Enlisting activists won’t fix intolerance
To many political observers, especially on the pro-israel side of the post-october 7 tumult, Montreal MP Anthony Housefather seemed like the ideal choice to take up a new government position fighting antisemitism. He is certainly seized with the issue, being the Liberal caucus’s most strident opponent of the anti-israel protests, encampments, rallies and marches since October 7 — all of which he routinely describes (often with good reason) as shot through with antisemitism, if not antisemitic by nature.
But he’s not an ideal choice. At all. The problem is that many people “on the other side” don’t believe Housefather is acting in good faith. They think he alleges antisemitism where there is only provable anti-zionism, or anti-israeli-ism. They’re not entirely wrong about that.
In May, Housefather posted a video with fellow Liberal MP Marco Mendicino from the University of British Columbia campus. They alleged they had seen signs “glorifying violence and terrorist organizations,” signs “with people with hand grenades, and signs glorifying the Al Quds brigade (of Palestinian Islamic Jihad),” though they provided no visual evidence of same.
“We are a country of law,” Housefather intoned in the video.
“The laws protect all of us. They need to be applied.”
Neither Housefather nor Mendicino are cabinet ministers, but when government MPS say something is illegal and demand enforcement, that’s serious business. Yet the only supposed visual evidence of a law supposedly being broken was a painting of a presumably Palestinian woman holding a gun, beneath the words “right to resist.”
That’s provocative, but it’s a million miles from illegal speech. There is no law against “glorifying terrorist organizations” in Canada, only against deliberately, materially facilitating their actions. It’s really not ideal to have MPS wandering around reinforcing people’s misapprehensions in that regard, demanding free speech be shut down according to their preferences.
All of this is pretty much beside the point, however, as far as Housefather’s new position is concerned. You can’t fight antisemitism in Canada without engaging the most passionate Palestinian supporters, a good few of whom clearly do mean “Jew” when they say “Zionist,” at least to my and many other Canadians’ eyes and ears. If Palestinian supporters can’t stand the sight of Housefather, surely he’s just wasting his time, preaching to a choir that’s already perfectly cognizant of the problem.
It’s precisely the situation that Amira Elghawaby has faced since her appointment in 2022 as our first “special representative on combating Islamophobia.”
You can’t fight Islamophobia in Canada without engaging Quebec nationalists, many of whom make no bones about being fearful of Islam and what pious Muslims might do to Quebec society. You can’t fight Islamophobia without talking to the only province that bans teachers and Crown attorneys and police officers from wearing a hijab.
But Elghawaby can’t talk to Quebec, and never will be able to talk to Quebec, because in the past she had disrespected Quebec’s all-consuming victimhood complex.
“I want to puke,” she wrote on Twitter in response to a historian’s proposition that French Canadians were “the largest group of people in this country ... victimized by British colonialism.”
Moreover, while some Quebecers are unusually willing (by Canadian standards) to express distrust of Islam, you must never call Quebecers “Islamophobic.” That will get you unanimously denounced in the National Assembly, as Elghawaby was for observing that “the majority of Quebecers appear to be swayed by anti-muslim sentiment” with respect to the hijab-banning Bill 21.
If Elghawaby didn’t understand that these comments absolutely torpedoed anything she might try to accomplish with respect to Islamophobia in Quebec, then she was unfit for the job. As it stands, surely she is wasting her time just like Housefather, preaching to her own choir.
Elghawaby chose contrition toward Quebecers as her escape route. It didn’t help. Housefather seems to care much less about his detractors. This week he applauded Meta (i.e., Facebook) for a new content-moderation policy that will “remove speech targeting ‘Zionists’ in several areas where ... the speech tends to be used to refer to Jews and Israelis with dehumanizing comparisons, calls for harm, or denials of existence.”
“We will remove content attacking ‘Zionists’ when it is not explicitly about the political movement, but instead uses antisemitic stereotypes, or threatens other types of harm through intimidation, or violence directed against Jews or Israelis under the guise of attacking Zionists,” Meta said.
It might well be a solid policy (though I’d have thought a general policy against threatening harm, intimidation or violence against anyone for any reason might do the trick). Meta can — or should be able to — police its users’ content however it likes; if the users don’t like it, they can leave.
It gets sticky, though, when politicians stick their fingers in the pie, essentially demanding that private actors censor speech on the government’s and society’s behalf. That activates, at the very least in spirit, our fundamental Charter-protected right to freedom of speech. It is not in the Canadian tradition to crack down legally on controversial or inflammatory speech. Encouraging that is no way to win the hearts and minds that need winning if you’re going to really try to chip away at antisemitism, Islamophobia or any other kind of intolerance or prejudice.
Once upon a time, Canada had an Office (and an Officer) of Religious Freedom. The Liberals got rid of it when they took office, because ew, yuck, religion. That office didn’t do anything particularly noteworthy, but it at least had a principled, multi-faith mandate. Zionists, Israelis, Jews, Palestinians and Muslims have no shortage of activists willing to argue their cases. Putting them on the government payroll is counterproductive at best.