{"id":71717,"date":"2026-06-02T19:44:06","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T19:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/71717\/"},"modified":"2026-06-02T19:44:06","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T19:44:06","slug":"chris-selley-at-a-synagogue-carney-tells-the-wrong-people-to-abandon-their-ethnic-rivalries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/71717\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Selley: At a synagogue, Carney tells the wrong people to abandon their ethnic rivalries"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most extraordinarily limp, ineffectual line in Mark Carney\u2019s comprehensively limp, ineffectual address<\/a> on the growing scourge of antisemitism in Canada, delivered Monday afternoon at a synagogue in Toronto, might have been this: \u201cWhen you come to Canada, you bring your faith, your tradition, your language, your story. You leave behind your wars and your animosities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where do you even to begin with that?<\/p>\n

Two-and-a-half years ago, Hamas committed a pogrom in southern Israel, killing more than 800 civilians<\/a> as well hundreds of others, and taking more than 250 hostages (dozens of which were later killed). Hamas leaders are smart enough to know hell would then rain down on them \u2014 and more to the point, on innocent Gazans living above their precious tunnels. Perhaps they underestimated just how much hell. But a fair number of Jews, both in Israel and the United States \u2014 and presumably Canada, although I\u2019m not aware of any comparable polling \u2014 believe Israel went \u201ctoo far\u201d in its response in Gaza: 39 per cent in the U.S.<\/a>, the Pew Research Center found in September 2025.<\/p>\n

You shouldn\u2019t harass people in their homes or businesses, as \u201cpro-Palestinian\u201d supporters have taken to doing, no matter what the polls say. My point is simply to underscore what\u2019s at the root of it: Not politics, but pure, crystalline antisemitism. Canadian and American Jews can\u2019t vote against Benjamin Netanyahu.<\/p>\n

The precise equivalent would be for Jewish Canadians to march through Arab and Muslim neighbourhoods waving Israeli flags in protest over what happened on October 7, 2003. But of course, Jewish Canadians don\u2019t do that sort of thing. (Nor do the vast majority of Muslim Canadians, of course. One of the most frustrating things about watching police escort horrible people around Jewish neighbourhoods, protesting the residents\u2019 Jewishness, is how few protesters there are. Police seem to have no problem telling counter-protesters to go away in order to keep the peace. Why not the protesters themselves?)<\/p>\n

But here we are. Western Jews who have to take it on the chin for Hamas\u2019s pogrom against Jews, and an Israeli response over which they have no control whatsoever.<\/p>\n

So, it was a hell of a thing to say to a synagogue audience, surely, that all Canadians are to \u201cleave behind your wars and animosities,\u201d without naming the relatively few absolute cretins who are trying to ruin it for everyone \u2014 none of whom were in attendance.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s extraordinary to me that Carney\u2019s speechwriters can\u2019t get past this obnoxious trope of stating aspiration as fact: \u201cWhen you come to Canada \u2026 you leave behind your wars and your animosities\u201d is just a more complicated version of \u201cthere is no place for antisemitism in Canada.\u201d If there were no place for antisemitism, if everyone was leaving behind their wars and animosities, there wouldn\u2019t be a problem.<\/p>\n

Also, what Carney stated as fact has never been true. It\u2019s not true in any pluralistic society. And while I suppose it\u2019s a lovely idea in theory, it doesn\u2019t need to be true to maintain social harmony.<\/p>\n

Canada has been a very successful adventure in diversity. All in all, we have probably endured less than our fair share of ethnic and religious strife. But there has been plenty of strife nevertheless, and I\u2019m sorry to report that much of it came from the \u201cold world.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the Fathers of Confederation, Thomas D\u2019Arcy McGee, was assassinated in 1868 by a fellow Irishman for having turned against Irish republican extremism.<\/p>\n

Canadian time travellers might be shocked to see how many swastikas were out and about in 1933 Toronto after Hitler\u2019s rise to power. The only saving grace of the Christie Pits Riots in Toronto, on Aug. 16 of that year, was that various immigrant communities, notably Italians, aligned with Jewish immigrants to do battle with Nazis who had brought a giant swastika banner to a baseball game.<\/p>\n

\u201cSix hours of rioting follows Hitler shout; scores hurt,\u201d was the Toronto Daily Star\u2019s headline the next day. \u201cJewish-Gentile ball game is marked by disorder as swastika flag raised; lead pipe was used; six constables only on hand though impending clash was forecast.\u201d (Some things never change.)<\/p>\n

What was the Air India bombing, the worst terrorist incident in this country\u2019s history,<\/a> about if it wasn\u2019t about imported \u201canimosities\u201d? We have never come to terms with that, to our shame, but we soldier on. There are myriad other examples. Hell, we can\u2019t even get official bilingualism right \u2014 a legacy of Canada\u2019s original old-world grievance.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re lucky, and we have done a lot of things right, but we\u2019re not special: You can\u2019t ask people to bring their faith, culture, language and world view with them to Canada but leave any rivalries or grievances behind. That\u2019s just not human nature. This insistence on combating dire situations with myth-making will eventually be a large part of the Liberals\u2019 undoing. In the meantime, on the issue of antisemitism specifically, Carney\u2019s government seems to have almost nothing to offer. And he offered it at a synagogue.<\/p>\n

National Post
cselley@postmedia.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The most extraordinarily limp, ineffectual line in Mark Carney\u2019s comprehensively limp, ineffectual address on the growing scourge of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71718,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[29428,3124,11059,21711,17,821,29175,29429,111,29427,29430,10177,48,29431],"class_list":["post-71717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mark-carney","tag-animosities","tag-antisemitism","tag-antisemitism-in-canada","tag-benjamin-netanyahu","tag-canada","tag-israel","tag-jewish-canadians","tag-law-enforcement-leaders","tag-mark-carney","tag-pew-research-center","tag-southern-israel","tag-synagogue","tag-toronto","tag-western-jews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}