The conspicuous new silence of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network

Breadcrumb Trail Links

NP Comment
News
Canada

Article content

First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping you posted on the travails of Canadian politicos, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here. 

TOP STORY

Article content

As Canadian cities continue to be roiled by mass rallies calling for the destruction of Israel, it has yielded nothing but prolonged silence from the one body that has been cited by the Trudeau government as a leading authority on “hate.”

Article content

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN) — a perennial recipient of federal “anti-racism” monies — has not issued a single statement or social media post in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks against Israel, even when those attacks sparked celebratory rallies across Canada’s major cities.

By contrast, the group issued five statements over five weeks regarding the 1 Million March 4 Children, a protest that called for the removal of “gender identity” instruction from school curricula.

And in early 2022, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network also issued a flurry of statements condemning the anti-mandate Freedom Convoy protests as a nest of far-right racism and anti-Semitism.

It was the CAHN that almost exclusively fuelled media reports at the time that Freedom Convoy was a close ally of Diagolon, an alt-right group that it cited as a national security threat. RCMP reports recently published by researchers Caryma Sa’d and Elisa Hategan found that the Mounties themselves never gave these threats much credence.“Due to the fact that all information traces back to one source (CAHN), triangulation and the verification of facts is almost impossible at the current time,” the RCMP wrote in its profile of Diagolon.

Article content

Related Stories

Ottawa rushes to condemn ‘attack’ on Gaza hospital despite the initial claims coming from Hamas

What are the laws of war? What some critics have wrong about the Israel–Hamas conflict

In February 2022, a CAHN statement even cited the ongoing Freedom Convoy blockades as evidence for why Canada needed “anti-hate” legislation to censor social media, even if it infringed on Canadian civil liberties.

“We would rather see a small amount of posts that are not-quite hate speech be a casualty of any legislation rather than have hate speech continue to attack and silence women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples, and others,” they wrote.

But 11 days after Hamas terrorists massacred more than 1,000 people in southern Israel — including six Canadians — the group has remained conspicuously silent even as mass-rallies gather in Canadian urban centres to cheer the attacks as an act of Palestinian “resistance.”

Within hours of the Oct. 7 attacks, rallies congregated in all of Canada’s major downtown cores with chants of “down, down Israel” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — a statement meant to explicitly reject a two-state solution in favour of Israel’s complete eradication.

Article content

Marches and gatherings have continued in the days since. On Tuesday, an Ottawa antisemitism conference attended by all four major party leaders was similarly thronged with protesters carrying Palestinian flags. “Protesting an antisemitism conference is showing your true colours,” read a statement by The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the conference’s organizer.

CAHN is chaired by Bernie Farber, a former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, who has previously been rather vocal about Palestinian extremism within Canada.

In 2009, following a similar round of pro-Gaza protests in Canadian cities that included calls for the destruction of Israel, Farber called for the rallies to be subjected to an official RCMP hate crime probe.

“Some of the rhetoric and chants that we have heard are everything from calls to murder, to comparison of Jews and Israelis to Nazis, to calls for genocide,” Farber said at the time.

Farber has posted statements to his personal Facebook page, saying he has “been trying to figure out how best to explain my trauma since the first news of the anti-Jewish massacres carried out by the Nazi inspired Hamas began.”

Article content

Farber referenced his father’s resistance against the Nazis, and said “And here we are with that nightmare scenario playing out again. But this time it’s different. This time we are not defenceless. This time we will not hide in holes. This time we have Israel.”

But while the CAHN frequently warns of anti-Semitism among the “far right,” its website doesn’t contain a single example condemning Palestinian extremism or highlighting institutionalized calls for Israel’s destruction — the latter of which has been extremely visible among Canadian academic circles since Oct. 7.

As of press time, one of the last statements issued by CAHN before going dark was a detailed guide on how to oppose the “parental rights” movement, which arose in part over revelations that school boards across the country had quietly adopted a policy of immediately accommodating the gender transitions of minors without informing their parents. As the guide warned, parental rights “seems to be an exceptionally salient concept, resonating far beyond far-right, or even conservative, echo chambers.”

Article content

In just the last few years, the Trudeau government has poured millions of dollars into “anti-racism” initiatives premised on the notion that Canadian society is shot through with “systemic racism” that can only be addressed with policy that ascribes different treatment based on one’s race or sexual identity.

CAHN has secured more than $500,000 in anti-racism grants, most notably a $260,000 contract to draw up a toolkit on “preventing hate in Canadian schools.”The resultant 53-page guide became notable for declaring the Red Ensign – Canada’s pre-1965 flag – a “hate symbol.” School administrators were also warned that various quotidian teenage activities – such as circulating internet memes or using TikTok – were potentially red flags for “hate.”

Just last month, CAHN was petitioning Ottawa for $5 million in funding over five years to act as an unofficial “anti-hate watchdog” against the “far right.”

IN OTHER NEWS

Within hours of a massive explosion hitting the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned it as a violation of “international law,” and his industry minister even referred to it as an “attack” – both statements seeming to imply that Israel was responsible (for instance, Trudeau hasn’t used the phrase “international law” when condemning Hamas, a terror group, except in the circumstance of calling for Hamas hostages to be treated humanely). There’s just one problem: The explosion very likely came from a malfunctioning rocket fired by a Hamas ally – and Canada’s condemnations were based on press reports sourced entirely from Hamas. And it’s not just Israel claiming that the rocket came from within Gaza; multiple independent analyses of video evidence have noted that the explosion took place seconds after a rocket barrage was launched towards Israel by the group Palestinian Islamic Jihad.  

Article content

Amid Ottawa’s more dubious attempts to bring down grocery prices, the Department of Agriculture has hit upon one that might actually help: Extending best-before dates so that grocers aren’t compelled to throw out food so regularly. While First Reading does not advise you to start chugging sour milk or eating expired ham, Canada’s best-before regulations are notoriously overzealous. According to Second Harvest, the typical Canadian egg is still plenty edible up to two weeks after its best before date. Photo by Kier Gilmour/Postmedia

Nearly two-thirds of Canadians want Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign, including a not-insubstantial number of Liberal voters. According to a new Angus Reid Institute poll, 57 per cent of Canadians want Trudeau out of the way by the next election. Among Liberals, meanwhile, it’s almost an even split between the “dump Trudeau” and “keep Trudeau” camps; 41 per cent want him to resign, while 44 per cent want him to stay. The context of the survey is that it is occurring amid a meteoric rise in Conservative support that is even starting to chip away at NDP votes. Based on an amalgam of major polls, 338Canada is now projecting that the next federal election could see the Conservatives capture 200 seats – a total that would rank among the most decisive landslides in Canadian history.

For any Canadian politicians looking to address the housing unaffordability crisis, the good news is that public expectations are already rock-bottom. A recent Nanos poll asked respondents how confident they were that Canadian housing would be more affordable in five years than it is now. The results are above; a mere 16 per cent had any hope things would improve. Photo by Nanos

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh – who has been calling for an immediate Israeli ceasefire that would keep Gaza’s Hamas leadership in place – seemed to imply in the House of Commons on Monday that Israel is contemplating a genocide of Palestinian people. After accusing Israel of imposing “collective punishment” on Gaza, he warned that “when we stop believing that each life has value, this is when the seeds of genocide take hold.” This prompted both Liberal MP Ben Carr and Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman to ask the NDP leader if he was really suggesting that Israel might try to “eradicate” the Palestinian people. Singh did not deny the suggestion, but replied “the only way forward to save lives is peace.”

Get all of these insights and more into your inbox by signing up for the First Reading newsletter here.

Article content

Share this article in your social network