On June 4, the Editorial Board of The Globe and Mail published an important opinion editorial entitled: “The missing words in Mark Carney’s antisemitism speech.”
The editorial is a response to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech days earlier, at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. In his address, Carney said that “across our country, antisemitism has surged to levels not seen in the post-war period,” and offered steps Canada will take to address the antisemitism, including setting up a new “Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion,” as well as other federal, educational, and data-driven programs.
The Globe and Mail’s editorial made it clear from the start that Carney’s speech did not “diagnose the problem. He offered sympathy, but no answers, apart from creating an advisory council that he first announced four months ago.”
The Globe’s criticism focused on how Carney’s speech talks around the issue of antisemitism because it does not actually address how it manifests in the current contemporary context. In front of a crowd of Canadian Jews, the Editorial Board notes that Carney’s speech did not address how “those who treat Israel as a pariah state by extension treat Jewish-Canadians as pariahs, unless they renounce Zionism” is the how, and why, of what is endangering Jewish Canadians today. Instead, Carney diagnosed antisemitism as a failure of Canada’s “civic compact,” which, the Editorial Board notes, does not “articulate, never mind confront, the nature of that failure.”
But rather than starting or stopping at noting the failures, The Globe and Mail explicitly names what our Prime Minister should have done: “[Take] on the antizionists – the core of the problem.”
Not only does the Globe rightly recognize that antizionism is the current manifestation of antisemitism, but the position which reflects the official viewpoint of Canada’s paper of record highlights how antizionism is the hatred in Canadian streets, academic spaces, and more – “This is where the Prime Minister’s courage failed him.”
But the editorial goes further than that. Not only is antizionism unnamed, but so, too, was the State of Israel. In contrast, the Editorial Board pointed out, is former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who the Globe says was “hardly bursting with action on antisemitism,” plainly stating last year: “‘The term Zionist increasingly being tossed around as a pejorative, in spite of the fact that it simply means believing in the right of the Jewish people, like all people, to determine their own future …I am a Zionist.’”
As Prime Minister Carney iterated, “history teaches us that hatred metastasizes when a society grows indifferent to it, when intimidation becomes routine, when conspiracy becomes discourse, and when citizens choose to look away.”
But the Editorial Board rightly identifies that Carney’s refusal to recognize, and thus confront, the specific nature of antisemitism as it plagues Canada today, represents a failure to look at the hatred head on. “The crisis of antisemitism in Canada today is specific, severe, and demands a targeted response,” stated Carney. But as the Editorial Board points out, by not directly naming Israel nor antizionism, let alone the chants praising the terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah or calls for intifadas in Canadian streets, Carney’s response is pointedly not targeted.
The Globe and Mail Editorial Board looks at this hatred, the rise of antisemitism in Canada, head on. They call it what it is and they specify its nature, like the Canadian Jews sitting in Prime Minister Carney’s audience deserved to hear, like all of Canada’s Jews deserved to hear from Canada’s leadership.
As the editorialsuccinctly concluded: [Prime Minister Carney] should have said: “If you oppose Israel’s existence, if you demonize Jewish-Canadians, you are wrong, you are hateful and I stand against you.’” HonestReporting Canada commends The Globe & Mail for this editorial.
