Gad Saad moved recently from Montreal, where he has long taught marketing at Concordia University, to Mississippi in part because “Jew-hatred was going crazy,” the Lebanese-born Jewish scholar told JNS.
“It started probably about 25 years ago, and it’s just been exponentially growing,” he said. “I didn’t really see that our future was in Montreal anymore.”
Author of the 2026 book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, Saad spoke at the Jewish American Summit in Los Angeles on Aug. 30. After his speech, he told JNS that he thinks Mississippi is safer for Jews than Canada.
“All of the deputies—the sheriff, the police—are all fans of my work,” he said. “They said that they all will protect me. You could carry guns in Mississippi.”
Saad is now associated with the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss. His website also lists him as a current Concordia marketing professor.
“When I’m threatened in person in Montreal while walking with my then 9-year-old son, I was told by police, ‘Well, maybe you should stop saying things that upset people,’” Saad told JNS. “I said, ‘Oh, that’s your solution?’”
He said that he asked Montreal police officers if he could carry a gun, knife or pepper spray to protect himself. Officers told him he couldn’t and that he should call 911 instead, he said.
“In Mississippi, I’m going shooting soon, because it’s the land of the free. Because I have the dignity to be able to defend myself,” he told JNS. “In Canada, my right to survive has been subcontracted to the government.”
Saad attributed the rise of Jew-hatred in Canada to “the immigration policies of Quebec.”
In 2025, Jews, who make up 1% of Canadians, were targets of 16.7% of all hate crimes and 70.7% of religion-based hate crimes, according to official Canadian data.
“Quebec, in their infinite wisdom, decided that because they care most about protecting the French language, then why not bring in hundreds of thousands of French-speaking Muslim immigrants, who at least can decapitate us, but before they decapitate us, they can say, ‘Bonjour,’” Saad told JNS.
“So as long as they do the decapitation in French, then it’ll all be fine,” he said.
According to Canada’s online immigration platform, “despite Canada’s reputation for inclusivity, Muslims face challenges such as Islamophobia and racial discrimination.”
There is a “persistent threat of anti-Muslim hate crimes,” and “negative stereotypes perpetuated by media and public discourse further contribute to misunderstandings about Islam and its followers,” according to the government site.
Saad doesn’t think that Canada can be saved at this point.
“I see it as a slow demise,” he told JNS. “Unless there is a cataclysmic agent of change that comes in—and I don’t see that happening—it’s going to be a slow burn until Canada falls off the abyss.”
During his speech at the summit in Los Angeles, Saad spoke about experiencing Jew-hatred growing up in Lebanon. As a 5-year-old, he heard people shouting “death to Jews” in the streets when the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser died, he said.
A teacher once asked students to stand up and share what they wanted to be when they grew up, and one said he aspired to be a “Jew killer.” The class laughed and applauded, and the student wasn’t expelled, Saad told attendees.
JNS asked Saad what he thought and felt at the time.
“I’m thinking this is insane, why do they hate me?” he said. “This is the boy that I grew up with playing soccer. Why is he saying that? So I was surprised.”
