I m afraid that the taboo against anti-Semitism is gone. It s no longer impolite company to say something anti-Semitic. I ll make the case for why that is the case, and why it s a good thing.
00:02:23.840We've seen a rise of anti-Semitism in the past in this country as well.
00:02:28.640And I want to note that, Mr. Speaker, because I understand the pain and suffering because I've seen it in my own community long before even this,
00:02:35.180where swastikas are painted on sidewalks or in front of people's homes, and all that still exists in our society.
00:02:41.060And it's something we have to continue to fight against every single day.
00:02:45.660But we're not going to be able to fix anything right now until there's a ceasefire.
00:02:51.840I see, of course, on social media, anti-Semitism is caused by the Jews.
00:03:07.040In the meantime, one of the largest French-language newspapers in Quebec, La Presse, publishes this cartoon of a blood-sucking vampire, Netanyahu, which was an old Nazi trope.
00:03:18.140And I'm not for censorship, by the way.
00:03:49.460You see this cartoon, what do you make of it?
00:03:53.300Well, as Heritage Minister, I'm going to be very prudent around the independence of the press.
00:03:59.880But what I am going to say is that, of course, you know, with everything happening right now in the Middle East and the tension that it's bringing in Canada as well,
00:04:09.260because communities are feeling this conflict very profoundly, that it's normal that there's critiques with such a cartoon.
00:04:20.240Really? OK, so the problem with that cartoon is not that it depicts Jews as bloodsuckers, but that it's just not the right time.
00:04:27.660And did you hear her say that she really cares about free speech and independence of the press?
00:04:31.740It's the first time I've ever heard a liberal talk about that.
00:04:34.240Maybe I can quote her back to her next time she bans Rebel News from something.
00:04:39.700Well, as Heritage Minister, I'm going to be very prudent around the independence of the press.
00:04:45.920Same day, I learned about this news from the Hamilton Playhouse.
00:04:50.880They had a Jewish festival, not an Israeli festival, but just a Jewish festival.
00:04:57.980And this was in the planning for months.
00:05:00.600And today it was canceled, they say, security and safety concerns.
00:05:07.600Maybe, or maybe anti-Semitism, or maybe they just said, you know, we don't want to be associated with this.
00:05:12.820But let's take them at face value and say that they're not making this up as a cover story, that they really are terrified of violence.
00:05:21.900That's what Hamilton police are for, to protect against anti-Semitic violence.
00:05:26.460But I guess Hamilton police are like Toronto police, or like York Regional Police, or like the Mounted Police, or like police everywhere in this country.
00:05:33.580They're basically being told to stand down and let the Hamas hate marches continue.
00:05:39.620And can you really blame the Hamilton police?
00:05:41.900Here's Matthew Green, the Hamilton Center member of Parliament.
00:05:46.880He's dressing up as a Palestinian activist in Parliament.
00:05:57.020The Honourable Member for Hamilton Center.
00:06:00.280Mr. Speaker, there's been lots of conversations in the House around trying to find balance.
00:06:05.120And in fact, the Conservative's position has somehow tried to make this whole thing, all of the atrocities, all of the murders, all the deaths, as though it's solely Hamas's fault.
00:06:16.520So in asking for balance, not once have they acknowledged that the Hamas doesn't own F-16 fighter jets.
00:06:23.480Hamas doesn't own 2,000 bombs that have been dropped on civilian populations.
00:06:29.520Hamas didn't force people from the north to the south and then threaten to invade Arafa.
00:06:36.900Hamas didn't bomb schools and hospitals.
00:06:40.160So I would ask through you, Mr. Speaker, to the Honourable Member, in finding balance and seeking balance from some of the ridiculous assertions from the Conservative Caucus, could the Honourable Member please reflect on what the imbalance of power and the asymmetry of power and military might looks like in that region and what the legacies of settler colonialism looks like here in this country?
00:07:04.420Yeah, if that is the view of the leading citizens of Hamilton, you can see why the police don't want to protect those Jews.
00:07:12.520And, you know, so a Jewish film festival is disrupted or stopped before it even starts.
00:07:19.140All of these happened on the same day.
00:07:31.140Say instead of Jews, say we're talking about black people.
00:07:35.620And instead of Hamas hate marches, say we're talking about the Klan.
00:07:38.740Now, it's hard to do that, I know, because we've never really had that problem in Canada, well, ever in a significant way.
00:07:45.900These hate marches that we see are truly unprecedented in their scope and their scale and their intensity.
00:07:53.020I'm not saying that in Canada's long history we've never had an anti-Semitic or an anti-black or a racist moment.
00:07:58.660Of course we have, but not in the continuous way we've seen here with the politicians and other community leaders just winking at it.
00:08:07.220Could you imagine if a hundred Klansmen and actually wearing the hoods, because a lot of these Hamas types, they wear masks.
00:08:15.260If they set up loudspeakers outside of a black church and were hurling invective and calling black people the worst names possible and saying, get out of here, go back to Africa, because that's what they're saying to the Jews.
00:08:28.060And could you imagine if in the face of that, the media would ignore those symbols like the Klan hood and would just say, oh, a peaceful protest.
00:08:38.260That's what they'd say about the Hamas hate marches.
00:08:41.160Could you imagine if political leaders dressed up in hoods in parliament to stand in solidarity with the Klan?
00:08:48.900This is not even a commentary on what's going on in the Middle East.
00:08:52.160I'm not talking about Israel versus Gaza right now.
00:10:10.700And by the way, there is something lovely about every place on Earth.
00:10:15.280Sometimes you just have to look a little bit harder for it.
00:10:17.820Now, I say this from the atrocious city of Toronto, the city that most Canadians, I think, if they had to pick a place that they hate, they would say Toronto.
00:10:28.140And these days, unfortunately, it's a place that let a lot of Torontonians say, look at this video.
00:10:33.940I mean, I'm on TikTok, and I know I shouldn't be.
00:10:36.720But what I like about TikTok is that the kids, I think the kids are going to be okay.
00:10:40.940Let me show you a couple of videos recently from Toronto.
00:10:44.120Here's one that I saw just today of some young fella making fun of that Toronto policeman who said, hey, make it easier for home invasion robbers.
00:10:55.580Put your keys near the door so they grab them and go.
00:12:30.660I could show you TikTok videos all day, but my point is there's a lot wrong with this city.
00:12:36.380Taxes, traffic, crime, out of control, immigration, unemployment.
00:12:43.720There's so many terrible things about Toronto.
00:12:47.240And then overlaid on top of that for the last half a year has been a wave of anti-Semitism that I don't think anyone has ever seen in two generations.
00:12:59.220Toronto is, in some ways, the most Jewish city in Canada.
00:13:04.380About 200,000 Jews, including a lot of Orthodox and visibly Jewish people.
00:13:20.000You felt free and safe, as you did really everywhere in Canada, until recent days and weeks, when pro-Hamas hate marches scream at synagogues, shout at children, shoot or throw Molotov cocktails at schools and synagogues.
00:15:17.740But I know that in a city that, you know, was famous for its Jewish neighborhoods and its Italian neighborhoods and its Greek and Portuguese neighborhoods, all of which were fun and interesting and had delicious food.
00:15:29.660Well, now there's hundreds of thousands of new Canadians from Muslim countries, many of whom have brought anti-Semitism with them to Canada.
00:15:41.740I find them terrifying, which is, I think, their goal.
00:15:48.280They are, and, you know, I saw signs of it in 2021 when there was an insurrection, although brief, not like current one, in May of 2021.
00:16:00.880Do you remember on Nathan Phillips Square when a bunch of Muslim pro-Palestinian sympathizers chased some Jews out of Nathan Phillips Square and terrified them, surrounded cars filled with young Jewish ladies who I interviewed at the time when I was still working for the Sun?
00:16:18.940And so, you know, nobody reacted to that.
00:16:44.060But I know a lot of people in my own community who feel that everyone hates us, that it's unsafe to walk the streets of Toronto, some whatever major city in Canada, or even in Europe.
00:16:58.560I'm going to disagree with you only in one respect.
00:17:01.040You say you feel like everyone hates us.
00:17:04.400I feel like the majority, the great majority of Canadians are friendly to Jews, are welcoming to Jews, are understanding of Jews, and are shocked by what they see in the streets.
00:17:17.560When I look at these anti-Semitic hate marches in Canada, and also we visited some of them in London, England, I see that they're about 80 or 90% Pakistani or Bangladeshi or Syrian, like newcomers here from other countries, not old stock Canadians, and some woke college radicals or old commies.
00:17:41.280I think the vast majority of what have been called old stock Canadians hate these hate marches.
00:17:48.600And by the way, a lot of new immigrants from other places hate them too.
00:17:53.020Chinese Canadians, Hindu Canadians, Sikh Canadians.
00:17:56.700I have never met a Sikh Canadian who loves these Hamas hate marches.
00:18:01.760So it feels like we're surrounded, but it's just because it's these activists and the police don't do a damn thing about it.
00:18:34.380The number of Persians, the number of people who support us in Toronto and in Canada, and are horrified by the abuses, by the inability of the cops to deal with it, whether they're intimidated or they've been told to stand down by the Trudeau liberals and by our mayor, Olivia Chow, here in Toronto.
00:18:52.300You know, you know, it's just people are horrified that this is not being dealt with and that, you know, our communities are being targeted.
00:19:03.340So with such vitriol and with such intimidating violence.
00:19:08.720You know, there are no hate marches outside Muslim mosques.
00:19:18.400There are no Muslim restaurants that are being vandalized with the pro-Israel point of view on this war.
00:19:26.160There aren't screaming mobs blocking – I mean, listen, there are always protesters where Justin Trudeau goes, but you don't see pro-Israel mobs blocking streets, threatening – you just don't.
00:19:41.000And yet, the response from officialdom – I mean, I'm holding in my hand here the Islamophobia Awareness Month or whatever, posters that the city of Toronto is putting up about women in hijabs not being welcomed.
00:19:57.780Here's a tweet from Mayor Olivia Chow just a couple days ago.
00:20:01.580Now, Islamophobia is a term that my late friend and your late friend, Tarek Fadda, said that is a term that captures people who are critics of the religion of Islam, reformists.
00:20:27.320And so he thought it was an overbroad term.
00:20:30.440But even if you use a slightly different word, people who are anti-Muslim, the mass of hate crimes in recent months has been against Jews.
00:21:11.520And I think the police are terrified by the unruly mobs.
00:21:15.200You know, I can't believe that they have allowed them to get out of control as they have and enabled them to continue to take over our streets, pray on our streets, P-R-A-Y, not E-Y, and walk up and down screaming for the eradication of the Jews.
00:21:37.380You talk to the average cop and they would say that this is ridiculous, it's out of control, but someone is telling them to stand down.
00:21:45.200I don't know whether it's the mayor or the police chief or all of the above.
00:21:49.340But Olivia Chow, you know, you bring up Olivia Chow, and she just did an op-ed in one of the local newspapers, Toronto Star, talking about how her mother was starved and likening it to what's happening in Gaza.
00:22:04.800That woman doesn't even understand what's going on over there.
00:22:08.480But the way she talks is like totally ignoring the fact that Hamas is holding back the food.
00:22:34.140She says, my mother was a hungry child in a war zone.
00:22:37.320Mayor Olivia Chow on why the untold suffering in Gaza hits close to home for her and so many Canadians.
00:22:42.860I mean, I appreciate the fact that the mayor of Toronto, who is overseeing tax hikes, crime, traffic, snarls, subway lines that are years out of date, she'd rather talk about foreign affairs than her real job.
00:23:00.480But in a city where you have constant hate marches, I haven't seen her lift a finger about those, but it's crazier than that.
00:23:08.800Yeah, I live in a riding called York Centre.
00:24:08.980Both, I could not believe that she voted.
00:24:12.320She, I knew she's going to, she was going to be troubled from the time she got elected because I could see that she was trying to play both sides of the fence.
00:24:26.020You know, the people who say, I'm worried about Judaism, anti-Semitism, I should say, but I'm also worried about Islamophobia, which I might add is not occurring in this city.
00:24:38.920What you're seeing on the streets of Toronto is pure hate towards the Jews and not Zionists, Ezra.
00:24:45.020Remember, we're called Zionists because people think they can get around it and not be anti-Semitic by calling us Zionists.
00:24:53.660They don't hate the Jews, they just hate Zionists.
00:24:56.22090% of Jews are Zionists in the diaspora.
00:25:00.260Well, not just that, but when you, when you target Jewish restaurants, Jewish schools, Jewish synagogues, you're sort of giving the game away.
00:25:06.600You know, I, I saw a poll, the Harvard-Harris poll in the United States, it shows 90% of Americans who were sort of grownups support Israel, but it's the youngest generation that's wobbly, it's about 50-50.
00:25:21.820And I ascribe that to the woke universities.
00:25:25.580I think the stats are similar in Canada.
00:25:27.540I haven't seen the exact same questions asked here.
00:25:33.340And what I see on the streets of Toronto are paid provocateurs.
00:25:38.040Remember, Toronto has always had a rent-a-mob leftist Antifa group of thugs.
00:25:44.500I see they've just been weaponized on this one issue.
00:25:48.100I saw that when I was in London, England as well, old Socialist Workers' Party leftists who, you know, were against the West.
00:25:56.460They were for the Soviets, they were against capitalism.
00:26:00.380This is just the next iteration in their war against the West.
00:26:04.420So I see some of that in Canada, too, the anti-everything group.
00:26:08.120But it's been buttressed in numbers by immigrants to Canada from places where they hate Jews.
00:26:15.440And we do not screen people for qualitative things like, are you tolerant of other groups or are you...
00:26:23.120When people come from countries that it's 90, 95% hate the Jews, where that's official cultural and government policy, they're not going to lose that hatred on a quick plane ride to Canada.
00:26:35.640And it's politically incorrect to say it, but we have brought anti-Semitism in here.
00:26:41.060Not every Muslim is anti-Semitic, of course.
00:26:43.480In fact, many refugees from those places have come here to be free.
00:26:48.500But there's a critical mass of Jew haters, and the politicians are, A, afraid of it, and, B, they're courting the vote.
00:27:05.160The gay trans and gay homosexual, it's mostly male gays, but there are a lot of dykes, and I'm going to say dykes because they are stupid dykes, who support...
00:27:17.360And you say that as a member of the LGBT community.
00:27:42.520But if they were to go over there, they'd be thrown off a roof.
00:27:45.860They'd be tortured for being homosexual.
00:27:49.080Well, Dr. James Lindsay points out that queerness, sometimes it can be used in a sexual way, but it also means just sort of an anti-establishment way.
00:27:58.760Any queerness, any way to undermine the West.
00:28:02.880And so I think that's the common ground.
00:28:04.900I don't think these queers for Palestine actually want to go over there.
00:28:07.700They just say, oh, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
00:28:10.780These folks from Hamas hate the system.
00:28:19.020But, I mean, we've seen openly at some of these, you know, the trans marches and when they were marching against transphobia, that some of those people came out and, you know, denounced transsexualism and, you know, gender identity.
00:28:36.240So, I mean, I think they just have blinders on.
00:28:39.380They have a willful hatred of the Jews and they're willfully denying what they stand for.
00:29:43.860But I think so many of our institutions have absolutely been conquered by the woke left that has decided that they didn't really like the Jews that much.
00:29:53.560And they look around and count noses and they're on the sides of Hamas.
00:31:00.500Is this the first time you're actually kind of reflecting on your role within this party?
00:31:04.740I mean, this has been going on for a number of months now.
00:31:06.720There's been tensions in Canada rising in 1970s.
00:31:09.100And you've seen your government struggle to sometimes or, you know, come up with a position that satisfies everybody.
00:31:15.260And you've kind of been at the forefront of this.
00:31:17.260But is this the first time you're actually kind of reflecting on your future here?
00:31:20.020I think it's the first time in my parliamentary career that I've had a reflection like this, where I truly felt last night that a line had been crossed.
00:31:33.300When my party members got up and cheered and gave a standing ovation to Heather McPherson and the NDP, I started reflecting as to whether or not I belonged.
00:31:45.400And I will let you know further how I feel over the coming days for the moment.
00:32:58.200And I would like to think that both you and I would be having the same conversation if suddenly there was a shocking tsunami of hatred towards blacks or towards Sikhs or towards another group.