Why Anti-Semitism Is Not Just a Jewish Problem

Commentary

One drawback to Michal Cotler-Wunsh’s address at the recent Canada Strong and Free Network conference is the unlikelihood it will get the breadth of exposure it richly deserves.

During her 35-minute speech at the May 7–8 conservative gathering in Ottawa, Cotler-Wunsh issued a recall to moral clarity that should, by rights, ring true for every Canadian who has ears to hear.

Most impressive of all, she unravelled the baffling intricacies of the Middle East conundrum with a simple truth that entirely avoided mere simplification. Anti-Semitism, she insisted, is not a Jewish problem. Or not only a Jewish problem.

“It impacts every single Canadian (who) cherishes this country’s foundational principles,” Cotler-Wunsh said. “I’m sounding sirens about what I see because I’ve been here before—if not me, then my grandparents. And what I see impacts all of us. You need not be a Jew … to understand.”

Nor, for that matter, need you be a card-carrying Conservative or even an inauspicious holder of culturally conservative views. Colter-Wunsh is, after all, the stepdaughter of former Liberal cabinet minister Irwin Cotler, one of Canada’s most august voices for liberal democratic ideals and freedoms of his generation. Born in Israel, raised and educated as lawyer and legal scholar in both Canada and the Jewish State, she is trained and engrained in Western rule-of-law traditions.

Yet in one deeply significant way, she stands apart from those predicting a collapse in the international rules-based order. Cotler-Wunsh’s far greater mobilizing message is this: the assaults on the institutions and codes of conduct at the heart of that post-war order have been decades in the making.

In fact, she said, they date back more than half a century to 1975 when the United Nations adopted a resolution defining Zionism as racism. The resolution’s revolutionary convolution of language and logic meant that every Jew and, indeed, every supporter of the State of Israel’s right to exist, must prove the negative of not being a racist.

It was what Cotler-Wunsh called “Blood Libel Number One” that harkened back to Nazi ideology and Soviet propaganda besmirching the Jewish people as “an inferior race” and their longed-for homeland as inherently illegitimate.

“Nobody in our world walks into a room and says ‘Hi, I’m a racist.’ (But for) Zionists, and I’ll say the majority of Jews and many non-Jews around the world, being a Zionist is integral to their identity. And therefore ‘Zionism is racism’ becomes the blood libel that allows for the accusation that all Zionists are really racists.”

Hideous enough, but the road to demonization was still to be paved with further infamies such as the 2001 U.N. anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, where the gathered NGOs and self-styled humanitarian organizations approved the designation of Israel as an “apartheid” state.

“Blood Libel Number Two: Durban turns into an anti-Semitic hate fest,” Cotler-Wunsh said. “We have now experienced 25 years’ worth of ‘Israel apartheid weeks’ across campuses in North America, and it’s something we cannot look away from. The pariah that becomes the State of Israel is an apartheid state couple with Zionism as racism.”

Finally (for now since no one knows exactly what comes next) there is the Blood Libel Number Three “hijacking, redefinition, inversion and weaponization” of the word “genocide” applied to Israel as only the Mad Hatter could imagine after the openly genocidal attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.

The word itself was “coined by Raphael Lemkin, whose entire family was annihilated in Auschwitz, to create the convention for prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide in 1948, of which Israel was one of the first signatories,” she said.

The mistake, Cotler-Wunsh warned, is to shake our heads or our fists at this 51-year history as if it is a series of individuated events rather than an intricate strategy being played out. Only the truly naive genuinely believe in uninterrupted conspiracies, of course. But strategies are ideas being executed through opportunities, whether seized or forced.

What has played out for the past five decades, she said, is the strategic execution of an “unconventional war” against Israel, yes, but the foundational order of North America and at least Western Europe.

“If we understand in that sort of analysis the length of time this unconventional war has been raging … then we begin to understand anti-Semitism as what the late Rabbi Sachs (called) a looking glass that predicts the threats to the foundations of democracies. It is the ability of extremism to latch on, or be united by, ever-mutating lethal hate,” Cotler-Wunsh said.

To be able to perceive that looking glass world is the beginning of being table to transcend “real or perceived differences of politics, or religion, of denomination, of geography” and see the true causality behind what the novelist Michel Houellebeq long-ago called “the suicide of the West,” she said.

“When you begin through this looking glass to analyze real world examples [such as] the Muslim Brotherhood conference taking place in Toronto [May 16–18], you see that is not a Jewish problem, as anti-Semitism never is. The Muslim Brotherhood openly declares its intent to build a caliphate on the rubble of our civilization. Anti-Semitism sounds sirens and its normalization [signals] the extremism that threatens [our] democratic foundations.”

But anti-Semitism cannot be seen as limited to the status of symptom. It requires a comprehensive strategy to counter the very comprehensive strategy unleashed at the U.N. in 1975, if not earlier.

Cotler-Wunsh’s speech could serve as a warning to decision-makers not to abandon the Irwin Cotler human rights heritage, but also to Canadians across the country to safeguard their own liberal democratic traditions as, well, Canadians.

“You have the resources, the abilities to stand up and speak out for this beautiful country, not just to remember what it was founded to be but to reclaim all that’s being hijacked and redefined and inverted and weaponized … to renew that shared covenant know we should never, ever take freedom for granted because freedom is not free,” she said.

How can we draw back from giving such a message the breadth and depth of exposure it so richly deserves from sea to sea to sea?

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.