a subversive attack on the Jewish people.”

I have since written to the town, now three times, without response. I requested to address the City Council to explain the difference between free speech and the vicious propaganda designed to normalise and demonize the Jew. The playbook was written less than a century ago in 1930s Germany. The free-speech answer to the passive response to these messages of hate is complicit in societal moral indifference.

The ultimate objective of this relentless campaign of slogans and rallies by unknown organizers is to normalize and demonize the Jewish person to create a moral indifference in society. This is the subversiveness of contemporary antisemitism, which could very well rally an incitement to violence against Jews. There is sufficient expert testimony and counter-information in the public domain.

The answer “I didn’t know” in the aftermath of violence will not cut it. The inaction of governments and the continued propagation of media supporting misinformation on the war in Gaza make all people who have turned a blind-eye participants in this relentless campaign of antisemitic intentions.

The methodology is not new; it is merely modernized. The success of the “Final Solution,” as 6,000,000 Jews were corralled into cattle cars and murdered in concentration camps, should dumbfound anyone; the genocide against Jews in Nazi Germany happened without a widespread moral uprising from the German populace, which would have taken place in the background of Nazi propaganda and the systematic marginalization of Jews.

‘Manufactured beliefs amplified by political failure’

The success of these campaigns rests on manufactured ignorance. During a casual conversation with a young man at a downtown Toronto event, I was told in earnest that the people who currently occupy Israel are not the original Jews, but rather people from Europe who took over Palestine due to a lack of space.

He then doubled down, “It’s easy to see that because people in Israel have blond hair and blue eyes.” It struck me at the sincerity of his commitment to these audacious claims—a truth he had come to believe in. I told him to visit Israel.

Manufactured beliefs are amplified by political failure. On my morning walks through the University of Toronto campus this summer, I was confronted daily with spray-painted declarations of hate for the Jews; “F**k Israel” tends to be the message of choice. I will admit to a feeling of being targeted and demoralized by the constant messaging. I guess that’s the objective: the normalization of Jewish hate.

The violent consequence was clear at a recent Toronto Metropolitan University event by Students Supporting Israel, when masked persons forcibly entered a private event featuring IDF veteran Jonathan Karten. The activists broke through a glass door and caused injuries to the speaker.

The student attendees were terrified, and if not for Karten’s quick thinking, things could have been much worse. The attackers’ rhetoric of calling attendees “war criminals” provided the perceived moral license to move from rhetoric to physical assault. This is the tragic endpoint of unchecked propaganda: the successful translation of the demonization phase into the physical intimidation of the Jew phase.

The problem we have in Canada today is twofold. First, there is a progressive partnership with jihadists. Our leadership is recognizing a non-state and the false news flowing from unreliable sources into our government leadership and the media.

Secondly, Canada lacks the legislative agency to defend the existing definition of hate or incitement to violence, which robs our security and policing services, along with the courts, of the ability to impose consequences on hateful narratives. This, by extension, gives license to the haters to exist in an anarchy of lawlessness when it comes to anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiment and protest.

Concerns over the political isolation of Jews mirror the historical danger of normalized marginalization, as progressive political victories in North America amplify anxieties over the legitimization of rhetoric seen as hostile to the Jewish community.

In New York, the election of Zohran Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor and one with anti-Israel inclinations, sparked immediate fear among mainstream Jewish organizations. They feel this way due to his outspoken support for the BDS movement and his refusal to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, as well as his commitment to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit the city, which has also been echoed by Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney. These are leadership positions that validate antisemitic actors.

Similarly, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow has faced criticism from Jewish advocacy groups for what they perceive as an inconsistent response to escalating antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel protests, with one group urging an investigation after she publicly referred to Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide,” thus contributing to a perceived political climate where anti-Zionist speech is seen as tolerated and justified, heightening the Jewish community’s feeling of vulnerability.

Waisuddin Akbari was convicted last November of threatening widespread death and property damage after telling a Toronto car dealership employee that he planned to “plant a bomb in every synagogue in Toronto and blow them up to kill as many Jews as possible.” He left no doubt in his intent. He received a sentence of 60 days’ house arrest.

Sites such as findIDFsoldiers.net are using public information; the site clearly exists to hunt Jews and incite harm to those listed, and yet, our leadership lacks the decency to shut this down, despite the media surrounding this website and the potential for those listed to be violated in this climate of rising antisemitism. All those on the list, including myself, my wife, and our son, make for easy targets to vent the perceived frustration of Israel’s unsupported right to defend itself and the vilification of the Jewish state for doing so.

As a Jew living in Canada, I feel that the social contract has been broken; betrayed by a country my family has lived in for three generations. Jews have become an exception to the rule of protection for all citizens. The red line keeps moving for me because I do not want to believe the reality of our situation here. However, I worry that one day someone deranged enough will act without warning, and in the blink of an eye, all our lives will pause at a tragedy that could have been avoided.

The choice facing Canada is not between free speech and censorship; it is between moral courage and a historical repetition enabled by societal moral indifference. When the evidence is so compelling, when the parallels are so clear, and when the consequences are already manifesting violently on our streets, “I didn’t know” is no excuse.

Israel Ellis is the author of “The Wake Up Call: Global Jihad and the Rise of Antisemitism in a World Gone MAD,” published by Wicked Son.