Western Standard - March 23, 2026


Israeli ambassador says Canadians may have to surrender freedoms


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

130.32404

Word count

307

Sentence count

10


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Israeli ambassador to Canada said that in order to combat anti-Semitism, Canada will have to give up some of its freedoms to combat the rise in hate incidents against the Jewish community. We discuss this and much more in this episode of the Forward podcast.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Some, I think, rather ill-advised comments from the Israeli ambassador to Canada.
00:00:06.900 We covered this yesterday, both in the news and we had an editorial on it.
00:00:11.140 The Israeli ambassador to Canada said, you know, all lies of the world are on Canada.
00:00:16.700 There's been a significant increase in anti-Semitism and hate incidents against our Jewish community.
00:00:24.780 I don't think many reasonable people would have disagreed with him.
00:00:28.280 but he kept on talking and he says uh you know this uh uh this could um this this is you know
00:00:38.360 gonna need uh Canadians to give up some of their freedoms he did say what freedoms I think the
00:00:42.800 implication is more likely around freedom of speech possibly privacy rights you know with
00:00:48.940 internet spying from the government or something hard to say but probably most significantly
00:00:52.720 freedom of speech freedom of assembly those kinds of things but saying in order to combat
00:00:57.840 the rise of anti-semitism dave uh we're gonna have to give up some of our uh our freedoms
00:01:03.920 yeah sing for a foreign ambassador to say yes that's what he said so you're supposed to let
00:01:09.280 me introduce all that stuff oh i'm kind of tossing it to you to suss it out oh okay well i can't you
00:01:14.480 you said it all uh yes that's what he said uh clearly stepped over the boundary of uh diplomatic
00:01:21.360 lines. You don't go into a foreign country, no matter where in the world, and tell their
00:01:28.460 governments what to do. As far as I could see, Derek, we were the only media that covered that
00:01:35.220 angle, so I'm not expecting much of a rebuke from the Liberal government. Normally, the ambassador
00:01:41.620 would be called in by the foreign minister and given a stern talking to, but I don't see that
00:01:47.960 happening here.
00:01:51.360 Thank you.