Tom Mulcair: Let's call antisemitism by its name

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On Oct. 16, Quebec Superior Court Judge Andres Garin renewed a court order forbidding any protest or action within 50 meters of the sidewalks bordering Congregation Shaar Hashomayim.

Last week, that court order was violated with apparent impunity. Montreal police were there but nothing was done to enforce the injunction.

The only formal recounting I’ve found came from Senator Leo Housakos, in the Senate chamber in Ottawa. He describes antisemitic direct threats of violence at the protest just outside the synagogue.

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No one has denied the essence of Housakos’s version and others with whom I’ve spoken have confirmed this account.

I approach this issue with a track record of having also fought against Islamophobia. During the 2015 campaign I championed a woman’s right to wear a niqab in her citizenship ceremony and paid a heavy political price.

This isn’t a question about picking sides. It’s a fundamental issue of religious freedom and human rights.

Hatred against Jews has a name: antisemitism.

In Canada, antisemitism is on the rise; two-thirds of all reported acts of religious violence and hatred are directed at Jews.

Some would say that this is part and parcel of the right to protest in the context of the ongoing horrors of the conflict in the Middle East.

But you don’t stand outside a Montreal synagogue in order to scream at the Israeli government; you go to a synagogue because you can scream your hatred at Jews who will be entering a place of worship.

That fundamental confusion between Jews and the Israeli government goes to the core of long-standing antisemitic attacks. Accusations of “dual loyalties” have always fed prejudices against Jews: They’re Jews, let’s attack them as a proxy for Israel.

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Here’s one example of a first-hand account that was shared with me:

“I went to the event at the Shaar Hashomayim with my friend and her 15-year-old daughter. Getting out of the car we could already hear the chanting and screaming but we had to walk towards it. Individuals with kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads, completely concealing their faces, were holding Palestinian flags and screaming ‘terrorists’ and ‘baby killers’ approaching us as we made our way to the synagogue entrance, trying to intimidate us …”

MP Mark Miller used strong words to denounce the situation, but there was one word missing: antisemitism.

“The protest currently underway in front of a Jewish place of worship, Shaar Hashomayim, in Montreal (is) a disgusting display of vitriol and beyond the pale any form of acceptable protest.”

Miller’s colleague MP Anna Gainey, much to her credit, didn’t shy away from calling a spade a spade: “The hate speech and antisemitic chants filling the quiet residential street are obscene. It’s unacceptable and has to stop.”

Mayor Valérie Plante offered up meaningless reassurances that: “The (Montreal police force) is there to make sure people feel safe and that they’re present when there are protests.” How about enforcing the law, including the injunction?

The Jewish state of Israel was created by the United Nations on the ashes of the Holocaust, the wholesale slaughter of over 6 million Jews, because they were Jews.

It was the horrific culmination of hundreds of years of pogroms and other forms of overt hatred against Jews.

Last week in Amsterdam, the world witnessed, in modern day Europe, Jews being attacked in the street because they are Jews.

Last week, in Montreal, Jews entering a synagogue were threatened and vilified because they are Jews — not for anything they’ve done, but for who they are.

When I was 14 years old, I visited the Dachau concentration camp. The words “never again” were written on a monument there.

Let’s make that a pledge that means something: never again.

Tom Mulcair, a former leader of the federal NDP, served as minister of the environment in the Quebec Liberal government of Jean Charest.

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