The central Jewish thinker Maimonides was influenced extensively by Aristotle, so it makes sense that a new pro-Israel, Canadian think tank bears the name of the ancient Greek philosopher.
Mark Milke, a Canadian political scientist and writer, founded the Calgary-based Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy in 2023 “to renew common-sense discourse in Canada,” per the charity’s site.
Though Milke is not Jewish, he and the think tank have focused often on defending Jews and Israel. “When the board, staff and I set up the Aristotle Foundation to champion reason, democracy and civilization, we never thought we’d have to address antisemitic mob behaviour on Canadian streets and campuses,” he wrote two days before the anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks.
“You often hear the excuse that the demonstrations across Canada are not antisemitic or anti-Jew but anti-Israel and its policies. If that were true, the only protests in the past year would have been at the Israeli embassy,” he added. “Instead, antisemitic protests have occurred in front of Jewish coffee shops, synagogues, hospitals and seniors’ centers and demonstrations have taken place at university grounds.”
The native of Kelowna, British Columbia told JNS that his family goes back to Prussia on his mother’s side. His great-great-grandfather fought for the North in the U.S. Civil War before settling in Saskatchewan.
His paternal grandmother fled Ukraine in the 1920s, escaping the tumultuous political climate that would soon engulf Eastern Europe. His Polish-born grandfather arrived in Canada in 1929 and settled in Edmonton. Both grandparents narrowly avoided the devastation of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, instilling in them a deep appreciation for their new home and a strong aversion to extremist ideologies.
“I never heard a smidgen of antisemitism,” he said, of his parents and family. “Quite the opposite. Growing up, they just understood what was right and what was wrong, and so they had no sympathy for the Nazis. They certainly didn’t like communism.”
“I hate bullies. I always have,” he told JNS. “I’m aware of bullies in history. That’s what tyrants are.”
Milke developed an early fascination with history and politics. He read encyclopedias voraciously as a child, and learned about historical figures and events that shaped his later worldview and career path.
“When I was a kid, I asked myself, ‘How did Adolf Hitler rise to power?’” he told JNS. “The core problem with Hitler was that we gave in and gave in because nobody wanted another war. You had to recognize the evil that was in front of you eventually, but it was far too late.”
A Canadian case for Israel
The foundation, whose budget for 2025 is about $1.2 million, employs five people and works with about 40 experts and scholars, including Vivian Bercovici, a former Canadian ambassador to Israel, as well as theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, University of Calgary history professor David Bercuson, political consultant and Iran expert Michael Bonner and Carleton College political science and philosophy professor Waller Newell.
Milke’s case for non-Jewish allies to champion the Jewish state relates to his aversion to bullies. We must “support our allies, liberal democracies around the world,” he said. “If you don’t do that actively, the tyrants take over. The autocrats take over. The ideological zealots take over.”
“I know Israel is not perfect, but Israel demonstrated in the 1970s it wanted a peace deal with Egypt, and in the ’90s with Jordan. It gave territory for peace,” he told JNS.
When Israel made the offer to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, “in a gross act of irresponsibility, he rejected a 97% loaf,” Milke said. “He was in this victim cult, ensconced in this permanent revolutionary victim mindset.”
Milke sees a parallel to Hamas today. “You can’t deal with someone who wants to kill you,” he said.
Surging Jew-hatred and attacks on Israel are part of a larger assault on Western values, he believes.
“Civilization is a fragile concept. You can tear things down easier than you can build them up,” he said. “If people want to understand what the lack of civilization looks like, it’s Oct. 7. Hamas coming across the border, attacking kibbutzes and others, and young teenagers, and 20-somethings at the Nova Music Festival.”
Rising antisemitism in Canada caught him off guard. “I never thought anyone Jewish would have to worry about living in Montreal or Vancouver, or that I’d find in Melbourne, as I did in December, a firebombing of a synagogue,” Milke told JNS.
“What surprised me in the last 16 months was just how many people had really poisonous ideas in their heads and showed up in the streets of Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver,” he said. “I think much of the public in the West does not understand the power of religious or ideological belief.”
That relates to the name of the foundation.
Aristotle “asserted that reality and reason matter to solving problems,” and “ancient Greece was an incubator for experiments in democracy,” per the foundation site. “Athenian citizens debated justice and the good life. All such elements—reason, democracy and civilization—yet matter today to human flourishing.”
The think tank addresses what it sees as failures of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, as well as “cancel culture” and academic echo chambers. It also advocates for understanding Canadian history better and stronger property rights.
After earning a master’s at the University of Alberta, Milke obtained a doctorate in political science from the University of Calgary, with a dissertation on U.S.-Canadian relations. (To pay for school, he planted trees in northern Canada for three summers, and he taught English in Japan for two years to pay off his loans.)
He worked at other think tanks and conducted research, including materials published by the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. He has penned six books and writes commentary regularly for newspapers, including the Calgary Herald, Globe and Mail, and National Post.
Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel “drew us into antisemitism and Israel, because it was an attack on Canada’s liberal democratic ally in the region akin to attacks on our allies that drew us into World War II,” Milke told JNS.
“Oct. 7 was also an attack on civilization, and one reason I and the board founded the Aristotle Foundation was to remind Canadians that civilization matters,” he said. “It’s not civilized to attack women, children, festival-goers and the elderly. Frankly, it’s not civilized to attack non-combatant men either. None of what happened on Oct. 7 was akin to the tragedy of unavoidable civilian casualties in war. It was a terror attack akin to Sept. 11.”
A “determined minority” of those who are “radically anti-Western civilization, and frankly anti-all civilization” revealed itself in anti-Israel and antisemitic chants of “death to Israel, death to the United States, death to Canada” at the Vancouver Art Gallery last year and in protests elsewhere in Canada, according to Milke.
“It’s why young Iranians and expatriate Iranians despise the Hamas radicals and sympathizers,” he said. “Because Iranians well know what a vicious theocratic tyranny looks like. That’s been Iran’s regime since 1979.”
U.S. politics
Milke told JNS that U.S. President Donald Trump’s newly announced tariffs “undermine Canada and the rules-based system that was built up in the postwar world among multiple countries worldwide.”
“Some people support Trump because they see him as someone finally pushing back on some issues they care about, or supportive of Israel. But he’s erratic and chaotic and not always in a good way. The tariffs are a good example of that,” he said.
“It was ramped-up protectionism in 1930, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, that sent the United States and other nations into the Great Depression with ratcheted-up costs and a shrinking money supply at the same time—not the 1929 stock market crash, too often wrongly cited as the cause,” he said. “Protectionism hurts investment, raises prices—thus, it costs more dollars to buy fewer goods, and that creates higher unemployment.”
Trump only imposed a 10% tariff on goods from China, “the nation he long complained about as being the trade problem—which it is—while hammering Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs” and did so after he “rescued TikTok and its Chinese military connection from being shut down,” Milke said.
Trump is targeting the northern U.S. neighbor “that on Sept. 11 sheltered thousands of Americans at Gander, Newfoundland, when air travel was shut down.”
“The tariffs are entirely wrongheaded and will damage all economies, America’s included, especially by hurting the poorest Americans with higher prices for everything from food to automobiles,” he said.
Many issues need to be addressed in the new year, but Milke’s priority list includes “much more work on radicalism and antisemitism,” reform of immigration as well as more research on the “illiberal nature” of diversity, equity and inclusion, which he says “in essence is anti-individual, anti-merit policy dressed in diversity ‘drag.’”
Another thing that he told JNS is needed is the “restoration of free expression and free association in Canada without making the mistake of equating mobs in malls as akin to that.” That begins with education.
“If you want to understand what’s wrong in Canada today, look at all the destructive, divisive and poisonous ideas in universities,” he said. “Identity politics where you punish people today for the alleged sins of their ancestors or just because someone’s skin colour today is the same as someone else 100 years ago, the attacks on Canadian history and founders and the problem of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment.”
“To understand the danger of what’s going on in universities, think of a lake above a dam,” he added. “If that lake is polluted or poisoned, everything downstream is damaged: the drinking water, the farms that produce food, the park that kids play in that turns yellow and dry.”
Just as clean water above the dam is needed, “ it’s the same with education,” he said. “If students are infected by poisonous, harmful ideas, everything downstream—schools, politics, business, civil society—is damaged.”