A political warning of antisemitism

Truth be Told
by Selina Robinson

Self-published, 2024
$30  /  9781069165107

Reviewed by Stephen Hume

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Somewhere in Israel, exactly where I’m not sure since I’ve never been there and at my advanced age have no plans to visit, are two trees. They must be tall. It’s been almost 50 years since the first was planted and more than 35 since the second. They acknowledge my work as a journalist shining a light into the dark corners of deeply entrenched antisemitism both in Alberta and British Columbia. 

There, that disclosure is out of the way right from the get-go. Here’s another: for 10 years now, my wife and several of her friends have been helping to support the family of a seriously ill — and now homeless — Palestinian. And she also supports a Jewish charity that helps needy elderly and disabled Israelis.

Whether the trees in Israel or my wife’s humanitarian efforts represent some conflict of interest in my writing this review seems a stretch, but you’ll have to decide that for yourself. For my part (another disclosure), included among my many friends are Jews, some of whom are indeed ardent Zionists.

Mind you, those friends, acquired over 60 years as a reporter, editor, writer, and teacher, also include anti-Zionist Muslims – and Jews who protest Israeli policy. There are Baha’is who fled persecution in Islamic states, Hindus and Sikhs, Buddhist monks and Roman Catholic hermits, Russian Orthodox news editors and Pentecostal mechanics, Baptists and Anglicans, animists and atheists, and quite a few irreligious sinners. Among them are CEOs and labour organizers, conservatives, liberals, socialists, greens — even a few avowed communists. So, my associations, in the spirit of inclusive tolerance, are eclectic despite my own deep personal ambivalence toward matters of religiosity, racialized ethno-nationalist pride and political or economic ideology.

Yet I thought again about those memorial trees in Israel and what they signify when the editor of this journal asked me — with some trepidation, I thought (he said he’d fully understand if I declined, given the cruel and absolutist hyperbole that any attempt at conversation about the Israeli Palestinian conflict seems to evoke) — if I’d consider reviewing Selina Robinson’s new book Truth Be Told.

Yes, I would. I’m no fan of politically correct silence. I say what I think. And I’m glad I agreed because Truth Be Told is brave work and, in some respects, magnificently so. It represents Robinson’s illumination of a corrosive politically and religiously tinged bushwhacking that resulted in her departure from cabinet and from the New Democratic Party.

Robinson is by profession a family counsellor, a conciliator, and a consensus builder, the opposite of the verbal brawler that your usual newspaper columnist represents. She was the head of Jewish Family Services in Vancouver before she ran for office with the NDP, fought as a city councillor in Coquitlam to improve access for people with disabilities and, on being elevated to cabinet, light-heartedly referred to herself as “the Jew in the Crew.” Not exactly the exemplar of a zealot. And, yes, she’s a Zionist.

Should being a professed Zionist disqualify one from expressing an opinion on Palestine?  No. Being an anti-Zionist should not disqualify one’s opinions, either. As Canada’s Prime Minister points out “it should be, and it must be, safe to declare oneself a Zionist. Jewish or not, Zionism is not a dirty word or something anyone should be targeted for agreeing with. It is the belief, at its simplest, that Jewish people, like all peoples, have the right to determine their own future.”

Robinson is a moderate. She writes emphatically that Palestinians also deserve a state, self-determination, peace, and fulfilment and that she disagrees with the current Israeli government’s policies and practices on many issues “including many of their actions in Gaza and the West Bank.”

“I also disagree with the Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and the terrorist regimes in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.”

Nobody gets a free pass from Robinson based on ideological or religious presumption.

Robinson also argues that a viable future for the Middle East can only be one of coexistence, mutual tolerance and acceptance of the other. In a polarized climate reverberating with over-the-top rhetoric, the preaching of tolerance and restraint takes far greater courage than does advocating for violence, for ethnic cleansing and even – a chilling resonance — likening Jews to vermin and disease, the very language Nazis used to create the climate justifying their “extermination” campaign. I mention that rhetoric precisely because it resonates on the side of the controversy that ultimately succeeded in driving Robinson from office.

Truth Be Told is framed as political memoir.  As such it joins the five-foot bookshelf in my library in the company of Pat Carney, Jean Chretien, Kim Campbell, Flora MacDonald, Brian Mulroney, Ujjal Dosanjh, Bill Vander Zalm and others whose so-called “tell-all’s” sought – perhaps vainly – to provide a closing word on their legacies.

Robinson’s book, although it does set out seemingly determined to balance the record regarding some sordid backroom politics, is also a lucid and persuasive call upon Canadians not to be silent in the face of rising antisemitism.

To be sure, Truth Be Told deftly outlines how Robinson was driven to resign from the party after a betrayal by NDP colleagues apparently less concerned with principle than in the expedient appeasing of threats from religious and ideological hardliners demanding her head in response to a generally innocuous remark, what she calls her ‘fateful four words.”

But it’s the rise of antisemitism cloaked in other language, often co-opted from the Jewish experience itself, that is the central focus of the book.

“I share my story,” she writes, “for this larger purpose: to shine a light on how antisemitism manifests in Canada and how our leaders are failing to confront it.”

Some of the antisemitism is easily identified. It is crude and overt: broken windows by night, the spray painting of Nazi swastikas, desecration of burial markers, the population of social media with antisemitic slurs from far right and far left fringe actors.

Some antisemitism is equally overt but potentially more lethal:  drive-by shootings at Jewish elementary schools, the torching of a school bus, arson attacks on synagogues in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, physical assaults of people perceived to be Jews — including students. In fact, police-reported antisemitic hate incidents have increased by more than 100 per cent in the past year, reaching a record level – equivalent to more than 15 incidents a day in 2023 — and prompting a federal government forum on how to combat antisemitism this February.

But other forms of antisemitism are more insidious. For example, while what might be called classic antisemitism denies and attacks the rights of Jews to live with equal rights in whatever society they inhabit, there’s a new form emerging which discriminates against, denies, or assaults the right of Jews to live as an equal member of the society of nations or their right to even live, with Israel emerging as the target, the collective Jew among the nations.

That wasn’t my analysis. It was highly respected former federal Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler’s and you can read it in Hansard, the official record of House of Commons debates.

The same Hansard record cites Per Axel Ahlmark, the late writer and former deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, who presciently observed more than 15 years ago that this new form of camouflaged antisemitism “attacks primarily the collective Jews, the State of Israel. And then such attacks start a chain reaction of assaults on individual Jews and Jewish institutions. . . In the past, the most dangerous antisemites were those who wanted to make the world Judenrein, ‘free of Jews.’ Today, the most dangerous antisemites might be those who want to make the world Judenstaatrein, ‘free of a Jewish state.”

Ahlmark’s warning about escalating antisemitism, as extremists take permission from the rhetorical climate to begin acting out, is borne out in the Canadian experience.

Antisemitism is certainly not the only hate problem in Canada, but Jews are the most targeted religious minority. Muslim victims of Islamophobia and Roman Catholics are the next most victimized yet Jews experience more than twice the number of hate crimes as Muslims and seven times the number of attacks on Roman Catholics.

A shocking 46 per cent of hate crimes in Canada are violent. Physical assaults lead the list, followed by uttering threats and criminal harassment according to Royal Canadian Mounted Police statistics tabulated from 2015 to 2023.

In this context – first the expanding use of highly emotive and polarizing language that conflates Jews with Israel, then a perceived permission to escalate to violence against Jews — the reaction to Robinson’s remarks follow the arc described in the cautionary observation of the Swedish leader and take on more concerning implications.

The “fateful four words” that ended Robinson’s otherwise distinguished career, first as a minister of finance and then of higher education, were uttered during an online forum a few months after the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel of almost 800 civilians — including the murders of 36 children — 379 security forces and the taking of 251 hostages, some of them also children, by militant groups attacking from Gaza. Another 3,400 Israelis were wounded. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

Robinson was talking in a webinar about the need for education, calling for the exposure of young people to greater and more nuanced knowledge about the events shaping the complex background to the creation of Israel following the persecution of Jews in a world swept by merciless and recurring pogroms.

Let’s be clear about that deep background.

Not long after the establishment of Magna Carta in 1215, the foundation of the idea that all citizens, including those in power, should be fairly and equally ruled by the law, antisemitic pogroms and discrimination in England gained momentum. Ghettos were established. Jews were forced to wear identifying badges. A special “Easter Tax” equivalent to a day’s wages for a skilled tradesman was imposed on every Jew over the age of 12. That persecution culminated in 1290 with the expulsion from England of all Jews. This was partially religious persecution; the church had ruled Jews were condemned to eternal servitude for their role in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.  It was also a convenient way for aristocrats indebted by their feckless waging of foreign wars to liquidate their liabilities, starting with the king.

Surviving Jews fled to France where they were next blamed for the Black Death in 1348 and subsequently murdered and persecuted. Survivors fled to Germany and Spain, where they were now persecuted by returning Crusaders.

They fled again to eastern Europe. Pogroms followed and recurred from 17^th Century Russia to 19^th Century Iraq. The modern apotheosis of persecution was reached in the 20^th Century with the industrialized slaughter of six million Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe, a fact which even today is denied, minimized or rationalized by apparently growing numbers. Mind-boggling as it might seem, a PEW Research Centre survey in 2020 found that fewer than half of Americans knew how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and the knowledge base was even lower for teenagers. The research indicated that the more that respondents knew about the Holocaust the warmer their feelings towards Jews were likely to be.

In her broader remarks on the need for education, Robinson referred to the contentious region that would become Israel as a “crappy piece of land.” Sloppily said, she acknowledges, although history is rife with sloppy assumptions about places and the peoples that inhabit them.

Canada was pitied by Voltaire as worthless — “a few acres of snow” — inhabited by “bears, beavers and barbarians.” Sir Francis Drake, sailing off this coast in 1579, reviled it as a desolate place of extreme winds, freezing rain and “the most vile, thicke and stinking fogges.” British and Spanish expeditions, exploring it more than 200 years later, dismissed what would become British Columbia as dreary, inhospitable, lonely and barren; inhabited by “tribes of people as near to the primitive conditions of the world as they are distant from European civilization.” A hundred years after them, a British MP scoffed that the new province was “a barren, cold mountain country that is not worth keeping. . . Fifty railroads would not galvanize it into prosperity.”

As comments go Robinson’s was, perhaps, mildly offensive — to the exceptionally thin-skinned. It scarcely compares with, say, a harsh comment in 1997 by the chief justice of B.C. that Indigenous culture here was featured by lives that were “nasty, brutish and short.” And it certainly doesn’t compare with “Israel is a disease. We are the cure!” or “For world peace, Israel must be destroyed!” – that would involve 10 million people, eight million of whom were born there – which is current commentary at some university and civic protests judging from displays of placards and posters.

Indeed, in February 2024, even as Robinson was being prepared for her political auto da fé in an orchestrated furore over her “crappy piece of land” remark, Global News was reporting from Victoria that just a few blocks away from the government buildings, the Victoria City Police department was investigating complaints about antisemitic rhetoric vilifying “criminal Jews” and “filthy Zionists.”

Even that was tame compared to the rhetorical context that preceded it and in which it was philosophically embedded. Palestinian leaders described Jews as “filthy, ugly animals like apes and pigs because of the injustice and evil they had brought about.” The characterization of Jews as unclean pigs (and pestilential rats) is an old antisemitic trope adopted from medieval persecutions.

But some of that rhetoric went further.  Some of it called for repeating the October 7 attack – by then synonymous with the butchering of mothers and children and the gang rapes and sexual mutilation of female Israeli captives. The United Nations’ special envoy sent to objectively investigate the circumstances reported “unspeakable violence perpetrated with shocking brutality. . . It was a catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors.”

Yet this, according to the oratory of some extremists, should be repeated “time and again until Israel is annihilated.”

Annihilation is a word with precise meaning that conveys precise intention. It means “complete destruction and obliteration.” So, there’s no getting around the intent of such words. The means proposed — by linking such rhetoric to October 7 — is murder, rape, terror, and indiscriminate slaughter; the apotheosis sought is the obliteration of the world’s only Jewish state. This seems remarkably like seeking a “Final Solution” but stated in another way.

On the one hand, we have words advocating “annihilation,” — the synonyms for which include “eradication,” “extermination,” “extinction,” and “liquidation,” – extreme terminology that shows up repeatedly in the Nazis’ carefully documented “Final Solution” to the “Jewish problem” in Europe. Which is why both the international Genocide Convention and the Supreme Court of Canada prohibit direct and public incitement to genocide. And both hold that it’s the incitement that is the crime, regardless of whether or not acts follow speech.

“The Holocaust did not begin in gas chambers,” Canada’s Supreme Court observes, “it began with words.”

On the other hand, we have Robinson’s words:

“Calling for the death of destruction of the other is not a path to peace. Yet too many Canadians and others have chosen this path.”

What’s going on here in the realm of words?

By comparison, what Robinson said – and, she writes, instantly regretted – in calling something a “crappy piece of land” seems mild and in the broader context of what she advocates actually seems conciliatory. One of the stereotypes of exculpatory rhetoric for politicians is “I was quoted out of context.” That’s the excuse frequently put up by those called out for apparently hateful speech directed at Israel and by extension at Jews – “I was mistranslated.” “You are misinterpreting.” But Robinson never once makes that excuse. She said what she said, acknowledged it, regretted it, apologized, and was then sacrificed on the altar of intolerance for her honesty.

But there was a context to what she said. And critics who pilloried this apparently decent, progressive woman chose either to ignore or to add additional glosses of subsequent interpretation of the context, entirely fitted it seems for the purpose of making what Robinson calls political “gotcha!” propaganda.

Seized upon by polemicists who advance themselves as “pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist,” Robinson’s “crappy piece of land” remark was cited as evidence of attitudes supporting genocidal, colonial racism and so on. But what Robinson says is this:

Every time we advance an intolerant position that we view as pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, I want us to understand that it is neither. We need to be both. To be pro-Palestine we must also be pro-Israel and vice-versa. This is the only way to advance peace in the Middle East, for both sides to win some and both sides to lose some. That is the essence of compromise. No single people can prevail “from the river to the sea.”

Truth Be Told – and Robinson says proceeds from its sales are directed to a joint Israeli Palestinian organization of 700 families, each of which have lost an immediate family member to the conflict but have chosen to promote dialogue, tolerance, reconciliation, and peace – is articulate and accessible.

More important, it urges us – wherever we stand on the complicated, nuanced conflicts in the Middle East — to look unflinchingly in the mirror when we’re tempted to self-congratulation about how far we’ve come in moving away from the ugliness of racist and ethnocentric misconceptions, righteous bigotry, and the self-affirming assumptions of received wisdom and careless stereotypes that still inform alarming numbers.

Robinson’s book, unlike the purpose of those who vilify her, is not about demonizing the other. It’s about self-scrutiny — for us.

True, surveys by the Anti-Defamation League indicate that in 2024 only about eight per cent of Canadians express openly antisemitic views compared to the global estimate of 46 per cent. And yet, at the same time, antisemitic incidents in Canada increased by more than 100 per cent in the year after the October 7 massacre and the ensuing war that it was clearly calculated to provoke. The following year an annual audit of antisemitic incidents in Canada recorded 5,791, the highest number in the 40-year history of the audit.

It was in that context that I thought again about the memorial trees and my memory of the grizzled newspaper veteran who half a century ago took me out of our comfortable newsroom in Alberta’s capital city, past the Cenotaph commemorating comrades lost in his brutal battles against Nazi U-boats in the North Atlantic, to gesture toward a well-regarded recreational and social club.

“They discourage Jews,” he said. “I’m a member.”

I was a young reporter but got the message. He didn’t like it, yet he was part of it. He’d spent four years risking his life to fight against it. Yet here we were, faced with the exigencies of working our contacts and getting the news.

The newsroom in which I worked, seemed like the city it served, cosmopolitan, inclusive, diverse. I shared the end of news desk with a Jew and a Muslim, both reporting to an Anglican deacon. The roommate with whom I shared an apartment was a Cree reporter who would go on to lead the Indian Brotherhood of Alberta. There was an exchange reporter from India and a copy editor from Bangladesh. There was a former RCMP officer and a reformed bank robber, working together covering both sides of the police beat.

That newsroom, I had assumed, was an accurate reflection of the society in which it was embedded. My older, wiser colleague was telling me that I was wrong, there were deeper currents to be addressed.

Antisemitism has a long history in Canada and as the Canadian Encyclopedia points out, it has rarely been restricted to the extreme fringes of society. It has been an undercurrent of the mainstream, rippling beneath the broad flow of Canadian society.

Beaches once displayed signs proclaiming, “No Jews or Dogs Allowed.” Hotels, country clubs and other establishments posted the warning that they served “Christians Only.” Real estate covenants excluded Jews. There were few Jewish teachers because the educational establishment insisted on their exclusion. Jews had to pass themselves as Gentiles if they wanted to work as nurses, or architects or engineers or to find teaching positions in law or medicine, the encyclopedia observes.

Most of us have by now heard the “None is too many,” response of Canada’s government to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution and the death camps. Not so many that Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King fretted that Jewish immigrants would “pollute” Canada’s bloodstream or that from 1930 to 1945, Canada had the worst record among Western countries in offering safety to Jewish refugees.

Perhaps it’s not surprising. As early as 1905, leading Quebec politicians were urging the federal government to deny entry to Jews – and, of course, also to immigrants from China and India. In Quebec, where Jews comprised about one per cent of the population, a boycott was organized attempting to drive them out of the province.

“Until the 1950s it had respectability; few people apologized for being anti-Jewish. Expressions of anti-Semitism were heard in Parliament, read in the press, taught in some schools and absorbed in some churches,” the Canadian Encyclopedia notes.

Truth Be Told reminded me of that epiphany as a young reporter. The book is an eloquent memoir. It tells the story of the making of a politician and a person, her winning battle – so far anyway – with cancer and her struggle with politically correct antisemitism. But it is more than that. It is also a dissection and an examination of the origins and nature of structural antisemitism in current Canadian society.

When I went out with that veteran journalist to be instructed in the unspoken vice of antisemitism, we walked past a repurposed Salvation Army building, the Citadel Theatre, the creation of Joe Shoctor, a Jew and a prominent lawyer who brought the stage alive in the city of Edmonton with a vitality that was the envy of Vancouver and Calgary and Winnipeg.

Just up the street, was the bookstore run by Mel Hurtig, another Jew, a patriot and a nationalist who was publishing out-of-print works by early Canadian explorers like Samuel Hearne and was, even then, at work on the Canadian Encyclopedia that’s now a standard reference for schools and the public.

There was Meyer Horowitz, the president of the University of Alberta, and Jake Superstein, the flamboyant promoter whom I got to know in my nights covering prize fights. And I had the bemused pleasure of watching the literary sparks fly over our dinner table when my wife, a novelist and playwright herself, abruptly told Mordecai Richler — who was citing his boredom in boilersuit Alberta — to stop moaning.  If he could not find anything interesting in a city of half a million people, it said more about his lack of imagination that it did about Edmonton. Uproarious laughter ensued and many more visits which demanded a reserve of Remy Martin only because Mordecai was the only one who drank it.

So, years later when reports began to trickle in regarding a teacher at an Alberta high school instructing students about an international Jewish conspiracy to control finance and the Jews’ responsibility for wars, atrocities, and an attempt to subvert democracies and then impose world government, and the hoax of the Holocaust, I took note. Could this be? Yes, it could.

And, I was to learn, antisemitism had a long and pernicious pedigree in Canada, reaching back into the very origins of the country although it’s a contradictory history and Jews are vitally present in the democratic evolution both of Canada and its provinces.

One of the first Jews to be elected to a legislature in North America was Ezekiel Hart. In 1807, he won a place in the legislature of Lower Canada but was not permitted to take his seat because, as a Jew, he could not swear his oath “on the true faith of a Christian.” Nevertheless, in 1859, Selim Franklin was elected to mainland British Columbia’s legislative council, one of the first in the British Empire, and in 1866 his brother, Lumley Franklin, was elected Victoria’s second mayor. Gold rush business magnate David Oppenheimer became Vancouver’s second mayor in 1888.

Yet there we were in a city I thought pluralistic and tolerant hearing about Holocaust denial and antisemitic conspiracy tropes being taught as facts to impressionable high school students. So, we set about digging into it, found it to be true and found it to be the descendant of persistent and systemic antisemitism with deep roots in the Social Credit party that had ruled Alberta for more 36 years.

Social Credit was based on a theory that government should create consumer credit to counter economic recessions. It was proselytized by a British engineer, Clifford Hugh Douglas, and galvanized Social Credit which swept to power in Alberta in the depths of Great Depression under William Aberhart, a Baptist pastor who had founded the Prophetic Bible Institute and was an early adopter of radio sermons.

Douglas in some of his writings describes Jews as parasites who strangle host countries with the “black magic” of their economic conspiracies. If that sounds like Nazi rhetoric, it’s because the inherent ideas about Jews controlling global finance are pretty much cut from the same cloth.

Although most historians have focused on the political and socio-economic tides behind Social Credit, scholar Janine Stingel, in a remarkable PhD dissertation, Social Discredit: Anti-Semitism, Social Credit and the Jewish Response, lays bare the facts of the matter by citing what the party and its functionaries actually wrote on the subject.

Indeed, while Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini had their Brown Shirts and Black Shirts, Social Credit in Alberta had its Green Shirts and styled the organization (right down to the manual!) after the Nazi youth movement.

It wasn’t long before newspapers in Alberta noticed the esteem in which the German and Italian dictators appeared to be held by Aberhart and Social Credit.

Cartoons soon appeared in the Calgary Herald depicting a childish Aberhart mesmerized by a Sieg Heiling duo of dictators, Nazi and Fascist. Another depicts the Alberta premier with swastikas reflected in his spectacles.

Social Credit responded to the press with a statutory assault called the Accurate News and Information Act. It forced newspapers to publish the government’s “clarification” statements by Social Credit, verbatim, as ordered. Balmer Watt, editor of The Edmonton Journal, responded with a blistering editorial defence of press freedom. It earned the newspaper the only American Pulitzer Prize ever awarded outside the U.S.

Alberta’s Lieutenant-Governor, John Bowen, refused to sign the Social Credit bill as ultra vires and beyond the legislature’s authority. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled the law unconstitutional. Bowen, however, was summarily evicted from his official residence at Government House by a vindictive government, and, to the honour of the office, every Alberta lieutenant-governor since has refused to live in the official residence.

Aberhart’s personal feelings about Jews are unclear and his successor, Ernest Manning, sought to purge the party of antisemitism. Yet in 1984, James Keegstra, that high school teacher from Eckville, was charged under the Criminal Code with inciting hatred against an identifiable group, the Jewish people. Keegstra had been a candidate for the federal Social Credit Party in three elections and at one point vied for its leadership.

The case took 12 years to wend its way through Canadian courts. And even as it was going on, an Alberta cabinet minister was caught out in an interview in which he said he was not aware of evidence of the Holocaust or of specific persecution of Jews under Nazism.

What has the history of antisemitism in Alberta to do with B.C.? Fast forward to a Social Credit convention in Vancouver in November of 1989 and a party member, Michael Levy, a Jew and a former Social Credit candidate. Levy moved that the clause requiring members to adhere to “Christian principles” (echoes of Ezekiel Hart!) be removed from the party’s constitution.

Maurice Lucow wrote of Levy’s experience in Canadian Jewish News:

“He was literally jeered out of the convention hall and the next morning, at a convention breakfast, both the premier and a cabinet minister told ethnic jokes, poking fun at Jews and Chinese.” Both apologized. Shortly after, the party revised its constitution and dropped the Christianity clause, Lucow observed.

Had there been no press present to call an offside, would there have been apologies? Doubtful given the previous 50 years.

Even today, public silence about the antisemitic tropes that regularly pop up at protests, on social media, in political commentary, and everyday conversation frequently goes unchallenged.

What we are seeing is the mainstreaming of commentary that is antisemitic while claiming to be about something else entirely.

“We see it in public spaces, in private spaces. We see it in the workplace, in schools, on university campuses. We see it sometimes being manifested even in interpersonal relationships with people you consider your friends,” Nico Slobinsky, Pacific Region vice president at Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs told Global News in a report some years ago.

This new, sophisticated, social media version of antisemitism comes camouflaged in outrage at Israeli actions in Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon. But why would the actions of a distant government or of extremist citizens of another country prompt people in Canada to fire guns into Jewish elementary schools or to attack school buses or to burn synagogues in Canada?

It’s because Zionism and Israel have been coopted to represent Jews.

Equating Zionism with Jews in general gives antisemites permission to conflate Jews in Canada with Israeli state policy in the Middle East. It’s a collectivization of assigned and predetermined guilt, otherwise known as scapegoating. Thus, as MP Scott Reid pointed out in the House of Commons – and I’m once again quoting from Hansard – mental and moral gymnastics permit antisemites to insist that Jews, “in this case Canadian Jews, are somehow collectively responsible for the actions of a country of which they are not citizens. They are somehow responsible for the action of another group of people over which they have no authority.”

And that is the core value of Truth Be Told. The book argues that to remain silent is to acquiesce. Robinson refuses to acquiesce.

“Silence is not leadership – it’s cowardice,” she wrote in her letter quitting the NDP caucus and reiterates in her book.  “And I cannot be silent.”

What happened once, can happen again. Robinson’s book is a contemporary challenge:  Pay attention. See things for what they are. Defend the vulnerable. Speak up. Break the silence.  

Further Reading

A Trust Betrayed: The Keegstra Affair by David Bercuson and Douglas Wertheimer, Doubleday Canada Limited, Toronto, 1985, 241 pages. Bercuson is a history professor at the University of Calgary. Wertheimer was editor of The Jewish Star at the time when a social studies teacher was charged under Canada’s hate laws for teaching antisemitic conspiracy theories in an Alberta high school.

Bible Bill: A Biography of William Aberhart by David R. Elliott and Iris Miller, Reidmore Books, Edmonton, 1987, 373 pages. Elliot was a historian at the University of Alberta, Miller an artist and writer from Calgary. Their biography of the Christian evangelist who transformed Alberta and its politics is a remarkable window into what became a political petri dish for institutionalized antisemitism which still echoes.

The Dynasty: the rise and fall of Social Credit in Alberta by John J. Barr, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1974, 248 pages. A former journalist with The Edmonton Journal and long-time public affairs consultant, Barr meticulously examines the currents and crosscurrents of the populist political movement that held continuous power Alberta for 36 years, most of that time under the sway of two powerful Christian evangelists.

Is God a Racist? The Right Wing in Canada by Stanley R. Barrett, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1987, 377 pages. Barrett was a professor of social anthropology at the University of Guelph when he published this deep and exhaustive analysis of the origins of Fascists, neo-Nazis and right-wing Christian extremism in Canada, propelled as Rabbi Gunther Plaut put it, “by the potent and readily available fuel of antisemitism.”

Unholy Alliances: Terrorists, Extremists, Front Companies, and the Libyan Connection in Canada by Warren Kinsella, Lester Publishing, 1992, 250 pages. Kinsella, a journalist, lawyer, teacher and political consultant, puts his prodigious investigative talents to work in this examination of how Islamists from the Middle East seeking to further their war against Israel forged relationships in Canada with extremists from both the far right and the far left.

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Stephen Hume has visited and written from every province and territory in Canada save one – he never made it to Prince Edward Island. A long-time columnist at the Vancouver Sun, he has written nine books of poetry, essays and history about the landscape of B.C., the people who live beyond the city limits and their astonishing stories. They include A Walk with the Rainy Sisters: In Praise of British Columbia’s Places (2010), and Simon Fraser: In Search of Modern British Columbia (2008). He was recently interviewed for The British Columbia Review Interview Series on the subject of a sense of place and storytelling. [Editor’s Note: Stephen Hume wrote a review omnibus on the published work of Jon Taylor, Langley Field Naturalists, Lou Allison & Jane Wilde, and Taryn Eyton for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster