Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad Episode 49: Avi Lewis Harassed and Threatened Over Yom Kippur Prayer
Guest: None (solo audio essay by Matthew Remski)
Matthew Remski: Hello and welcome to Antifascist Dad Episode 49. Avi Lewis harassed and threatened over Yom Kippur prayer.
You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name. I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad, and the Patreon for this show is antifascistdadpodcast, and subscribers get early access to a second weekly episode, which if you are a subscriber, you're hearing this on the day it was released. Thank you so much for your support. If you're hearing it in the main feed, it's because I unlock everything fairly quickly because this is an educational project.
And just a note. All of the references for what I'll discuss today are in the show notes, along with a link for my book called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times.
On September 20, this is the first evening of Yom Kippur. Families gathered at the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Ontario, as did many Jewish families gather around the world.
At around 7pm local time, they heard shots ring out in the street beyond the stained glass.
Sean Ward, 29 years old, had engaged Constable Jeff Smith with a shotgun while yelling antisemitic slurs. No one inside the synagogue was hurt. Smith was critically wounded and he killed Ward.
News of the attack does not hit the Internet until 8:33pm with a report from the local Quinte News.
But earlier at 8:14pm, Avi Lewis posted the following: Tonight, Yom Kippur begins, the most somber moment of the Jewish calendar. It's a time of atonement, a time to grieve those who have been lost, a time to acknowledge and take responsibility for harms we have caused individually and collectively.
For Jewish people, the personal has always been political and the political always personal.
This year I'm reflecting on the fact that we failed to do our part to stop an ongoing genocide committed in our name. There are many other fronts where I have to do the work of repair, but nothing on this scale.
Comments on this post were flooded by accusations of treachery, that Lewis was disgusting, that he was a self-hating Jew, a subhuman, disgusting cockroach, which sounds a little antisemitic, that his mom should have swallowed him, that there's no genocide in Gaza, that I hope the crocodiles get you. This is referring to Netanyahu's planned moat around what is left of Gaza. And of course that he's a kapo, which means that Palestinians are compared to Nazis.
There were also supportive and grateful quote tweets from those who share Lewis's antizionist views. But as so often happens in a rage cycle, they were fewer, they were slower to come, they had less traction.
Later that evening, Ezra Levant wrote that Lewis posted literally the moment a terrorist attacked a Belleville synagogue.
This is not only chronologically untrue, it started to establish a false link between the two events. Now Levant is the publisher of the right-wing propaganda platform Rebel News.
And then the next morning, Professor Mia Bloom falsely claimed that Lewis posted after the Belleville shooting hit the news. This is extraordinary in terms of misinformation because Bloom is actually a misinformation researcher who has focused on QAnon and right-wing extremism. And let's just put a pin on that.
Former Canadian ambassador to Norway and senior fellow at University of Ottawa Artur Wilczynski posted, quote, Lewis is a propagandist and a hate monger. His statement is incitement to violence against Jews. We see the result last night in Belleville. Vivian Bercovici, who's the former Canadian ambassador to Israel and now a National Post columnist, wrote, quote, Avi Lewis just threw oil on an already raging fire. Liberal MPs Anthony Housefather and Ben Carr also condemned Lewis, along with the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. By the 22nd, so this is two days, the attack on Lewis and the conflation of his statement with the shooting has trickled up to the opinion page of national newspaper the Globe and Mail, with columnist Robyn Urback calling Lewis's post textbook antisemitism and listing the Belleville shooting among acts made, quote, reasonable by this twisted logic. The, in other words, by claims or presumed claims of collective Jewish complicity. Urback wrote her column with no information or seeming interest in who Sean Ward was or what motivated him.
Now to add another moving part here, there's a parallel Yom Kippur incident.
CBC anchor newsreader Neil Herland posted to his personal Instagram on Yom Kippur evening, this is the 20th as well, a video of himself approaching a pro-Palestinian protest that was camped out in front of the Meridian Centre in downtown Toronto. In his caption to this video he wrote, I'm a journalist and I happen to be Jewish. On Yom Kippur, I went to a synagogue service in Toronto and was met by protesters trying to taunt and intimidate me from entering the building.
So Neil makes it sound like the building is the synagogue, and he uses the word synagogue several more times in the thread, and somewhat grandiosely suggests that the protesters were there to meet him.
Now in the video, we see protesters wearing keffiyeh and waving Palestinian flags and holding posters depicting wounded children in Gaza. And they are standing in front of a public arts venue that, as it turns out, Herland's synagogue had rented for the occasion to have the capacity to host a guest speaker named Mark Regev, who is a longtime Netanyahu spokesperson. Now, Herland didn't even name Regev, the target of the protest, in his post. As Israel's ambassador to the UK, Regev ran constant interference for Israel, denying there is a genocide, telling Mehdi Hasan that he was only seeing the dead children Hamas wanted him to see, and telling the BBC that there have been no limitations whatsoever on food, water, medicine entering the Gaza Strip, and then telling Christiane Amanpour that the deaths in the flour massacre, if you remember that, people lined up to get flour rations from a truck, were caused by rioting and trampling, not by sniper fire.
So that's why people showed up at the Meridian Centre, not at a synagogue.
They didn't show up because Herland wanted to pray for atonement. They showed up because a likely war criminal was speaking there.
So the same pro-Israel lobby that attacked Avi Lewis for his statement goes on, of course, on a roll to boost Herland's deceptive post as more evidence that Jews are under attack in the city, as opposed to their speaking out against Israel. And this second event sort of underlined, or it supported, the implicit thesis that the shooting in Belleville was related to anti-Israel protesting.
But then we got some actual details from Global News and the National Post on who Sean Ward was. They reported that the Belleville shooter was released from the Canadian military in 2022 for refusing the COVID vaccine on religious grounds and that he had voiced antisemitic COVID conspiracy theories.
Police called the attack hate motivated. Now, given my reporting background in the COVID era around right-wing extremism, Ward fits the profile of a kind of second wave QAnon guy radicalized through antisemitism. There's no indication that the shooting had anything to do with Israel or antizionism or sentiments about the genocide in Gaza.
Now to add even more moving parts amidst all of this, Public Safety Canada released its antisemitism progress report. And in its definitional section, the document states that antizionism is a form of antisemitism. There's actually two points in the document where they make this very concrete conflation. This is now the second government-related document that conflates these terms. The other one, it's the CASE report, was the subject of my interview with Daniel Silofsky a few weeks back on this show.
Also amidst this, my colleagues and I at Conspirituality Podcast produced an episode on how one of the most effective antivax COVID grifters in the United States, Peter McCullough, is now making media inroads in Canada.
And by invitation of Jesse Brown of Canadaland, who was not at all prepared to interview McCullough and debunk his bullshit talking points. The bulk of the episode is Derek and Julian doing the important work of breaking down McCullough's tactics, but I open the episode with a brief review of how Brown went from doing some good independent journalism in years past to a post-October 7th focus on equating antizionism with antisemitism.
Now. That fall, Brown started out by covering antisemitic attacks that seemed to be increasing in number in very concerning ways, to framing anti-IDF, anti-Israel, antigenocide, pro-Palestinian protests in general as being antisemitic in nature. And this began with his framing of vandalism committed against the Indigo Books flagship store in November.
They used some washable red paint, they had some posters they put up with wheat paste, and all of the vandalism targeted CEO Heather Reisman because she's the founder of the Heseg Foundation, which provides scholarships for non-Israeli IDF soldiers. Now the poster said that Reisman was supporting genocide, but Brown tweeted simply that they were attacking a Jewish bookstore.
Now, in 2024, he went ahead and meddled in a correspondent's assertion that Israel was committing genocide in post-production on a particular episode. This prompted staff departures over editorial integrity, but he just continued. He doubled down with a fawning interview of Israel's ambassador Canada.
This drew a staff rebuttal.
His staff has shrunk by half at this point, and recently on the local level, he's been a contentious figure in the Toronto mayoral race because he was tapped by the Jewish Lawyers of Canada organization to moderate a candidates' debate on rising antisemitism. But the problem is that Brown, who's supposed to play the role of moderator, had already on record publicly accused the incumbent Mayor Olivia Chow, who's an old time NDP activist, of letting Toronto become a global capital of antisemitism, which is absurd on its face.
So obviously Chow declined to appear.
The terrible danger and misdirection of conflating antizionism with antisemitism was perfectly encapsulated by the fact that the morning after the Belleville shooting, Brown published his interview with Peter McCullough.
Now Peter McCullough has no record of antisemitism, but antivax advocacy like his has been central to a matrix of right-wing conspiracy theories like QAnon that share a common antisemitic axiom. This is the idea that modern medicine is a demonic Jewish attack on Christian bodies and children, and which equates injections with rape and vampirism.
This is the water that it appears Sean Ward was swimming in.
So here's a guy driven by obvious violent antisemitism and antivax content like McCullough's.
And instead of learning enough about McCullough and his milieu to either refuse to platform him or to be able to like shut him up and, you know, actually push back and kick his ass on air, Jesse Brown's focus at that time was more on an antizionist Jew who happens to be the only political leader who's standing up for our public health system against austerity attacks and the contempt of Premier Danielle Smith in Alberta, who has political ties to antivax influencers.
Now part of what's so dangerous about this boy who cried wolf aspect in this hyper-Zionist attitude towards antisemitism is that Brown and Mia Bloom and Artur Wilczynski might be right in certain cases about the antisemitic motivations of some aggressive acts. But they are being so transparently biased about all of it that over time the public will become more cynical about the necessity to protect Jews from actual antisemitism, such as we see from people like Sean Ward.
So the conservative, reactionary, colonialist, racist politics of the pro-Israel lobby persuades them to overlook the obvious antisemitism from far-right extremists when it suits them.
For them, smearing Avi Lewis and every other Jewish person who stands against genocide satisfies two other goals.
You get to maintain the Israel exception and you get to continue the century-long tradition of defaming socialist Jews.
And then on September 29, it got a lot worse.
The National Post published a column by Yoni Goldstein, who's the former editor-in-chief and CEO of the Canadian Jewish News.
And this column was thinly veiled call for the assassination of Avi Lewis.
The column is titled Jewish Law Tells Us How to Deal with Avi Lewis.
And here's how it opens.
The Jews were well into their desert journey when Korach, a member of the privileged Levite clan, openly questioned Moses' leadership. 250 people, a tiny fraction of the nation that then comprised hundreds of thousands of adults, sided with him. Korach and his leadership group refused Moses' summons, accusing him of leading the Jews out of Egypt for his own glory.
Suddenly, God caused the earth to open up and Korach and his family were swallowed alive. The 250 admirers were consumed by fire.
The biblical story of Korach presents a stark lesson in how Jews think about internal dissent. When it escalates to become a threat to the continued viability of the community itself, it is indeed an extreme consequence for eliciting communal harm. But then, Jewish law is fairly clear on the subject. When a Jew endangers the Jewish community, the community is obligated to stop them.
Now, later on in the column, he writes, in Leviticus, God orders the Jewish people, you shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart, but rather to reprove your kinsmen. The rabbis generally understood this to mean that the Jewish response to a disagreeable community member is to approach privately and attempt to convince them, through honest discussion, to change their ways.
Maimonides later added that the confrontation is an essential element not only to impress upon the subject the seriousness of the matter, but also to avoid holding the contempt in until it boiled over into something worse.
None of this applies, however. This is Goldstein going on. When a Jewish person presents a clear and present danger to the Jewish community. When that happens, Jewish thought is much more forceful. You must prevent the perpetrator from causing harm.
Jewish law developed two character sketches to describe such scenarios. The first is known as a mosar, a Jewish person who informs to oppressive authorities, potentially leading to the imprisonment, torture or death of community members. The second, called a rodef, refers to a Jew who's actively pursuing another with the intent to harm or kill them. In both scenarios, the law is clear that a Jew is duty bound to step in. Protecting the community and its members is the most important thing, unquote.
What Goldstein leaves out is that by Talmudic tradition, a rodef or a mosar can be legitimately targeted for extrajudicial murder. And rodef was a term in popular circulation prior to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
So far, Yoni Goldstein and the National Post have gotten away with this. Folks have notified the RCMP. Folks have written to the Minister for Public Safety. There's no public response. So far, as veteran Jewish antizionist and feminist Judy Rebick notes, no one in the mainstream media or political class has denounced or even commented upon the issue.
The exception being Liberal Salma Zahid, who was recently the target of an Islamophobic attack.
And of course, because the political elite might be confused. After all, it's now the federal government's working understanding that antizionism is antisemitism. So maybe they're taking the view that Goldstein's column and his extremist language is a reasonable act of self-defense against the NDP leader saying a prayer.
Now there have been condemnations of the column and calls for a retraction and investigation of the government funding that the National Post, which is owned by a US hedge company, receives. CUPE President Mark Hancock made a statement. So did the National Council of Canadian Muslims and also a number of antizionist Jewish organizations. The Winchevsky Centre, Independent Jewish Voices Canada, the Jewish Faculty Network, Jews for Tikkun Olam, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. These are small community organizations who are now a targeted minority within a minority because they're willing to stand up for the principle that a person can pray for and atone for what they choose to without being threatened.
Finishing up. As a non-Jewish person, I'd like to make a couple of points. The last time I heard anyone use the Torah or any scriptural reference to talk about their political enemies was when this happened.
Benjamin Netanyahu (archival audio, October 28, 2023): You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember and we are fighting. Our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza or around Gaza and in all other regions in Israel are joining this chain of Jewish heroes, a chain that has started 3,000 years ago from Joshua bin Nun until the heroes of 1948, the Six Day War, the '73 October War and all other wars in this country.
Matthew Remski: That is Netanyahu on October 28, 2023. And the reference is to the Hebrews being authorized by God to kill all of the Amalekites, including women, children and livestock. IDF soldiers went on to call Gaza Amalek, and the language of religious war has since permeated the offensive.
So I mean, I suppose that Torah can be used against Palestinians or Jewish antizionists depending upon the material conditions, I don't know. But it's weird to me because I think one of the main points that Goldstein and other Zionists are trying to make is, don't confuse our affinity for the homeland with the actions of the ethnofascist government. We're not aligned with them. But it seems to me like there's an easy way to not confuse people on that point, which is to just avoid sounding like a religious extremist in an ethnofascist government.
The last thing I want to say here is addressed to other white non-Jewish progressives and socialists in Canada like myself and beyond. And to say that if you have not yet become active in your defense of antizionism, in defense of Palestinian and West Asian dignity, now is the time.
To the extent you're able, you can do this publicly, you can do it in your relationships, and as you do it, you must not be afraid of spurious accusations of antisemitism.
Why is this the time? You know, there are two reasons. As far as I can see, right now, attacking critics of Israel, genocide and neocolonial brutality as antisemitic is the same thing as attacking the political alternative to capitalism and imperialism at the last moment in which we can bring the planet back from the brink of ecological and species collapse. In the US the accusation of antisemitism is being used currently against the DSA by the Democratic elite. It's being used in the UK against Zack Polanski, whose Green Party just made the incredible move of declaring Zionism as a racist ideology at their recent conference.
Now the basic morality of socialism is breaking through 75 years of post-war propaganda to wake Gen Z especially up to the necessity of anticapitalist revolution.
And I think this conflation between antizionism and antisemitism is a kind of last ditch effort to stem the tide.
They're saying essentially, if you think Lewis makes sense on redistributing resource wealth, that's cute, but he's an antisemite. If you think Mamdani's plan for socialized groceries is good, it will come at the cost of increasing hatred for Jews. If you think that Zack Polanski is good for wanting to deproscribe Palestine Action, well, you know, you might be an antisemite.
These, according to Dr. Lara Sheehi, and you can go back a couple of weeks to my episodes with her, are psychic intrusions that tell you your yearning for fairness and dignity for all people is somehow contaminated by bigotry, like an original sin that you can't ever confess or purify enough.
Now, as a human being, you have to always examine yourself and interrogate your community for primal resentments that we know curdle into conspiracy theories and flare up into hatred and influence politics to the point of violence and even genocide. But as we do that, we have to recognize that antisemitism is not some special, you know, exceptional category of that examination that takes precedence over things like racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia or ableism.
There's a second reason I think you need to be brave now. The pro-Israel lobby has won the institutional and media and legal sphere. There will be no investigation of Yoni Goldstein's thinly veiled incitement to violence against Avi Lewis. There will be no liberal state protection for antigenocide political expression. We are it now.
But who is the we?
Our Palestinian or West Asian neighbors are stigmatized and silenced and policed by the political and media classes. Our antizionist Jewish friends are in a constant intergenerational battle to speak directly into the error of political Zionism. Everybody who is most immediately and personally impacted by this is exhausted. And so it is time for you to lend a hand, if you can.
And if there's a sliver of you that thinks it's too complicated, it seems like a painful intercultural dispute with ancient origins in that crazy part of the world over there. Well, that was never true.
And it's less true every day.
Borders are not real.
The AI that tracks your purchases on your phone is seamlessly connected to the AI targeting civilians in Gaza.
Your moral stance on this will be called hateful or evil by the Jesse Browns of the world.
They will try to make you feel like shit. But that contradiction, I don't know how to say it, it can feel exhilarating. If you can manage to see through it. It can inspire you to go harder. It can inspire you to help more. Because what else are you going to do?
Thanks for listening, everybody.
Take care of each other.
