Following an editorial published recently in the Jerusalem Post, today's online National Post has a commentary on the rise of antisemitism in Canada. It is in general well written, and makes some interesting points. The author does not, though, pay sufficient attention to the three main sources of antisemitism in Canada today, two of which are comparatively recent.
The first, and most longstanding, is the suspicion and dislike of Jews felt by those who don't know any better. These are generally people from rural Canada, who often reach adulthood never having met a Jew, and who draw upon their ignorance, folk religion and family tradition to arrive at a banal sort of Jew-hatred. These are the people who say "he Jewed me down" to describe a client who struck a particularly stingy bargain, and who are convinced that Jews are miserly and have funny noses. While this brand of antisemitism is the oldest in Canada, it is also inconsequential and leads more often to social embarrassment than to violence or malevolence.
Then there is the phenomenon of the followers of the Religion of Peace, who make up an ever increasing proportion of Canadians, due almost entirely to immigration and birth rate. (Very few Canadians convert to Islam, and the Nation of Islam in the USA has no parallel here, thank heaven. The majority of conversions in Canada tend to be of women converting upon marriage to a Moslem.) Importing not only cutting edge fashion and cuisine from the old country, Canada's Most Peaceful Immigrants bring with them a collection of hatreds against pigs and monkeys (aka Jews and Christians, or vice versa) rooted both in religion and tribal culture. It is no coincidence that antisemitism rises fastest and most violently in those centres that boast a high share of Islamic immigrants. While this form of Jew-hatred does bleed into the popular culture, it doesn't do so rapidly.
The third form, and the most dominant amongst the chattering classes and fellow travelling elite, is the same form of antisemitism that marks much of Europe these days. It sometimes expresses itself in the form of criticism of Israeli atrocities and colonialism (forgetting that the vast majority of human rights accusations are totally unfounded, and that the Arabs who live in Israel are more wealthy, healthy and free than those who live anywhere else in the Middle East.) It is most commonly found among socialists and more moderate lefties, who are invariably terribly concerned with the environment, supportive of Kyoto, and deeply committed to multiculturalism. In short these are the people for whom the gospel of the New Left has replaced any form of religious belief. Almost all these people were baptized Christians as babies or very young children; virtually none of them have their children baptized. This is significant.
Underlying the obsession with the environment is a hatred of science and development. Beneath the advocacy for the poor and the constant cries for more government spending is a rejection of capitalism and prosperity. And multiculturalism is really a fancy term for the renunciation of Europe, its civilization, and its heritage. In short, the legacy of Western Civilization, crafted over millennia, is currently out of favour with a sizeable chunk of Westerners. Those who should be the heirs to Jerusalem, Athens and Rome turn out to have more in common with Philistines and barbarians.
It is this fundamental rejection that explains so much of the Jew-hatred of today's upper classes, and NDP, Liberal and Democrat voters. By spurning military might and international commerce they cast off the legacy of Rome; by reducing public education to pablum and allowing barbarians to set curriculum they divorce themselves from Athens; and by utterly eschewing sexual morality and respect for life they neatly sever their connection with Jerusalem. But while there are no people who identify themselves as classical Greeks or Romans, the Jews are still with us, a living reminder of the legacy of monotheism and morality that made civilization possible, and it is for this that they are currently hated.
Of course, practicing Christians (which for all practical purposes excludes Anglicans, United Church members, and the left wing branches of Catholicism and Anabaptism) are equally heirs to and embodiments of biblical morality and the divine commandments. At the moment, though, they are not a sufficiently small minority that they may be assaulted and their houses of worship burned, although they may be mocked with impunity and forced to sacrifice their beliefs on the altar of political rectitude. Religious Christians should team up with those Jews who aren't firmly in the Abraham Foxman camp in order to assert the primacy and importance of the Judeo-Christian and classical traditions before it is too late. In Holland, for example, that moment has passed; those few churchgoers who still exist in that poor country are merely at a rest stop on a highway that leads either to socialist atheism or fundamentalist Islam.
Posted by Clio at January 2, 2003 12:04 PM