The uncomfortable reason antisemitism is festering in Canada

Now, to be clear, I don’t endorse the Protocols, and if you have someone in your life who seems to have mistaken them for important evidence of historical Jewish perfidy, you should kindly prevail on them to rethink their choices of literature. But the reality is that Jews today in Toronto and elsewhere are not threatened by random cranks but by organized groups that have regularly convened inside Jewish neighbourhoods and outside synagogues for over two years now. This itself represents a kind of sustained intimidation at odds with liberal norms, but it also has served to normalize and legitimize more extreme anti-Jewish sentiments. These have now scaled up to terrorism and attempted kidnapping. Somewhat disconcertingly, one of those indicted for such serious offences is already out on bail. Apiarists with a penchant for early 20th-century conspiracy theories will face the full wrath of the state; potential terrorists, on the other hand, will face generous bail conditions, it seems. It is only an emphasis on hatred, however, that would conflate these two disparate cases. Moreover, if there are specific threats against Jews that have arisen within Canada (as it seems there are), that is the result of policy failures. And all of these public gestures in the wake of the Bondi Beach attack represent a refusal to attend to those failures. This refusal produces a number of externalities. The first is the substantial constriction of both public and private Jewish life within Canada. For cultures do not flourish under police protection. The second is the diminution of Canada’s sphere of genuine liberalism. For liberalism entails the tacit promise that disagreements can be managed peaceably via the political process. Not just violence, but the persistent threat of violence, is (as Hobbes would remind us) merely warfare by other means. The problem then is not the hatred that lies in the human heart (except perhaps in the most generic sense). The problem is the attenuation of genuine liberalism within liberal societies, and this is a general problem. For Jews do not require special protection; they require the ordinary protections that liberalism is already designed to confer. Meanwhile, the cause of this problem is not hard to identify: favoured groups, either on ethnic or political grounds, have declined to accept the impositions of liberal norms of behaviour, as both Muslims within Toronto and leftist fellow-travelers have taken to harassing Jewish institutions (and general passersby) as a kind of expanded theatre of the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is an uncomfortable fact for those who have committed themselves to multiculturalism or general progressivism, and political authorities are understandably wary of the optics should they finally crack down after months of inaction. As a result, both municipal and provincial authorities have declined to enforce the relevant public square laws in the absence of compliance. This is, in other words, a profound failure to uphold basic liberal protections under the guise of liberalism. That failure, in turn, has downstream effects as increasingly ugly and antisocial behaviours become normalized. Indefinitely occupying public areas opens the way for marching through Jewish neighbourhoods, which in turn opens the way to ripping down mezuzahs from the doorways of Holocaust survivors. To blame all this on hatred is to avoid the hard choices of governance. It is plain that the reigning governments find it either politically inconvenient or merely bothersome to enforce their mandate to keep public order. But they, too, ultimately answer to their constituents. The larger question is whether ordinary citizens themselves will continue to suffer rulers who defer the real obligations of ruling to committees, legal counsel, and so on. And it is ultimately the avoidance of those political obligations, rather than the power of amorphous hatreds, that has led to our present situation. To paraphrase Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida, these daily outrages stand in our weakness, not their strength.