Canada Has an Antisemitism Problem

And its leaders don’t know how to confront it.

By Harry Khachatrian

A police car parked outside Shaarei Shomayim synagogue in Toronto, March 8. Photo: Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press/Associated Press

It has become a grim trope in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, that news of another shooting or violent attack targeting Canadian Jews is met with the question: “Which one?” From late July 25 to early July 28, two locations of a Jewish-owned bakery chain were vandalized, with both under firearm-discharge investigations; and shots were fired outside armored-vehicle manufacturer INKAS, which counts Israel among its many clients. Four days later, in Montreal, an arson attack destroyed NÖAM, a popular kosher restaurant.

Since the Hamas terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, triggered the current war in Gaza, a raucous wave of antisemitic agitation, intimidation and violence has rocked Canada. Jewish schools have been struck by gunfire—so far, outside operating hours. Synagogues have been fired upon, firebombed and vandalized. Mezuzahs have been torn from the doorways of Jewish seniors. Jewish-owned businesses have awakened to shattered glass, paint and bullet holes. “Visibly identifiable” Jews have been assaulted and fired on from passing cars.

The Jewish community center a few blocks from my condo now has a police cruiser parked outside as a permanent fixture. It’s a bleak environment, far removed from the Canada to which I immigrated 25 years ago. A friend’s grandparents recalled growing up in a Montreal where signs at certain beaches bore variations of the notorious warning: “No dogs or Jews allowed.” That world, which Canada congratulated itself for having consigned to history, feels more familiar now than it has in generations.

None of this has ameliorated the suffering of Gaza’s inhabitants or helped “free Palestine”—whatever that means. Yet politicians at every level keep responding with the same platitudes: “Antisemitism is vile and unacceptable.” “Hate has no place in Canada.” Apparently it does. Antisemitism has secured a comfortable suite at the Four Seasons.

Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, a far-left radical so insidious she rivals New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani; Ontario Premier Doug Ford, an alleged conservative; and Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney have issued versions of this statement repeatedly this year. Each attack is treated as an inexplicable eruption of generic “hate,” disconnected from the movement that has spent nearly three years supplying the language, targets and moral permissions surrounding it.

What unites these politicians is their inability—or unwillingness—to address the ideological engine of this malady: anti-Zionism. In Toronto, masked and keffiyeh-clad demonstrators have repeatedly descended upon Jewish neighborhoods, surrounded community institutions and screamed slogans at Orthodox families. The ostensible target is always “Zionism,” an elastic abstraction that somehow leads its opponents, with remarkable consistency, to synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher businesses and neighborhoods populated by Jews.

Apologists may insist upon a distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish hatred, or retreat to the predictable banality that they’re “merely criticizing the Israeli government.” Yet the victims are always Jews.

The question Zionism once posed—whether the Jews should possess a sovereign state—ceased to be theoretical in 1948. Anti-Zionism today is no more a serious political aspiration than a movement dedicated to dissolving Japan and driving the Japanese into the Pacific would be. Canada must recognize anti-Zionism for what it has become: an anti-Jewish fever dream masquerading as a progressive liberation movement.

Ms. Chow’s failure is especially contemptible because she has embraced this movement’s moral vocabulary. At a gala hosted last November by the National Council of Canadian Muslims, she declared that “the genocide in Gaza impacts us all.” Moreover, despite her reputation for showing up to nearly every local event, Ms. Chow has never attended Toronto’s annual UJA Walk with Israel and in 2024 refused to attend an Israeli flag-raising ceremony at City Hall, which she called “divisive.” Yet whenever a synagogue is vandalized or a Jewish business is shot, Ms. Chow dutifully announces that she stands with Toronto’s Jewish community.

Ms. Chow may not have endorsed chucking stones through synagogue windows, but she accepts the movement’s premise that Israel—the world’s only Jewish state—is an enterprise of genocidal evil. She then professes horror when people marinating in that rhetoric begin treating Jewish institutions as Israel’s domestic outposts. The political climate is so degraded that Albertan politician Naheed Nenshi recently apologized for the “harm” caused by posing with Israel’s ambassador.

Messrs. Ford and Carney aren’t much better. Mr. Carney announces hate-crime measures, while Mr. Ford promises that offenders will be prosecuted to “the fullest extent of the law.” Yet these assurances increasingly resemble insipid political theater. Amir Azar, a Toronto man whose prosecution is proceeding within Ontario’s criminal-justice system, was nevertheless released on bail despite facing 29 charges arising from an alleged campaign that included setting fires at four synagogues, damaging a fifth, threatening a Jewish community center and extensively damaging a Jewish-owned café.

None of these politicians’ measures address the reason Jewish schools need reinforced glass in the first place. A country in which Jews require police cruisers outside community centers, armed guards at synagogues and reinforced windows at schools cannot credibly insist that antisemitism has “no place” within it. Canada has already made room. The only question is whether its leaders can muster the integrity to name the movement that put it there.

Mr. Khachatrian is a Toronto-based film critic at the Washington Examiner.