Trained to avoid rushing to judgment, we historians know there will be far more to learn about Monday’s Montreal bloodbath, wherein a terrorist killed one police officer and one civilian.
The police claim the terrorist was not antisemitic and that the resulting murder of a beloved Jew in the Jewish neighborhood attacked is coincidental.
Assuming that conclusion holds, Canadians and their leaders must admit that even if antisemitism didn’t trigger this crime, the lynch-mob mentality against Jews, Zionism, and Israel drove it as well as other acts of political violence.
The same argument holds when terrorists attack areas with no Jews at all. It’s essential to recognize that by tolerating so much antisemitism and “Zionophobia” – hostility toward Zionists – many Canadians helped foster an atmosphere of political totalitarianism breeding extremism, zealotry, and violence.
Silence often speaks volumes. Those who keep quiet while others harass Jews, Israelis, and Zionists broaden the zone of tolerance for all forms of brutality. In healthy democracies, there are no innocent bystanders; when fellow citizens are besieged, silence is complicity.
Lack of public reaction to antisemitism
Jesse Brown opens his March 2026 Atlantic essay, “Canada’s Polite Pogrom,” with a devastating line. Describing how the University of British Columbia’s Ed Rosenberg quit teaching geriatric medicine after 30 years, Brown explains that the antisemitic bile students and colleagues at the University of British Columbia posted after October 7 was bad enough. Nevertheless: “He did not resign because of the messages…; he resigned because the university wouldn’t do anything about them.”
Antisemites around him could be dismissed – it’s hard to feel betrayed by twisted people who celebrated such perversions. But Rosenberg and so many others have felt betrayed by so-called “innocent bystanders” and supposedly responsible administrators who did nothing.
The insult is compounded by a cancel culture and DEI bureaucracy exaggerating the slightest slips into massive grievances – when it comes to other groups.
Selective silence is equally painful, double-crossing the targeted – and emboldening aggressors. On June 1, Prime Minister Mark Carney modeled the kind of political cherry-picking that justifies using the cliché “doing more harm than good.”
Carney’s 2600-word speech about antisemitism never used the Z-word, Zionism, and only mentioned Israel once. That’s like denouncing Southern racism without defining it as an obsessive bigotry against blacks.
Linking anti-Zionism with antisemitism is not some Jewish delusion; it’s a conscious stance wired deeply into the Palestinian national movement’s DNA. Palestinians and their enablers yell “Death to the Jews” and target Jewish schools, synagogues and individuals when they’re enraged by Israel.
Palestinians and their enablers recycle old Jewish stereotypes and dip their anti-Zionism in the toxic reservoir of anti-Semitic slurs. And it’s Palestinians and their enablers who have fed a spike of Jew-hatred since October 7, because the antisemitic anti-Zionism of Hamas and other Gazans on that bloody day inspired them.
Carney’s omission was particularly glaring because he o so earnestly, speaking in French, invoked the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor to explain Canada’s “celebration of differences.”
That acceptance reflects Taylor’s notion of “recognition,” Carney explained, which “is more than mere tolerance…. To be recognised is to be received as who you are.”
How ironic that in this speech Canada’s prime minister refused to recognize or receive how Zionists are – or admit how much they have been pursued.
These full and partial silences help amplify today’s shouters, who continue to believe they run the conversation.
They dominate the airwaves, the headlines, and social media. Today’s loud, often foul-mouthed, hotheads view everything through a partisan lens – which paves the road to totalitarianism.
Reducing our complex world to a series of all-or-nothing political propositions oversimplifies and inflames discourse simultaneously.
Extremists thrive in this highly charged atmosphere. They make politics tribal – us versus them. And they escalate identity into zealotry.
Belonging is no longer enough. Bullying the other becomes expected, fundamental – first, most easily, in Tweets, then in words to strangers, then in breakups over politics with friends and relatives.
Once that happens, once you’ve demonized and objectified the other, it’s easy for unstable maniacs to turn violent. After all, everyone else has convinced them that if you dare disagree with me – you’re an existential threat to me and our democracy.
Canada’s turn from Canada the decent and delightfully boring, to Canada the indecent and menacing, reflects this evil logic’s spellbinding power. Of course, not every terrorist or partisan firebrand is a Jew-hater or an anti-Zionist. But Jew-hating and Israel-bashing green-lighted a culture of political fervor and abuse.
We now live in a world – in democracies – where healthy functioning adults – not just lunatics – act crazy. They shun colleagues and friends, harass shopkeepers or customers, hit little kids, shoot their schools, and assault their places of worship, proudly, while earning high-fives in return.
For decades we’ve known in theory – it starts with the Jews, but never ends with the Jews. The words were mouthed – and are mouthed whenever Jews are targeted. We need more than words.
The twin evil genies of Jew-hatred and political violence, which have long been intertwined, have been unleashed, and Jews aren’t responsible for returning either foul force into its bottle.
Jews should focus on defending themselves just enough to feel free to double down on being Zionist, doing Jewish, and celebrating Israel.
It’s the much larger non-Jewish world that must remember two long-lasting lessons. Jew-hatred is the disease of the non-Jew, not the Jew.
And citizens in healthy democracies must defeat the totalitarian, conspiratorial, violence-breeding evil of antisemitism, doing it, not for the Jews’ sake, but for the sake of their own societies, and their own souls.
The writer is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Last year he published To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred, available on the JPPI website. Next month, he will publish The Essential Guide to the U.S-Israel Partnership, the 250th Edition.