Instrumentalizing antisemitism (again)

Why did a Spiderman who climbed up a scaffold with a Palestinian flag get so much more attention (and condemnation) than Shopify selling a Nazi T-shirt?

About a year ago, journalists and politicians were very concerned about a guy dressed like Spiderman. During a pro-Palestine protest that had targeted the US Embassy in Toronto, the crowd marched through Toronto’s hospital district and a protester dressed like Spiderman climbed up construction scaffolding and waved a Palestinian flag in front of Mount Sinai hospital.

The protest became an obsession for a few days. Justin Trudeau called it reprehensible and police investigated. It was antisemitic for this protest to have passed by Mount Sinai.

Now, one year later, a ceasefire has been called between Hamas and Israel (kind of), and journalists and politicians have apparently stopped caring about antisemitism. Where it was absolutely critical to ensure that Jews feel safe in Toronto by condemning the Mount Sinai protest, the same journalists and politicians are nowhere to be found in condemning Canada’s own Shopify for selling Nazi T-Shirts.

A quick Google search exposes that Canadian media and politicians did not really care that Shopify sold Kanye West’s Nazi T-Shirts a few weeks ago; the news was bigger in the United States than it was in Canada. CTV didn’t report on it at all, Global’s reporting cited another white nationalist, Milo Yiannopoulos, who explained that West left Twitter, and CBC’s reporting on it focuses more on West than it does Shopify, a company with leadership that has consistently tangoed with the far right.

If it weren’t for The Logic, we might not have known how slow Shopify’s leadership was to remove the online store, how employees expressed deep concern that the store wasn’t immediately removed, or that the company finally did remove the store because they were worried about fraud, and not so much about the whole Nazi thing.

(Shopify also just laid off a team who supported Black, Indigenous and women entrepreneurs. They don’t have to pretend any longer).

What’s the difference here? Why did journalists and politicians pounce on a protest to denounce antisemitism but were ambivalent towards a Canadian company literally selling Nazi merchandise?

Last year’s Mount Sinai-adjacent protest was used as cover for police to increase its presence during protests. It also helped reinforce and justify banning protests from within a distance of certain facilities. This, combined with the war on drug users, seeks to carve out mini DMZs across Canadian towns and cities where expressing dissent, using drugs or doing things that the state deems unacceptable will be forbidden, free speech be damned.

Shopify selling Nazi merch doesn’t allow the police state to deepen itself, and so it’s far less interesting to people in power — antisemitism be damned.

Canada — our institutional leaders, our politicians and our media — does not actually oppose antisemitism if it doesn’t allow the state to advance an attack on its citizens. This has been crystal clear, from honouring a Nazi in the House of Commons to the government fighting Library and Archives Canada from releasing the name of historic Nazis that lived in Canada: these issues cannot be used to advance the security state. Therefore, antisemitism that might result from these issues does not matter to the state.

However, if antisemitism can be used to advance a politic that does align with the status quo — whether that is increasing police presence, criminalizing dissent or supporting Israeli violence — then they will fall over themselves to condemn it.

This isn’t unique to antisemitism. It’s true for any kind of hatred — if condemning it works for the priorities of the state, then fine. Otherwise, we can ignore it.

CBC is reporting that a new CSIS report has identified something that anti-racist activists have been saying since Oct. 7, 2023 and before: if you care about antisemitism, you need to tackle the far right. Anyone that follows the far right knows that antisemitism has been more and more prevalent online, with depictions more vile in the past few years. The antisemitism is not only out in the open, it’s proudly announced and pronounced by the posters. While code words for Jews that have been floating in the ether for years (a century!) — cultural Marxism, globalism, Marxism in general — are thrown around online more than ever before, I’ve increasingly seen people drop the pretense all together and instead demonize Jews directly.

And some of this language is finding favour among high-profile people, politicians included.

Again, if you watch these spaces, you know this.

It’s why Kanye West’s Nazi shirt store should have been removed immediately — because Nazism is coming back. And yet, there are no police investigations or heightened police presences to combat Nazism in Canada. For Canadian authorities, antisemitism and hatred in general is only interesting if it can be pinned on the left (which, by the way, the authors of this report say that Palestinian encampments were not breeding grounds of antisemitism, contrary to the screeching of certain Zionists). If a bunch of tech bros are tacitly letting Naziism proliferate, it’s barely worth a mention.

Understanding that the far right is the most significant source of antisemitic content (and is the most likely to pose a risk of violence) allows us to also understand how antisemitism is intrinsically tied to Islamophobia and other kinds of hatred; that the pushers of antisemitism as a gateway into the far right for sympathetic Internet users, are also pushing Islamophobia, Transphobia, homophobia, ableism and misogyny.

Unfortunately, in this era of tech bro fascism, the targets of those hatreds are often the biggest threat to the priorities of the state. And unless we slay this fascism, the extremists will always be given the benefit of the doubt while the folks who are most likely to be targets of the threats will be demonized, policed, criminalized and harassed.

POST-SCRIPT

The inspiration for this piece was seeing this article go across my newsfeed this morning. The headline, “Violent extremists are using antisemitism to recruit in Canada: CSIS report,” pushed me to finally write about Shopify, which I’ve wanted to for days (sorry STEM, you will have to wait!).

But when I actually read the article, which I did just as I was finishing my last paragraph, I was stunned to see Elizabeth Thompson at CBC quote a former CSIS guy who claims that ultimately, the far right isn’t as much of a threat as “Islamism” is. That in the past decade, there have been no arrests of far right activists, while Islamist groups (and it must be said — those are not actually a thing in Canada) pose the real threat. Here are the quotes:

Phil Gurski, president of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting and a former CSIS analyst, said he thinks the greater threat of violent extremism comes from Islamist groups.

"Over the past 10 years the government has under-represented the threat from Islamist groups and over-represented the threat from far-right groups which they call IMVE," he said.

Gurski said there have been several arrests of Islamist-inspired groups or individuals planning attacks in Canada.

"We've had virtually no arrests on the far right," he said.

This kind of straight-up lying is absolute fucking poison. Jews experiencing antisemitism does not have to always be tied to Muslims. In fact, doing this is in itself Islamophobic. Demonizing Muslims, who not only experience more hatred than white Jewish Canadians do, but who represent the group who have been most murdered in Canada by extremist violence is also journalistically fucked up.

I hope that Elizabeth Thompson sees this, and is reminded of the following list:

Ibrahima Barry, Mamadou Tanou Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Aboubaker Thabti, Abdelkrim Hassane, Azzedine Soufiane, Mohamed-Aslim Zafis, Yumna Afzaal, Madiha Salman, Salman Afzaal, Talat Afzaal.

I know that these names might be hard to read for us old-stock Canadians who are used to Johns and Elizabeths. Abdelkrims and Mamadous can be difficult to pronounce and see as being human, but CHRIST. COME THE FUCK ON.

Plus, while we *always* forget this, we cannot forget every woman, girl, child and relation murdered by the generalized extreme hatred of women, the silent victims of far right violence who die because their partners believe they have the right to their lives.

Nor can we forget the Indigenous people murdered by extremist violence, so often committed by men and women on the payroll of the Canadian state.