The recent murder of six Israeli hostages by Hamas has brought renewed focus to the plight of the remaining hostages still in captivity. The murdered hostages have been identified as Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Ori Danino. Hamas, which still holds more than one hundred hostages, has announced that the remaining captives will likewise be killed if the IDF attempts their rescue. 

The Hub’s editor-at-large Sean Speer spoke with former federal immigration minister and Alberta premier Jason Kenney for a forthcoming episode of Hub Dialogues to get his thoughts on these developments, the October 7 tragedy, Israel’s resilience, the limits of pluralism, and the Trudeau government’s response to the conflict as it attempts to balance competing political interests. 

The following is a lightly edited excerpt of their conversation.

SEAN SPEER: We’re speaking on September 3, days after we’ve learned that Hamas has executed six hostages. You visited Israel this summer. Why don’t you talk about your trip and reflect on the experience?

JASON KENNEY: Yes, In June, I was in Israel for a little over a week with a group of Canadians. We started the visit—as I think that was my seventh visit to Israel—by going to Yad Vashem, which is the global Holocaust Museum. You can’t visit Yad Vashem without leaving that place completely devastated, completely cratered emotionally, contemplating the mystery of that unthinkable evil.

And then to go from that place to the next day to one of the kibbutzim that was completely demolished, where families were burned alive, women brutally raped, and handicapped people tortured, it was an overwhelming experience.

In that community, I think of 1,400 residents, over 700 were either killed or taken hostage. As you probably know, many of the kibbutzim and other communities attacked along the Gaza Strip on the Israeli side of the border tended to be filled with kind of peacenik left-wing Israelis, who saw it as their special vocation to show the path to peace, and they would hire Gazan Palestinians to work in their communities, on their farms, and they would give them training, and they would befriend their families, and they would drive them to hospital for medical appointments in Tel Aviv and so forth. Yet many of the people who they had helped were in the second wave of the invasion. The first wave was from the Hamas soldiers, and the second wave was a lot of civilians who came in and participated in the violence.

So, it was gut-wrenching. But it was also incredibly inspiring to see the resilience of the Israeli people, and you can understand where that resilience comes from. Half or roughly half of Israelis are Mizrahi or Sephardim. They’re Middle Eastern Israelis. They were all kicked out of their countries following 1948. The other half are, largely speaking, Ashkenazi, most of whom are the descendants of Holocaust survivors. I think it’s hard for the Western mind or the Canadian mind to comprehend the depth of Israeli resilience.

The Israeli rallying cry is “Am Yisrael Chai,” which means “the people of Israel live.” Every time that they say it it’s a repudiation of the Holocaust and the endless efforts to destroy their only homeland. So, the whole trip was extremely moving to see how they continue against, all pressure internationally, simply to exist.

SEAN SPEER: One of your political traits that I admire most is that you’re a principled pluralist. I have to ask, Jason, has the post-October 7 experience caused you to rethink pluralism and its possible limits?

JASON KENNEY: Yes. I always tried to say that, for me, the Canadian approach to multiculturalism, one of the reasons it’s been so broadly popular is because it was introduced into Canada as a positive affirmation of the best of a people’s cultural and religious and ethnic backgrounds, but not as a kind of Gramscian-Frankfurt School Marxist cultural relativism where anything goes.

There’s always been the sense that, yes, we encourage people in Canada to preserve what’s best and celebrate what’s best about their cultures of origin. But at the same time to be fully Canadian, to learn Canada’s history, to be loyal to this country, first and foremost. And there was this sort of unwritten social compact that we had.

But I think what we’ve observed over the past year are people who don’t want to be part of that social compact, people whose primary loyalty appears not to be to Canada or the liberal democratic values upon which it’s founded, including the dignity of the human person. But rather to, well—let’s be honest, for a fairly large number of people, apparently loyalty to a terrorist organization like Hamas or openly expressing violent Jew hatred on our streets and universities in particular.

Tolerating these expressions of antisemitism, which are becoming—this stuff sometimes, if you’re a student of history, sounds like you’re in like Germany 1933—this kind of the spirit of the pogroms happening in some of these marches and university protests is deeply disturbing, profoundly illiberal, and I think has nothing to do with authentic Canadian pluralism.

SEAN SPEER: It wasn’t self-evident to me on the morning of October 7 that the Trudeau government would carry itself over the subsequent 12 months or so with the kind of mealy-mouthed, “on one hand, this, and on the other hand, that” response to these developments that it has. What do you think is behind it?

JASON KENNEY: A ham-fisted effort at political triangulation between two cohorts of Canadians with diametrically opposed views on the conflict, and the bulk of Canadians in the middle who really don’t want a government picking sides, quote, unquote.

I think there’s also been an institutional bias at the Department of Global Affairs amongst the professional career diplomats to be quote “even-handed,” which, to me, makes no sense when it means being even-handed between a genocidal terrorist organization and a democratic state trying to defend its citizens from terrorism. Even-handedness, to me, means standing with a democratic ally against an explicit campaign to extirpate the Jews from the Middle East and destroy the only Jewish homeland. You can’t be even-handed about that.

Finally, I think that there’s been a high degree of a political pandering. You just saw last week, I think 50-some Liberal staffers write a public letter saying they won’t campaign for their party, as long as it, I don’t know, as long as it doesn’t support the goals of Hamas or something. And so, those are the internal pressures that it is facing.

But I think there’s something a little more pernicious at play here. There’s no doubt that Justin Trudeau is likely approaching the end of his tenure as leader, either before or after the next election. So, you’ve got senior ministers running, if you will, discrete shadow leadership campaigns, including Melanie Joly, the foreign minister. And I think the folks who are mobbing the streets of our major cities and our university campuses to express their hatred for Israel are going to likely constitute a very powerful voting bloc in the next Liberal leadership campaign. And I think that’s not lost on her or on other senior ministers of this government.

Hersh. Eden. Carmel. Alex. Almog. Ori.

Since Saturday night their names, their faces, and their stories play on repeat in my head. These were six people taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th and held for 330 days before being executed by the terrorists, just as the IDF was closing in on their rescue.

Heartbroken, hopeless, gutted—the emotions since Saturday night, the emotions felt by so many of my Jewish friends I have spoken to. Heartbroken that these six souls were brutally taken from us. Hopeless because for so long we imagined these six coming home. We dreamed of Hersh running into his mother’s arms, we hoped for Alex’s chance to hold his baby who was born after he was taken hostage, we wished for them all to be back where they belong.

But most importantly we are gutted by the silence and indifference of so many. Gutted and betrayed by those who had posted “all eyes on Rafah” on their Instagram feeds but then stayed silent on the day that six Jews were murdered. Gutted by those, such as Foreign Minister Melanie Joly, who condemned Israel for going into Rafah when it was clear that hostages were being held there. Gutted by those we thought were our friends who failed to reach out to show sympathy in our time of grief.

Frankly, what remains one of the most disturbing realities since October 7th is the silence from progressive voices on the plight of the hostages—indeed, even worse than simple silence was the outright hostility to efforts to raise awareness of the situation. This response raises critical questions about the principles guiding progressive activism given the movement’s claim to be a strong voice on human rights, justice, and the protection of vulnerable populations. This convenient lack of consistency when it comes to vulnerable Jews and Israelis is a damning indictment of progressivism’s moral integrity and credibility.

A representative example of this troubling double standard in evaluating global conflicts is that in the days after the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, one of the most senior leaders of Hamas, the screams of condemnation from progressive activists were loud. They claimed that it showed that Israel wasn’t serious about a ceasefire. Protestors masked as pro-peace activists even held vigils for the terrorist. But when six hostages were murdered as they were about to be rescued, these same “pro-peace” activists now stay silent.

Unequivocally denouncing the murder of Israeli hostages by Hamas should in no way contradict the values that progressives claim to represent. That such denouncements are few and far between speaks volumes about the true intent of their advocacy.