Antisemitism is Alive and Well in 2017

By Leon Kushner

I’m boiling over with disgust. Here we are in 2017. One would think that in our modern world, society has advanced so far that maybe racism is mostly a thing of the past. In some cases it is. But when it comes to hating Jews, it absolutely is not.

Let’s take a few recent cases:

Has anyone heard of the country IJF? That’s because it doesn’t exist. It stands for the International Judo Federation. If you haven’t heard, Israel came in 6th place overall with Tal Flicker winning a gold medal. Aside from Israel having to beg various countries to permit their team to fly into Abu Dhabi, where the competition was held, Israel was not allowed to show their banner flag like every other team did. Nor was the Israeli national anthem played when 8 Israelis won medals. Look at their website: IJF

You will see a list of winners by country. However instead of Israel they display IJF. Even the televised play by play announcers never mention the country Israel. Most of the Muslim competitors in the past have refused to shake hands with their Israeli counterparts. It’s a shameful display of blatant antisemitism! The IJF should be held to account for allowing countries like the UAE to host such events and the world’s mainstream media should be reprimanded for giving such behaviour a pass.

Tal Flicker
Moving to Canada, a student union at a prominent university in Montreal (McGill), was so upset that their anti-Israel, BDS motion was not passed, that they voted to throw out 3 directors of the board because they were Jewish and threatened them to boot. This action is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 30’s. Many of us have contacted the university and it finally hit a little bit of the mainstream media. I await the appropriate action of charging those guilty students of hate crimes and expelling them from the school. Something tells me that I might be waiting for a very long time.

A common trick by many Islamic nations is to sponsor students to attend universities in the West to attack Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism. These fake students register for 1 or 2 courses and as a result have plenty of time to attack Jews on campus and sponsor anti-Israel events like the annual hatefest called Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) which has spread from the University of Toronto to most universities throughout the western world. Whereas most students, Jewish ones included, are busy focussing on their studies, these antisemitic political activists have all the time and money in the world to publish sophisticated promotional media and bring in some of the vilest speakers on the planet. For the most part, the university administrations let them. Their defence usually falls under ‘free speech’. Sure they alway add ‘The university does not necessarily agree with the messages of the speaker’. Sadly, as a result many once neutral students who are often ignorant about the real situation in the Middle East, fall for the slanderous BS that they are forced to face on campus on a daily basis. This is the real tragedy.

I recently attended a wonderful speaker, Dr. Lawrence Hart, who teaches medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. He might be the only professor who started a Jewish organization for the faculty at a university. There are often Jewish organizations for students such as Hillel but rarely if ever did one exist for the professors. He made an excellent point. Although we should never ignore our Jewish students, they do come and go but the professor are usually stuck on campus for years. He showed us slides of at least dozens of some of the worst antisemites who spoke at the school over a 15 year period including people like Norman Finkelstein who claims that the Jews made money on the Holocaust, to Hamas supporter George Galloway. His honest admission was that after 15 years his organization did little to fight antisemitism on campus. With no support from the administration (actually quite the opposite) it proved futile and nerve wracking to fight antisemitism when in fact he had to fight his administration instead.

The event was sponsored by a fantastic organization called Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR).

Lastly there is the case of an imam in Toronto (Elkasrawy) who preached at a downtown mosque that Jews are filthy pigs who need to die. The Toronto Star (our largest print paper) promptly tried to whitewash his words and in his defence said that when arabs say Jews they really mean Zionists. Well in that case, that’s not really hate speech, is it?

Israelis outside of Israel are often faced with blatant antisemitism, as tourists, students, employees and in business. Jews like myself living in the diaspora have faced it as well. We need to motivate Jews and pro-Israel people of all religions to stand up to antisemitism. Think of it like crime on the streets. It will never go away and it’s never easy to combat, but we don’t give up. We have laws against it, and police to protect us. Sometimes a simple email (if enough are sent) can do the trick. In other cases a lot more effort is required. It would be helpful if parents and Jewish organizations educated our youth about this issue and identified specific problems and efforts to combat them rather than hide them under the table and pretend they don’t exist.