Organizers of the protest have denied that Mount Sinai was targeted because of its links to Toronto’s Jewish community (it was founded by the city’s Jews when Jewish doctors were facing public discrimination). However, that claim has been met with skepticism.
What’s flagged as precipitating the growing anti-Jewish action and rhetoric is Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in which Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 of its civilians and kidnapped 240 more. In an effort to retrieve the hostages, Israel’s military routinely pounds Hamas strongholds in the Palestinian territories, leading to casualties.
Some feel Israel’s response lacks proportionality. Their anger against Israel is thus transferred onto individual Jews leading to a general rise in anti-Semitism.
That explanation holds to a degree.
However, I think if you truly want to understand the growing anti-Semitism in Canada today, you have to look beyond an abrupt geopolitical event in the Middle East to an ongoing ideological project now deeply rooted in all institutions of the West.
That is, I believe there is a connection between rising Jew-hatred in Canada (and the United States) and the proliferation of diversity, equity, and inclusion material and training in our education system, corporations, and government.
I outline in my report that at the core of DEI instruction is the claim that the world is divided into the oppressed and the oppressor. Moreover, according to the DEI doctrine, your attitudes or behaviours are not what make you an oppressor (in reality you might be congenial to everyone). It’s the extent to which your racial, sexual, or religious group experiences more success than others that gets you cast as the villain.
By that formula, it’s typically white, Christian males playing the role of villainous oppressor in the DEI drama; one study I cite noted that DEI instruction praises historically marginalized groups while “criticizing the dominant culture as fundamentally depraved (racist, sexist, sadistic, etc.).”
But that spurious formula applied by DEI proponents is easily transposed onto other groups who dare to perform above what the gurus of tolerance will tolerate.
In my report, I cite cases in which DEI officials focused their vitriol on high-performing individuals of Asian ancestry. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised that Jews might also become a target.
These comments by Goldfarb, a former associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, suggest that DEI, rather than reducing prejudice (a claim made by proponents), can increase it.
He’s right. In my recent work I highlight several studies showing that DEI instruction “increases prejudice and activates bigotry among participants by bringing existing stereotypes to the top of their minds or by implanting new biases they had not previously held.”
While I can provide excellent empirical facts showing DEI does nothing good and, more specifically, can promote bigotry, when it comes to my specific argument that the proliferation of DEI is abetting the rise in anti-Semitism I’ll conclude with a bit of observational data.
Consider which organizations have been repeatedly in the news for trumpeting an anti-Semitic message. Certain labour unions, academic associations, student groups, and government-dependent agencies immediately come to mind. Interestingly, in addition to leading the anti-Semitic charge now, for years they’ve been the flag-bearers for DEI.
These purveyors of DEI have been particularly successful because the mountains of empirical evidence debunking their core ideas and practices has been mostly ignored. Hopefully, my research report can help change that. As it stands now many are being fooled into believing the DEI falsehood that bigotry, if applied against the “right,” is justified.
If DEI were to be scrapped (as the evidence proves it should be) anti-Semitism won’t disappear. But in the absence of DEI, on those occasions anti-Semitism does rear its head, far fewer will celebrate it as morally virtuous.
