The World Symposium Against Anti-Zionism, held in Toronto on May 17, was intended to confront the “new face of Jew-hatred,” according to Amir Epstein, director of Tafsik, one of the event organizers.
“People need to be educated and informed, and we need to learn exactly what it is and how it operates and what will equip us better to fight back,” Epstein told JNS, of anti-Zionism.
“While others are ignoring it and tending to a wound that is 1,00-years-old, we’re saying it’s time to focus on this new one that is blowing up and making hatred towards us completely acceptable and normalized,” he said. “It’s time to take away the weaponization of our identity, and that’s what we’re trying to do by going after anti-Zionism.”
Jews, and everyone else, ought to be able to define themselves, according to Epstein.
“No one is going to identify the Jews but the Jewish people, and Zionism is Judaism,” he told JNS. “You can’t fight back something you don’t really understand. You can’t fight back something you don’t know.”
“The enemy is sneaky, and they’re evil,” he added. “We have to understand what it is they’re doing to be able to fight back.”
The event drew a host of speakers, including Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, scholar Gad Saad, influencers Lizzy Savetsky and Emily Austin and United Arab Emirates-based activist Loay Alshareef, who advocates for normalization with Israel.
Organizers said the event drew about 1,000 people from across Canada, as well as from the United States, Europe, Trinidad and Israel.
Shapiro told the audience that anti-Zionism advocates for the Jewish state, which “has 10 million citizens, some 2 million of them Muslim, another 200,000 Christians, should be destroyed” and that Israel “ought to be treated unlike any other country, because Israel is somehow uniquely evil.”
“Most of all, the anti-Zionists must lie about Jews, because the only way to convince people that all of these other lies are true is to convince people that they have been bamboozled, that they’ve been hoodwinked, that they’re suffering from a sort of false consciousness,” which they blame on “Israel-controlled media, these Zionist-controlled governments,” Shapiro said at the event.
“This is where anti-Zionism becomes totally coincident with antisemitism,” he said.
Melissa Lantsman, a Conservative parliamentarian who represents Thornhill and who is Jewish, addressed the audience at the event.
She told JNS that the symposium is important, “because language shapes reality, and when the denial of Jewish self-determination becomes normalized in media, academia and in our very own government, it has real and dangerous consequences.”
“A conference that names anti-Zionism clearly what it is gives advocates, policy shapers and institutions the right vocabulary to distinguish legitimate debate from outright delegitimization,” she told JNS. “That distinction is important for the safety and viability of those who stand tall for freedom, democracy and Western values.”
Naya Lekht, co-founder of Stop Antizionism, which also hosted the event, told JNS that “we needed an event that will be like a catalyst that will help our community shift the paradigm” and to make clear that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the same.
“American juries are so confused. They think that anti-Zionism is a form of criticism,” she said. “We need to change the culture, and that will take time.”
Salman Sima, a former political prisoner of the Iranian regime and founder of International Coalition Against Racism Everywhere, told JNS that “usually you see that the leftist, the Islamist, the jihadists differentiate between Zionism and Judaism.”
“We need to say that Zionism is a successful land back movement,” he said.
The conference was unusual, he told JNS, in that it gathered Jews and non-Jews, including Muslims, and speakers from across North America “who are not afraid, and told those people in the audience they were not victims. They were the heroes.”
Miriam Mattova, Toronto-based model and activist, told JNS that the conference was important to her, as someone who faces “constant” hatred and threats online, because it helped build “real bonds, relationships and unity between people who share the same mission.”
“The biggest takeaway for me was realizing how important unity and visible support are right now,” she told JNS. “People are exhausted, fearful and often afraid to speak publicly.”
“Conferences like this create space for important conversations, education and solidarity,” she said. “They remind people that they are not alone.”
