Today’s Antizionism is Jew-Hatred

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

The Jewish world has grown darker. I’m not going to compare the anti-Jewish hate that has spread across this and other countries since October 7, 2023, to the Holocaust, but we know that Jewish life has become far more precarious. And so much of the hatred flies under the rubric of so-called “antizionism,” with people claiming that this isn’t “antisemitism.” But this is false dichotomy. And we know it when we see it.

“Antizionism” is not about the now arcane historical debates that occurred mainly within Jewish communities from the 19^th century through 1948, in which those who became Zionists sought to actualize the Jewish ties to biblical Israel and recreate a modern state. By “Zionists,” today’s enemies are not referring to supporters of the 19th century self-liberation movement of the Jewish people, whose goal was to establish a national home. They known little of this history. They’ve never heard of Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Ber Borochov, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, or Chaim Weizmann.

As a derogatory slur, a pejorative, it simply means “Jew,” the way earlier words, now archaic, used to. Some call Jews “Zios.” They mean the Jewish people, who exist in opposition to everything good in the world, and who are figures of emblematic wickedness. In this they simply update what Nazis said a century ago. Hitler, too, was an “antizionist,” along with his racial antisemitism. It attacks Jews, here in western countries like Canada – in the cities where they live, in the universities they attend, in the publishing houses where they send their manuscripts, and in the entertainment world where they act and sing.

Note that it calls itself antizionism, not anti-Israelism, so that the net can grab virtually every Jew who simply wants to see Israel not destroyed – and that’s the vast, vast majority. We Jews know what it means, regardless of what our enemies claim. Would anyone think that the term antisemitism means hatred of Semites?

Clearly a ludicrous idea; it was invented in the 19^th century by a German Jew-hater, Wilhelm Marr, to make it sound more “racially scientific.” No one is fooled by that, of course, nor should they be by so-called “antizionism.” In its effects, it is for Jews a distinction with a negligible difference. It is meant to portray Jews as villains, and while it may fool some gullible people, it will deceive very, very few of us.

After all, as Michel Coren noted in “Roald Dahl’s Antisemitism Feels Painfully Familiar,” in the British magazine the Spectator March 16, “most Jewish people do in fact to varying degrees support Israel, partly because centuries of bigotry, violence, massacre, and attempted genocide have given them little alternative. They may oppose Israeli policy, may condemn the current government, may even want radical compromises, but there’s still support. And in the current climate of leftist and Islamist triumphalism, it’s all Zionism and none of it acceptable.”

Anti-Zionism is marked by three core “libels”: that “Zionists” are colonizers, guilty of apartheid, and committing genocide. (Actually, the only time we were settler-colonialists was when we conquered Canaan, but that was God’s doing!) Anti-Israel activists incorporate historical manifestations of anti-Jewish discrimination under the guise of anti-Zionist political activism, from the blood libel to Nazi-era tropes, mixed with contemporary academic theories. Anti-Zionism acts as a container for these historical tropes, blending them together with progressive talking points.

George Washington University professor Daniel Schwartz, in “Vocabulary Lesson,” Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2026, describes a pro-Palestinian demonstration in 2025 at his campus where a student held a placard with Israel at the center and spokes radiating outward to other evils: imperialism, white supremacy, even reproductive injustice. “This is not garden-variety political criticism of Israel policies or conduct. It invokes a symbolic architecture in which the Jewish state becomes the universal source of global suffering -- a structure with deep resonance in antisemitic thought.”

Scholars argue that it is the third major iteration of discrimination against Jews. The first was anti-Judaism, based on religion, the second was antisemitism, focused on race, and the third, anti-Zionism, is a hatred of Jewish peoplehood.

“Anti-Zionism transforms the very meaning of Zionism,” contends Adam Louis-Klein. “The Jew is reconstructed through a new symbolic logic and a new repertoire of stereotypes,” Where antisemites invoked the pseudo-biological figure of “the Semite” to cast Jews as an Oriental race infiltrating the West, anti-Zionists invoke the authority of the social sciences to recode the Jew as the “Zionist,” a European colonizer destined to commit genocide of a non-European population.

“Erasing Jewish indigeneity and severing Jewish belonging to the land of Israel, anti-Zionism transforms the race polluter of antisemitism into the white settler of anti-Zionism,” he asserts in his March 24, 2026 Free Press article “Yes, Anti-Zionism Is Discrimination.”

For this reason, he writes, it’s imperative that organizations and institutions committed to protecting Jews and fighting the scourge of Jew-hatred start condemning—clearly and without apology—antisemitism and antizionism. This goes to the moral core of the matter: the right of Jews to a homeland versus the bigotry of those who deny them that right.

After the Holocaust, explicit Jew-hatred became unfashionable in polite society, but the impulse never disappeared. The workaround was simple: separate Zionism from Judaism in name, then recycle every old anti-Jewish trope and pin it on “the Zionists.”

 

How to Gain a Majority Government

 By Henry Srebrnik, Charlottetown Guardian

If you can’t win a majority in an election, what to do? Simple: buy one. Ask a banker! As it happens, we already have one running the country.

Marilyn Gladu, the member of parliament for Sarnia-Lambton-Bkejwanong, is the fifth MP to cross the floor in as many months and the fourth Conservative, joining Nova Scotia MP Chris d’Entremont, Greater Toronto Area MP Michael Ma, and Edmonton MP Matt Jeneroux. Are there others waiting in the wings?

Last month, Prime Minister Mark Carney also added former New Democratic MP Lori Idlout, who represents Nunavut, to his caucus. Very soon she may be joined by Doly Begum, the Liberal candidate in the April 13 Scarborough Southwest byelection, who was until recently a deputy leader of the Ontario NDP. This was less of a surprise. I’ve often considered the NDP as a “farm team” for the Liberals, certainly in terms of ideas!

But these Conservative defections are something new. Is the “Trump factor” creating a desire for a “national,” de facto “coalition” government for Canada? “This all comes at a time when the country as a whole is uniting -- uniting to move forward,” Carney told reporters in Ottawa on April 8, gesturing toward Parliament Hill. As for Gladu, she defended her decision by explaining that “you want serious leadership and a real plan to build a stronger and more independent Canadian economy.” She and the other floor-crossers all pointed to Carney’s leadership and focus on the economy and getting more major infrastructure projects as reasons why they joined his caucus.

The Liberals have admitted to maintaining a target list of potential crossers. Two Liberal sources told the Globe and Mail that the party had identified ten potential recruits when efforts began last year. Every crosser has been rewarded in one way or another. This amounts to the construction of a majority government through backroom recruitment, not through the democratic verdict of a general election.

British anarchists in the past had a risible slogan: “No matter whom you vote for, the government will get in.” In Canada, replace “government” with “Liberals.” Who needs elections?

This whole thing may prove a boon for Alberta separatists. Will Albertans now want out? For many in that province, whose oil sector drives its economy, the answer increasingly may be yes.

After all, as political scientist Albert Hirschman pointed out in his book Exit, Voice and Loyalty, if you feel you have little say in the governing of your country, you may feel you have no choice but to leave.

So even if floor-crossing has always been a feature of Canadian politics, if the Tories can never win a federal election these days, and Stephen Harper may end up being the last Conservative prime minister, power will be concentrated forever in eastern Canada. If you can’t beat ‘em...

And to get back to Great Britain, two historical examples come to mind:

“Bought and sold for English gold” is a famous phrase from the 1791 song “Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation” by the Scottish poet Robert Burns. 

The song is a bitter political commentary on the Act of Union of 1707, which united Scotland and England to form the United Kingdom. It decries those members of the Scottish parliament who signed away its independence, which its opponents considered an act of treachery.

In 1929, Labour Party Ramsay MacDonald returned to power in an election, but his government was soon faced with a worldwide economic recession.

The cabinet split, and MacDonald formed a so-called National Government with Conservative, and some Liberal, support. The subsequent 1931general election saw it win a landslide victory, taking 554 seats while the main Labour Party was reduced to just 52 seats.

This decimated the party but left MacDonald and his tiny handful of “National Labour” members of parliament in power, though as little more than a front for a Conservative-dominated administration. The coalition won another landslide victory in 1935, and, due to the Second World War, remained in power with no further balloting until 1945. In fact the next three prime ministers – Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, and Winston Churchill – all Conservatives, never won an election in their own right.

Here in Canada, is the House of Commons now a marketplace? For Carney’s Liberals, the April 13 byelections were just the icing on the cake.

 

Who is Really a Danger to American Democracy?

 By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

This coming November, Americans will be voting in mid-term elections for numerous local, state, and national offices, including both chambers of Congress. And in their opposition to the hated President Donald Trump, the Democratic Party is waging uninterrupted ideological and political warfare against him, even as the country is involved in a Middle Eastern war.

Insisting that the president and his MAGA movement is an existential danger to America, the idea of “restoring democracy” after Trump is eliminated is widespread on the left. Various scholars in fact contend that the U.S. is already governed by an authoritarian regime. 

Much of the evidence they cite, like Trump appointing “loyalists,” consists of the president exercising his duly constituted authority. Other issues, such as the investigation of Trump’s opponents, is retaliation for similar activities by Democrats between Trump’s two election victories. And unlike genuine dictators, Trump keeps getting stymied by many federal judges, include the justices of the Supreme Court, who block many of his initiatives.

It is in fact the Democratic Party that is testing and trying to overturn democratic norms. Most central has been the denial of Trump’s legitimacy.  Hillary Clinton in 2019 described him as an “illegitimate president” who stole the 2016 election.  Trump, perhaps understandably, in turn denied Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, pointing to easily manipulated mail-in voting and non-citizen participation, encouraged by the Biden administration’s open-border policies, which allowed upwards of 20 million people into the country.

Democrats advocate for making Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia states, guaranteeing four more Democrats in the senate. They want to strip states of the power to draw electoral boundaries and to insist on in-person voting by actual citizens. One example: the recent Proposition 50 in California, advocated by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and passed by the state’s Democrat majority, which will limit the representation of Republicans in a state where Democrats already control the entire government. 

It will redraw the state’s Congressional map to favour Democrats, a major victory for the party in a high-stakes national redistricting fight that could determine who controls the House of Representatives. If Virginia voters approve a redistricting plan April 21, theirs will also be a more Democrat-friendly House delegation.

The left has been targeting those members of the Supreme Court who were appointed by Trump. Angry at their position on an abortion issue before the court in 2020, Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declaimed: “I want to tell you, (Neill) Gorsuch, I want to tell you, (Brett) Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.” The party would like to pack the Supreme Court with liberal judges to guarantee control there. 

Then there is the use of mass mobilization against government, notably in the Women’s March occupations of the Capitol and Senate complexes in 2018 and the months-long riots against local police and courts during the first Trump term in the summer of 2020. More recently, there are the multicity efforts to obstruct immigration enforcement and the massive “No Kings” protests in the second term. Democrats want to expand “sanctuary” cities and an amnesty for “undocumented” migrants, whom they rightly assume will vote Democratic as citizens. And while the riot of Jan.  6, 2021 at the Capitol can be blamed on Trump, it was in the context of the violence by the left throughout the previous year.

Perhaps the most insidious threat to democracy is the partisan press and its unholy alliance with the Democratic Party.  With few mainstream exceptions, the media is overwhelmingly aligned with Democratic narratives, agendas, and policies. The overwhelming percentage of professional journalists in the national “legacy” media identify as Democrats. Public broadcaster National Public Radio self-reported that its Washington D.C. editorial staff consists of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans.  The most vaunted news authorities such as the New York Times lean left not only in their opinion sections but in the framing of their news coverage.  The Washington Post has been even worse.

That’s how journalistic malpractice like the coverage of Clinton/Obama-spawned “Russiagate” conspiracy theory was foisted upon the public to discredit Trump. There was also the concerted media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 presidential election. Most egregious was the way the media insisted Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, and never fitter to run for a second term in 2024. This probably cost Democrats the White House.

Then there is academia, where instructors overwhelmingly identify as liberal Democrats, outnumbering conservative Republicans as much as ten to one, depending on department and campus.  And of course, there is Hollywood and its leftist cultural influence.  Look no further than California for one-party Democrat rule.

Finally, former president Barack Obama continue to interfere in America’s politics in ways no previous officeholder did. His predecessor, George W. Bush retired to his Texas ranch once he left the White House. Obama by contrast kept a home in Washington after 2016 and it’s been an unofficial headquarters for the Democratic Party ever since. He still calls the shots in many ways. Yet no journalist in the city reported on this despite it happening right under their noses.

 So -- just who is the threat to American democracy now? Is the appellation “Democratic” for the party perhaps a misnomer?