Jew World Order

On October 25, Doug Ford’s Conservative government, through an Order in Council, adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) “Working Definition of Antisemitism.”

Not only is this unilateral move in keeping with the Ford government’s anti-democratic tendencies, the flawed IHRA definition poses a direct threat to freedom of expression. It also fails, as David Feldman wrote in the Guardian, to “make any ethical and political connections between the struggle against antisemitism and other sorts of prejudice.”

More worryingly, the only form of racism specified in the Order in Council is antisemitism, leaving out descriptions of definitions of racism faced by other racial and religious minorities in Ontario.

An Ipsos poll published in April 2019 revealed that almost half of Canadians “admit to having racist thoughts they would not voice.” The same poll found that 26% of Canadians “believe it has become more acceptable to be prejudiced against Muslims/Arabs.”

A different report released in June 2020 by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a United Kingdom-based think tank, concluded that Canada has a well-established network of right-wing extremists very much comparable to those in the United States and Britain. The study identified 6,352 Canadian Twitter users who posted right-wing extremist content on social media and identified a reach of 1,669,720 accounts following extremist content originating from Canada.

According to the ISD report, on Facebook, “Muslims were the most widely discussed minority community, and the most common target of posts containing explicit hate speech (23%), with anti-Semitism being the second largest grouping of hate speech (16%).”

A poll conducted by Mainstreet Research in June 2020, reveals that a majority of Canadians believe Black and Indigenous people are treated less fairly than white folks “when dealing with police, the criminal justice system, and employment practices.”

Elsewhere, a July 2020 Ipsos poll for Global News found that 60% of Canadians agree racism is a “serious” issue in Canada, up 13% since last year. That number was even higher among younger Canadians, or 70% of 18 to 34 year olds.

A June 20 Angus Reid poll found that 43% of Canadians of Chinese ethnicity who were interviewed said they have been “personally threatened or intimidated” at least once, 13% said it happens frequently, and 8% said they have frequently been “physically attacked by strangers.”

These studies indicate that many groups including Indigenous peoples, Black Canadians, Chinese Canadians, Muslims and Jews face racism in various forms across this country. Clearly, then, Ontario needs comprehensive tools to combat all forms of hatred and bigotry, not a vague definition that has been widely criticized for conflating legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and its military as antisemitic. At minimum, the provincial government should not ignore the statistics that report extreme prejudice and hate against Muslims in Canada.

While it goes without saying that fighting antisemitism and all forms of oppression is essential, by adopting the IHRA definition the Ontario government is implicitly creating a hierarchy of victimhood and, by extension, downgrading the urgency with which other targets of racism must be protected.

The IHRA definition is problematic in a number of ways. Not only does it assert, “Jewish identity and Zionism are inseparable” critics at Jewish Voice for Peace say, it also treats those “who wish to take part in the struggle for liberation from colonial rule” as nothing but bigots and racists, says Neve Gordon.

As Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, has written, the IHRA definition is being used to “exclude criticism of Israel from the bounds of acceptable discourse.”

In fact, five of the 11 illustrative examples provided by the IHRA conflate criticism of Israel or Israelis with Jewish people.

In July 2018, the Jewish majority in the Knesset passed the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People (informally known as the Nation-State Law) which stipulates that “The Land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people,” and “The exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People.” This blatantly racist piece of legislation subordinates the rights of 26% of its citizens who not Jewish, a majority of whom are Palestinian Christians and Muslims.

One of the IHRA’s illustrative examples claims that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor, is antisemitic. The Nation-State Law can be read as a tacit endorsement of this definition as it dismisses any historical account concluding that the formation of the Israel in 1948 was accomplished through violent processes of dispossession and ethnic cleansing.

This part of the IHRA definition could be used to target anyone who supports the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, or anyone who advocates for equality in a democratic, non-sectarian country instead of an explicitly “Jewish state”—one that grants superior rights to Jews (as Israel currently does). Paradoxically, this is tantamount to punishing genuine calls for racial and ethnic equality in the name of stopping the spread of antisemitism.

The Ford government’s adoption of the IHRA definition is troubling, because it gives license to those who would like to paper over the institutionalized discrimination faced by nearly two million Palestinian citizens of Israel. It also harms other anti-racist initiatives by setting a troubling standard for freedom of expression while also threatening academic freedom, as has been pointed out by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations.

Ontarians must stand up to antisemitism and all instances of racism and discrimination wherever they appear, but the IHRA definition is flawed and, at worst, limits society’s ability to fight oppression in all is forms.