Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at a synagogue in Toronto on June 1, addressing the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing Canada, included many pertinent points.
The problem is that it largely avoided the fundamental issues: why antisemitism has surged, how it has mutated, who is fueling it, and what concrete actions will be taken to confront it.
Standing in one of Canada’s largest synagogues, the prime minister acknowledged that “Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians” and that “if that covenant fails for one of our communities, it fails us all.”
He also highlighted the important role of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism. After all, if you cannot define antisemitism, you cannot effectively combat it.
While the prime minister may have struck some of the right notes, he ultimately failed to deliver where Canadians most needed leadership: naming and confronting those who are fueling and spreading antisemitism on Canada’s streets.
There is no need for another council to investigate this phenomenon. Five years of overt antisemitism—and the past two-and-a-half years in particular, marked by relentless hate rallies, shootings and violence targeting Canada’s Jewish community and anyone who supports the Jewish state—have made the perpetrators of anti-Jewish hatred visible to anyone willing to see.
Not once did the prime minister address how liberal values have been hijacked, redefined, inverted and weaponized to normalize ever-mutating forms of antisemitism. Not once did he refer to Islamic extremism and its role in the antisemitism crisis across Canada. He also failed to mention those who champion diversity, equity and inclusion while excluding Jews from their spaces.
Instead, he touted government policies and praised law enforcement, rather than calling for existing laws to be enforced and for perpetrators of hate crimes to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Nor did he commit to implementing his own government’s IHRA Handbook.
The prime minister also failed to look inward and examine the role his government has played in funding organizations that have promoted antisemitism, including entities with ties to terrorist organizations.
While speaking about the need to avoid “importing foreign conflicts,” he overlooked the impact of his government’s persistent anti-Israel policies on Canada’s Jewish community—from affirming Israel’s right to self-defense while restricting military export permits, to rewarding Palestinian leadership with recognition of a state in the aftermath of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, without requiring meaningful reform.
Significant and troubling questions have already emerged regarding the identities and backgrounds of several members of the council, one of the prime minister’s flagship proposals.
Most strikingly, while standing in a synagogue and speaking about the 3,000-year history of the Jewish people, he failed to mention the Jewish people’s millennia-old connection to the Land of Israel, effectively attempting to separate Israel from Jewish identity.
By omitting these realities, the prime minister’s statement risks contributing to the continued normalization of antisemitism rather than confronting it.
As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, warned: “Antisemitism is a virus that mutates so that new antisemites can deny that they’re antisemites at all because their hate is different from the old. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were hated for their race. Today they are hated for their nation state, Israel. What all three have in common is that they are different ways of saying that Jews have no right to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights of other human beings.
“Anti-Zionism, denying Jews the right to their one and only collective home by misrepresenting Judaism, is the new antisemitism.”
