The Paikin Podcast - How Safe? The Rise of Antisemitism in Canada with Jesse Brown

Episode Date: February 8, 2026

Canadaland’s Jesse Brown joins Steve to discuss his investigative podcast series, “What is Happening Here,” how October 7th made his world “fall apart,” the rise in antisemitism in Canada, the “double standard” in how it’s covered, and the pushback and attacks his reporting on antisemitism has received. They also discuss the left’s antisemitism problem, how Jewish people are seen as white privileged “oppressors,” if anti-Zionism is racist, and if he’s lost friends or advertisers doing this series. Support us: patreon.com/thepaikinpodcastFollow The Paikin Podcast: YOUTUBE:    / @thepaikinpodcast  SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OhwznC...X: x.com/ThePaikinPodINSTAGRAM: instagram.com/thepaikinpodcastBLUESKY: bsky.app/profile/thepaikinpodcast.bsky.socialEmail us at: [e-mail]

Hi, everybody, Steve Paken here. I'm pretty new at this podcast thing, but Jesse Brown has been at it for more than a decade, focused mostly on media criticism, but every now and then he turns his attention to a subject that really gets under his skin. And we're going to talk about one of those subjects today. Jesse has a special podcast series called What Is Happening Here? And he begins by saying, quote, two years ago, my world began to fall apart. Well, let's find out what is happening here. Jesse Brown, one-on-one, coming right up on the Paken podcast. Well, this rookie is delighted to welcome the godfather of Canadian podcasting to my little show here. He's the founder and host of Canada Land. There's Jesse Brown. Jesse's great to see you. How you doing? I'm doing well.

Thanks for having me, Steve. Well, you say you're doing well, and I want to follow up on that because, you know, let's take the quote. Two years ago, my world began to fall apart, which eventually begat this new podcast series that you've been working on. What happened two years ago that made your world fall apart? October 7th. At first, it was not clear to me that this was going to be any kind of a life-changing event. Of course, it was a massacre or a tragedy, but one gets used to hearing bad news from Israel.

This was particularly bad, but the events in Israel, to me, did not seem like they were going to touch me here in Canada the way that they did. I had been covering the media and one aspect for over decade, as you said in your introduction, and one aspect of media coverage that we've really focused on is discrimination. We did a whole series called Thunder Bay on anti-Indigenous discrimination. We've done a lot of work on anti-Black discrimination during BLM, anti-Islamophobic discrimination. So it was pretty normal for me to, take note when anti-Israel protests, which we've seen over the years quite a few, when they bled into anti-Jewish sentiment, which they occasionally have over the years. And that's a line

that the anti-Israel movement itself has always tried very hard to assert, we're not against Jews. So when I saw that some people involved were against Jews, I remember the first inciting event that I reported on, there were a bunch of protesters who showed. showed up to protest Christia Freeland's constituency office, which seems like a pretty legitimate place to protest if you're against Canada's foreign policy. And, you know, she wasn't there. And the doors were closed. And there was no one to yell at.

And some people just kind of noticed that they were kitty corner to the local Jewish community center here in Toronto. And a bunch of them started to direct very angry accusatory chance at the Jewish community center. Like what? I don't remember the content of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the chance themselves, but they were, they were certainly, it's not, the issue is not that the chance were anti-Jewish chants. It was that anti-Israel chance were being yelled at a Jewish institution,

if you follow me. So they were conflating Judaism. Yes. Okay. Jews were being held responsible for what Israel is doing. And maybe that was an honest mistake from people who saw some Hebrew writing, you know, and, you know, but my experience with this is that it's just kind of like a daily thing to say that shouldn't be those that small group of protesters crossed the line and usually you would have people within the anti-Israel organizational space saying yes we don't approve of that and it didn't happen this time i actually got a phone call from one of the organizers who said can you go easy on this because you know people are really traumatized and um yes i acknowledge this shouldn't have happened, but we're trying to not call people out right now. They're kind of

pleading for me to ignore this. I didn't ignore it. And rather than the usual responses that I get when I, when I point out, just sort of a lapse into discrimination, people were incredibly angry with me. You know, this community center, I know it well. The Jews pray there. There's an overflow service that happens in the high holidays. Children go there for daycare. It's just like a Jewish community space. And it's actually a community space that's welcoming of people of all faiths. It's kind of a hub where people can kind of meet Jews in Toronto. And for that space, and they've had dozens of incidents since. They've had vandalism and protesters.

They had to eject a guy. You know, again and again, people say, you know, taking their complaints against Israel to your local Jewish space. It's plainly discriminatory, plainly anti-Semitic. And people were really upset with me for pointing this out. When you said people, who are the people? Well, first, it was, you know, the usual thing that doesn't really get under my I've got a thick skin at this point, having me in podcasting as long as I haven't been on Twitter as long as I have.

Anonymous accounts online are people who are very radicalized or part of a movement. But where my world started to feel uncertain and I could feel the ground shift beneath my feet is that journalists that I'm familiar with are friends with. You know, we can talk names. I don't want to hide other people's, you know, these are the statements that people made publicly, and I assume they stand behind them. But the consensus, it became clear amongst a big sector. I don't want to say cohesively, the whole journalistic community, but they're sort of like a younger, more, you know, quote-unquote progressive sector that sort of stand it in uniformity that at this moment, it's improper to be, to be, you know, bringing up anti-Semitism.

And either I'm wrong. You had to get through like layers of defense. Some people saying, this is not that. You're wrong about this. This is anti-Zionism. It's not anti-Semitism. Or people sometimes suggesting, you know, well, there's Jews who are doing it. So how can it be anti-Semitic?

Or people saying, well, the camera angle is lying to you. Like, you're taking this out of context. It's not exactly what happened. And when you get through those lines of defense, you're like, nope, it happened. And in fact, somebody yelled out a slur or somebody, you know, just saw somebody with a keep on and said, you know, you're a Zionist, you're a genocider, made those assumptions based on them being Jewish. Then the argument would shift to, who cares? This is a really minor thing that you're bringing up.

This doesn't matter, given what's happening in Israel. Stop censoring yourself, which leads to us kind of a series of other accusations that a lot of people ascribed intentionality to that. That in bringing up anti-Semitism, Jews were trying to distract. I have no affiliation with Israel. I'm a journalist who maintains neutrality on, you know, topics of foreign politics. They'd never taken a position in support of any country. To be kind of accused that I'm doing this out of, you know, some sort of a plot struck me as consistent with conspiratorial thinking about Jews working together.

So I gather you were disappointed with the fact that as you looked at both mainstream and digital media, you weren't seeing any, you know, any kind of information. depth coverage of any of these incidents or what seem to be, in your view, I guess, a trend towards anti-Semitic incidents. Do I have that right? You do. I saw a very clear double standard. Now, there are certainly what was reporting as soon as the statistics were available, that the incidents of police reported hate crimes against Jews was spiking. And they have spiked to historic levels, and, you know, though Jews are less than 1%, less than 1% of the Canadian population, where we are now the number one target of police reported hate crimes. Every piece of information that entered the discourse was met with a counter argument, that this

was actually the manipulation of groups like B'nai Brith, who consider every Palestinian flag flown to be anti-Semitic. It's a daily labor to explain to people, police reported hate statistics are not B'nai-Britz statistics as a very high standard. The police do not consider pro-Palestine political messaging to be a hate crime. And, you know, you get an answer, well, Jews report hate crimes more than other groups. There's no statistical basis for that. In fact, I know many Jews who don't bother calling the cops because nothing has done. So you have to kind of get through, like basically a lot of the very same people who have been very sensitive to racism, microaggressions, over the years, took a very unique position, which itself is kind of indicative.

of a certain discrimination, because these are not people who you would ever find saying, no, you're not experiencing racism. Well, you call it a unique position, but in fact, I mean, I've listened to the podcast episodes that have dropped, and, I mean, you had some of them, I guess many of whom you knew, questioning your mental health. I mean, questioning whether you'd gone crazy. What'd you think of that? I mean, it's not pleasant, but at the same time, this is an old playbook.

When you have somebody who's saying things that are inconvenient for an ideology that you've jumped on to, I'm an inconvenient person because the typical thing is most of the voices who are bringing these things up have official affiliations or many of the voices. They work with Sijia or with an anti-Semitism group or something that's Israel affiliated. Well, that's easy. They are explicitly Israel advocates. I'm not. I don't have any political affiliation myself. but my news organization is thought of as a progressive news organization.

We know from our audience surveys that over 85% of our audience leans left. And I have a history of caring about discrimination against other people and covering it as a journalist. So when I bring up issues of anti-Semitism, it's really inconvenient and it can't be dismissed with the usual defenses. So they go after my sanity. I'm also very forthcoming. And I think a more personal approach to journalism than perhaps journalists like yourself. When I feel that I talk about from a first person what's happening, you know. So when I feel that the community has changed, when I feel that friends and colleagues are applying a double standard, when I feel that there's an unfairness, I'll talk about how that's affecting me.

I think in doing so, I open up a door for like, well, there you have it. He's admitted it. He's emotional about this. Well, have you followed up with any of the people who made the allegations? I mean, we can name names here. I can name names here if you like, too. But, you know, there's some pretty prominent journalists who've accused you of sort of losing your mental health.

Did you ever follow up with them and ask them to come on your show and talk about it? Yes. Not about my mental health. I don't really consider that necessarily a topic for, let's have a debate about whether I've lost my mind or not. But the voices that you heard on the podcast who have been kind of attacking me in that way, I would say attacking and trying to discredit.

include people like Shri Pradkar, who we did a piece of reporting about, you know, from the Toronto Star, and Nora Loretto, who used to be on the program from time to time on Canada land. Who else? I think we heard Jeremy Appell. I've made myself available. Anybody who wants to talk about me, I've made myself available. If you'd like to talk to me, I'll accept any interview request. You know this, Steve.

I'm on this show after all. You're here. I accepted yours. You know, even people who are, I think, on the radical and people side of things to the extremes. And I try to avoid making comments about people as a person. I won't call Eve Engler an anti-Semite. I think he is someone who does anti-Semitism. I think his behavior is anti-Semitic.

I'll talk to him. I think we need more dialogue right now. What has happened over this issue is a siloing where people are really uncomfortable having their ideas challenge. What we have is a process by which Zionists, but who are we talking about? We're talking about Jews, are being like dehumanized and degraded on a daily basis. It's through repetition that we're seeing just the language of Zionist freak, genocidal freak, comparisons to animals. All of this is really hard to do when you're actually sitting face to face with somebody.

It's hard to talk to somebody that way. I might have a reasonable position on things that you don't agree with. I might be, it's only possible to say to somebody, you are a Zionist genocider when I've never described myself that way if I'm not in the room. So if the question is, have I, you know, I've reached out to some of those people directly for comment when I have talked about them. You know, when I, when I reported on Shreiparadkar, of course, we reached out for comment. you know, when somebody calls me a nut job on the internet, they're probably not going to have me say, hey, I heard what you said about me. Can I come and defend myself?

Fair enough. But you and I probably think of Canada, as I suspect a lot of the 40 million Canadians do, as a kind of, you know, the kinder, gentler half of North America. And I learned from your podcast that Canada has had more synagogues vandalized than any other country in the world since October 7th. And those two things don't compute in my head. So maybe you can help me understand how that possibly could be the case. Well, that's what I tried to figure out. And I spent about seven months trying to figure it out.

As far as I can tell, more synagogues vandalized. And I'm not talking about just spray paint here. There's a synagogue in Toronto that's had dead animals thrown on its steps and windows broken again and again and again. It's happened 10 times. As far as I can tell, yes, in absolute terms, Canada has had more of that. happened than anywhere else there's more than that we there's a Jewish grandmother who got stabbed in the back by a guy with an anti-Semitic internet presence in a in a basically what's known as the kosher lob-blaws in

Ottawa the one place you can go to buy kosher food there's a Jewish dad who was visibly Jewish he's a Orthodox guy who was savagely beaten in front of his kids in Montreal and there have been no fewer than seven mass murder plots you know we all followed the horrible massacre at Bondi B where Jews were... Australia. In Australia where Jews were celebrating Hanukkah on the beach and two ISIS-connected radicals came and just opened fire and killed, was it, 15 Jews.

There have been seven attempts to do similar things. And kind of credible attempts. People were in possession of weapons or explosives. I think in three cases they were connected to ISIS. These were serious attempts that, thank God the police thwarted. So when we talk about, in addition to the police reported hate statistics, you add this all up. Canada that I thought I was living in.

So when I talk about my world starting to crumble, it was both in a very personal level of the, you know, friends and colleagues and people who, like, not in terms of people who I thought would always have my back, but people who I thought shared principles with me against discrimination surprised me. But also, in a wider sense, I'm living in a country where I think Jews have every reason to, you know, we hear this media refrain that Jews feel unsafe. Jews are unsafe. When these things happen to a group as small as ours, we are unsafe.

So, you know, all of this adds up to a conception of Canada that, as you say, is like, very different than the pluralistic and polite and the, you know, compared to America or the mass shootings, we consider as much less violent. To answer the question, why, I don't know, it's going to take some time. Why do you think? Jesse, I knew at some point in this interview you were going to try to turn the tables on me and assume your traditional role of question asker instead of question answerer. And I was sort of thinking, how am I going to react when he does that? And I'm going to react this way. Jesse, I'm asking the questions today, okay? Fair enough.

Fair enough. Fair enough. That's a good. There were some things. That's how I would dodge it. Yeah. Go ahead. There were some things I heard, of course, during the series that I found extremely disquieting.

somebody, you've got somebody quoted as having yelled, you know, Hitler should have finished you all off. Somebody else that you were interviewed or one of the voices I heard said the entire Jewish community of Toronto has blood on its hands. How do you, I mean, these are obviously inflammatory, extreme things to say. How do you take these in? It's been a process. I think that my experience echoes a lot of people, a lot of Jewish people, in that at first there's this like visceral response where you're kind of put on your back heel. I have never experienced significant discrimination or anti-Semitism in Canada before October 7th.

This is a golden age that I've enjoyed for most of my life. I think that that is indicative of the wider experience. The Canadian Jewish experience has been, I think, uniquely free of discrimination, at least during the 48 years or the 46 years of my life up until October 7th. So it was shocking. And, you know, it takes a moment to figure out what's happening. And sometimes, you know, I was not, I don't think there's disbelief. You know, like, can I believe my eyes? Can I believe my ears?

But I guess I'm wondering, do you take it at face value? Or are these sort of ignoramus just popping off? Or how do you take it? Yeah, then it's the rotten apple that maybe these are, maybe these are, you know, the few extremists who are using a legitimate political movement. Oh, maybe I can get some cover here for, you know, my fringe anti-Semitism, which hasn't been palatable before. You know, at the risk of giving away the end to the podcast, which I do think people should go listen to what is happening here, I've come to understand that we are facing a hate movement. and by we I don't just mean Jews I think that and I don't think it's it's like

oh anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism it is its own unique hate movement anti-Semitism itself was its own unique hate movement Jews talk about you know anti-Semitism's been with us for you know hundreds if not thousands of years it's not really true Jew hatred has been around for hundreds or thousands of years anti-Semitism is a term coined by Germans

like you know whatever 120 years ago It was a very specific phrase that when it was introduced like anti-Zionism, it was supposed to be a good thing. It was, I'm not one of these people who hates Jews for killing Christ. I'm an anti-Semite. Jews are Semites. They're racially impure. They're orientals. They're semites.

They're kind of Arab. They're not us. They're not white. And on a Darwinistic, you know, like genetic, you know, it's phony race science. That was the intellectual, you know, assertion, the bunk science of anti-Semitism. we know anti-Semitism is a bad thing that nobody wants to be. That took a lot of work. So now we've got a new term anti-Zionist, which is like, to many people, they're very proudly

anti-Zionist, right? And they'll reject the notion that this is anti-Jewish. It's a political thing against a country. Where we get to in exploring this with academics and talking to the people who espouse these views and actually digging into their views. And I sit down and I have uniquely civil conversations on the show with activists. It's not your usual Israel good or bad, you know, yell fest, really dig into what they're about. And what they're about is that they want to abolish a country.

If I were to say that I want to abolish Japan, and I don't think that the Japanese people deserve their sovereignty, if I were to say that I want to abolish Turkey, that's hateful. It's not acceptable. And usually it has a racist, you know, there's a spectrum. If I say, I hate Italians. I'm against Italianism. Well, I don't know. Italians are kind of considered white right now. If I were to say that I hate Pakistan, we would, you know, where I hate Kenya, I think that would immediately be.

Well, that's a racist argument. There's an ethnic national, we lose ourselves in these semantics squabbles. Israel is the one country where people now feel completely okay to say they don't have a right to exist. They should be abolished. Let me just for argument's sake. Let me make what I suspect is the point that they're trying. to advance, which is their belief that Israel's conduct in Gaza is so beyond the pale as to warrant Pariah Nation status and therefore fill in the blank.

What do you think of that? I think that a full-throated political response against Israel's actions in Gaza is well within the boundaries of political discourse. And I think that the vast majority of the people who participate in anti-Israel political action are appalled by what they've seen out of Gaza and wanted to stop and believed that they were going to peace demonstrations, ceasefire demonstrations. I believe that. I give a lot of benefit the doubt to that.

And I'm a firm believer in our rights of free expression and political expression and political expression, political protest. What I don't think a lot of people understood is that they were joining a pre-existing ideological movement that has explicitly, if you look at the first Hamas charter, called for the genocide of Jews, that is based on a religious, not strategy, not a political movement by this is how we're going to get to a better place, because there is no moral argument for ethnically cleansing Jews, for removing them or killing them, and there's no moral argument

for ethnically cleansing Palestinians. And so one way or the other, these people are going to have to figure it out together. And that is not the movement that people were joining. They were joining a movement that glorifies martyrdom and that believes that martyrdom

is the path. And they can't really explain how that's going to work. So really what this movement is pushing for is what we've lived through, which is permanent conflict, permanent murder, permanent death. And this was the strategy of October 7th.

There was a strategy. I don't like to describe it as just pure chaos and barbarism. There was a strategy. Let's go and murder brutally. And the strategy included rape, and there's been a lot of denial of that. Let's make sure that it's film. Let's make sure the media sees it. Let's make sure that the parents of the victim's see it. Let's make sure that we enrage Israel,

humiliate them, degrade and dehumanize them, and the response will be a sledgehammer. And that will turn the world against Israel like never before. That was the strategy and it was effective. Yeah. It happened. And it required the death, the brutal death and very traumatizing death to everybody, not just the families, but everybody who lives with intergenerational trauma and memories of the Holocaust. It required those deaths, 1,200 plus Israelis. And And now, what are we at now? 60, 70,000? I don't know.

But a lot more Palestinian death. So that's the movement that people were joining. And I fully believe that there is a necessity to call it out as a hate movement. And those who legitimately want to advocate for Palestinian life, life, but not death and martyrdom, need to detach from this anti-Zionist movement, which in its military reggae, in its war drums and its calls for kill, kill, kill, this is not a peace movement. It's, it's, and it's not something that is just a threat to Jews. It, we're seeing, it's becoming the omni cause.

You know, the same people showed up, the exact same people showed up, uh, to protests on behalf of the Iranian regime, right? On behalf, or, or for Venezuela for Maduro. Now, I don't like kidnapping. world leaders. But we're seeing, you know, there's almost this magical thinking that Israel will fall, and with it so too will fall, you know, Western imperialism around the world. This is its own religion. No one can actually explain to you how the sequence of events is going to take place. Let me ask you to talk about a distinction that, again, I learned a great deal about from your

podcast series. And that was the distinction between Jews in this country feeling unsafe versus feeling uncomfortable. And I guess the distinction here is that, you know, Jews have a right not to feel unsafe in their own country, Canada, but they don't have a right not to feel uncomfortable about how Israel has conducted itself post-October 7. What do you make of that distinction? I think it's a racist distinction,

and if you dig into it, it has an ugly heart of racism. The argument goes, you are privileged white people, you have been indoctrinated into a cult of Zionism through propaganda as a child. You're not used to feeling uncomfortable. So when we come to your synagogues and protest your synagogues, which have been, you know, have been vandalized, but we have nothing to do with that, when we come to your community events, when we come to your neighborhoods, not the Israeli consulate, but your neighborhoods,

and we yell bloody murder, and we say that you are Zionists who support the death of children, how many more babies do you have to kill? When we come to your businesses and you dare to complain about it, well, tough shit. You're experiencing discomfort for the first time in your privileged white life. It is an ugly argument. It is a complete reversal and double standard from people who otherwise say that when

people speak up and say, I have been the victim of racism, we listen to them. It doesn't mean that they're always right. It doesn't mean that we have to take their word as gospel, but we listen to people. We take them seriously. We treat them respectfully. And we investigate to see whether or not there has been discrimination. This is one of the interesting conundrums, rather, because, you know, you've talked about whether Jews are, quote, unquote, white.

And certainly, you know, I'm a little older than you. So certainly, you know, back in my mind. day when I was a young guy growing up, Jews were not considered white. Jews were considered very different. And today, there is certainly a large faction of people in this country who not only see Jews as white, but, and I'm talking about Canadian Jews who may never even have been to Israel, but they see them as sort of a colonial oppressive presence. At some level, at some level, Jesse, this is a very bizarre thing to say, but that's kind of progress in one way, right? I mean, Jews are seen in the same discriminatory light as, you know,

the British would be or other colonial powers from back in the day. Is it an indication of how far Jews have come that many people considered Jews in Canada to be part of a colonial oppressive class of people? What an optimist you are. Sadly, no. I mean, in a way, it's hilarious, given that... I am being facetious, of course, but that... there you go. Yeah. This argument of Jews as the white colonial oppressor, like, there's no inclusion into the kind of

of the high status. In a sense, Jews are being kind of positioned as the apex predator, kind of like more white and colonial. There's a weird way in which people who are part of this movement, you know, they do consider Canada to be a settler colonial project. And yet,

they reserve their real, like, hatred for Israel, not the country that they live in and participate in. and our citizens of. Like they're angrier with Israel. Somehow Israel is like still doing the, you know, colonial genocide thing in a way that Canada gets off the hook for. There's, you know, there's an inversion process happening.

It's like a permission structure thing where in the exact same way in which Jews were persecuted for being not white enough, now you're kind of too white. Now, this falls apart in every way. It falls apart in an Israeli context because, like, there are Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews who are from Arab countries where they were ethnically cleansed from. And they are not white. They're like, the Jews are just not white. They're not white if you're going to even look at white just from like a pigment standpoint. To apply it here is interesting too because you get into questions of indigenity where, you know, what is effectively being argued is that diaspora Jews Ashkenau.

Uzi Jews, our ancestry spent so much time in Europe and there was so much intermarriage, some of it through rape, that we effectively became white. And it doesn't matter that no Polish, you know, or German or, you know, like those people didn't consider us one of them. That doesn't matter anymore. We effectively are them now. And it doesn't matter that there is a genetic bloodline that firmly, this is just science, connects Jews to the Levant, pre-European pre-geaspora.

So you're actually saying things about indigenity and how if people are dislocated from their land and there's enough intermarriage, they lose their indigenity. I know a lot of indigenous people who would have a thing or two to say about that. That is not consistent with any other conception of indigenity. Again, it's a double standard that supplied the Jews. Well, let me, okay, I'm going to pick up on that double standard thing. because I think it's fair to say that if the Italian government were to do something that was extremely controversial and perhaps indefensible, Italians in Canada would not be asked to defend that practice.

You could say the same thing about Greeks here in Canada for the Greek government, Turks here in Canada about the Turkish government. For some reason, Jews in Canada are often asked to defend the actions of Israel's government, even if they've never been to Israel, or even if they oppose. the conduct of the government of Israel. Why is that? Racism. It's a modern-day application of something that happened in the Middle Ages called the forced disputations. You ever hear about this one? Nope. I'm not so smart, but I have some smart listeners. And one of them said, you know, you know what this is? It's the modern version of the forced disputations. And so I studied and

read up on this. And what, you know, what happened was in the Middle Ages and medieval times, there were these sort of public debates where they would haul Jewish leaders up before an audience of Gentiles, of Christians. And, you know, like, the idea was, you know, this was sort of, they're going to,

the battle of the faiths, Christianity versus Judaism. But the actual terms of the debate were not about, you know, what's a better religion or what's the one true faith? The terms of the debate were, have you blasphemed against Christ simply by not accepting Christ? and are you there for guilty?

And maybe you're guilty of killing him as well. And the answer to that question was predetermined. There was no universe in which the end of that debate would be actually we're just peaceful people living next to you who happened to have a different faith system than yours. There was no version where we were like, yeah, that makes sense. Because the entire society was built on the premise that Christ is Lord

and everybody has the opportunity to accept him as Lord. and these people, for some reason, don't. It started guilty, and it ended guilty, and at the end of it, they would burn Torah's and sometimes they would expel Jews. This was a pretense. It was basically creating an intellectual pretense for basically pogrom-like behavior. The people who are inviting Jews to defend Israel, first of all, simply by asking Jews to do so, have already made a racist move, right?

Your Judaism means that you are different than non-Jews. you must, you could be okay if you denounce Israel. You could be okay, but first we need to hear it, right? Because the conclusion's already been reached. Israel is evil. Israel is a genocider. Jews might be okay, but we know that most of you support Israel, and you're going to have to prove otherwise.

This is, you know, there's a statement I was reading recently saying that the anti-Semite does not accuse the Jew of theft because he both. believes the Jew stole something. He accuses the Jew of theft to watch him turn his pockets out. Well, okay, but I am going to ask you. It's an exercise in humiliating us. I understand, but I am going to ask you the flip side of that question, which is I also would observe, and I find it quite interesting, that in Israel itself, there is a significant diversity of opinion about the advisability of the conduct of Benjamin Netanyahu's government. In this country, however, and I suspect, you know, some of my more engaged in community work Jewish friends are not going to like the way I put this.

There is very little diversity of opinion permitted within sort of official Jewish community circles in this country. There is a great deal of, you know, if you don't support Israel, particularly at this moment in its history, post-October 7th, you know, you're really not a good team player. And I wonder whether some of that, some of the kind of, I don't want to call it intolerant, but what's considered an acceptable mainstream view within the Jewish community of Israel, I wonder how that plays into all of what you are trying to describe. I think it does. It's not my role to defend the positions of the B'nai B'nai Bres or Saja. But I'll say this, there is a very important distinction between saying that I support Israel.

What do Jews mean when they say I support Israel? What does a Jew mean when they show up to the walk for Israel? I can forgive people for saying, oh, I guess you support Nathan Yahoo. I guess you support the war. No, they mean they support the existence of the state. And it's important for Jews to say that right now because never have so many people been calling for the destruction of Israel. So right now, you can excuse Jews for feeling like this is not necessarily a safe place

for me to engage publicly in a conversation about my deep consternation and disapproval of Nathan Yahoo because I'm basically. feeding the arguments of people who want the entire country, including my family that lives there, to be wiped off the map. I'm going to keep that criticism to myself or within the community. Steve, I'm sure that you'll agree that if you talk to Jews about their feelings, if you talk to two Jews about what they think about what Nate and Yahoo is doing, you'll hear six opinions. And not many, like, I, you know, there's like one guy in every crowd who kind of has just lost it and will say hawkish, violent things. Those people exist.

I wonder how much of it is them just expressing frustration and pain. I don't know that they actually believe that. But, you know, I guess you have to take people at face value. The vast majority of Jews I talked to about this, like, what does a Jew think of what's happening in Gaza? I don't know. What is that human being think? Like the same range of opinions, the same obvious responses to seeing atrocious images, there's really no difference. The only difference is that these alarming levels of anti-Jewish violence,

and hate are traumatizing Jews and are coloring the way Jews expressed themselves publicly. I'll give you one statistical backing for that. You know, Avi Lewis put out a report and likes to say that, you know, only 51% of Jews are Zionist, which suggests that 49% are anti-Zionists. Well, and he's not part of the 51%. He did a, I guess, four out of the five NDP leadership candidates did a debate on the few of Palestine this past week. And Avi Lewis proudly proclaims himself an anti-Zionist Jew. That's right. Of which I believe something like, depending on the poll, something between

one and three percent of Jews identify as. And I'm not saying that the minority, because there are a minority, that's a wrong position. But I think that community, you know, everyone's entitled to their opinion. But communities do form consensus, right? So he has an interest in what you'll hear from that small percentage of Jews. I think he actually said, I'm trying to save the soul of Judaism. So he's preaching to Jews that he's part of the minority that's got it right and he's going to convince us all. And then I think he manipulates the stats. And he says, we're making progress here because only 51% of Jews call themselves Zionists and, you know, fill in the blanks, 49% might be on his side. This is not true. I think it's upwards of 80%

of Jews feel strong connections to Israel. Okay. We're not calling ourselves Zionists anymore because you get targeted. Right. because people are afraid. People are going underground. You can bully and force Jews to stop using that word. But you're not going to stop Jews who have, as we talked about, a deep religious connected. The ways in which Jews are connected to Israel, like the people of Israel.

So it's spiritual, it's religious. It's in the scripture. If that's not your bag, maybe it's because you got family and friends there who you care about. Maybe it's just because as a people, you recognize that there's seven million Jews there and you care about just as a people, what happens to them. Maybe it's because you want to have a safe place if things get out of hand here. Maybe it's because of whether you call it indigenity or some sort of ethnic connection. That's where we come from. There are lots of reasons, the same way that any people can be connected to a land. Many, many reasons why Jews are connected

to Israel. And we're not going to stop feeling connected to Israel. You can just, you can just force people to be quieter about it. That's all you're going to accomplish. I would be very interested in your take on the distinction between anti-Semitism of the right, which has certainly been a significant force, I guess during the course of my life, versus anti-Semitism from the left, which is a, it seems anyway, in my life to be a more recent phenomenon. How are they different or are they different? At the extremes, they're not very different. It's that horseshoe theory where You know, the ways in which, you know, the Nick Fuentes' talk about Jews and Jewish power and the Jewish question is not that dissimilar to how people on the very, like, I'm not even sure how this, you know, the part of anti-Sionism that is Islamist, that, you know, as opposed to Islam, very, very different thing.

But that is, you know, how did that become part of the left? And there is an interesting history that's explored in the show about Soviet messaging. Where does anti-Zionism come from as an ideology? There were little strains of it in Nazism, but then it was really developed as a Soviet idea. And then in collaboration with Arab governments, it got imported into that region. But that connection might explain it as a thing of the left. But I don't know how a religious fundamentalist outlook of the world with all of its, you know, usual homophobia and misogyny became a thing of the left.

So all these distinctions disappear at a certain point. But there are people who are part of like the, you know, the communists or the anarchist left who have become deeply anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish anyhow through anti-Zionism. And many of the things they say are indistinguishable from what people on the right say. They're just sort of saying it towards different goals, I guess. You know, there is this longstanding mythology, the Jews control, this, that, and the other thing. And if you're on the right, you think that they're a fifth column that we need to, that needs to be excised from American politics, so it stops influencing American foreign policy.

And if you're on the left, you think the same thing. But towards the goal of, you know, I guess a worldwide revolution of the people, you know, and not an America first, you know, it's very, very similar. For years, Canada land was much more focused on what we see. saw happening from groups like the proud boys or, you know, anti-Semitism that was coming from this new, you know, alt-right. And we've dedicated, like, a lot of resources. It's not fun to, you know, if some of these people like, you know, Gavin McKinnis or Lauren Southern or Faith Goldie were putting kind of like a certain face, you know, whether it's satire and comedy or like a blonde pretty face on rebel news where they wouldn't explicitly say things about Jews, if you spent enough time

going through hours of their, you know, paywalled podcasts or ramblings, you'd get to the anti-Jewish stuff. It was there, and we did that work to expose that. One criticism that I faced about the new series, what is happening here, is that none of the anti-Semites that are criticized or exposed on the show are from the right. I go where this story takes me, Steve. I traveled across Canada. I spent months talking to dozens and dozens of Jews. And I just asked them, like, what happened to you and who was doing it? And not one of them said it was coming from the right. That's a fascinating development. I want to know if you've lost any friends over this Canada land series. Yeah, I have. I've lost friends and colleagues. I've lost friends and colleagues

before the series. I've had relationships fall apart where I try to be really, in most cases, I hope I'm not the one severing those connections because I really do think that most of the people who are doing the harm are confused. I think there's a great deal of moral confusion. And I think that there's a way back, you know, and I despair as somebody who lives in words and lives in conversations. I despair for the idea that like we can't talk to each other anymore, that we're on warring teams that can't communicate. I think that's a really bad path. How about advertisers? Have you lost advertisers for the series? I have not, but there was an incredible amount of pressure put on advertisers. Like, there is kind of like an ad hoc thing that happens

where there are a lot of, you know, keyboard warriors and every day there's a new target. This is a Canadian thing we can talk about as well, but every day there's a new target and the game becomes, how can we get at them? You know, we weren't able to shame them and humiliate them into reversing their position or apologizing. Let's go for his employees. How can you work for this guy? He's a Zionist, he's a genocide. If that doesn't work, who are his advertisers? So it's like, you know, it's that internet mob cancellation thing. And I have, I've been the target of that, for sure.

There was an episode in which you focus on, you talk to, I guess, a young mother whose elementary school-age child was being sort of swarmed and shouted at. you know this is at school free Palestine free Palestine kids a larger group of kids swarming this one Jewish child to the point where I guess the well understandably the child felt as if they didn't have any friends at school and didn't want to go to school anymore and the parents has apparently sued the Peel District School board for failing to provide a sort of safe place for the kid to go to school do you know what the status of the lawsuit is as far as I understand it's it's it's a it's a pending, it's ongoing, and there hasn't been any kind of settlement or trial yet. What should our reaction be to a group of, one group of students, sort of swarming an individual student who is Jewish, and presumably at age 10, doesn't know a heck a lot about what's going on over there? What do you think it should be?

Well, you know, you're doing this again, aren't you? Yeah, like, but in this case, like, we're acting like these are top. questions to answer. This is not a tough question to answer. I agree. I think, I mean, it's wholly inappropriate for that to be taking place. The question is, what should the school be doing about it? And in this case, I guess the parents were quite unsatisfied at the school's response. Fair to say? Yeah, fair to say. And this came out of a situation, like, we're forgetting the basics here. This stuff is not that complicated. It really isn't. What do you do when a whole crowd of kids swarm one kid and point out, I don't care if it's because she's

got red hair because it's like it's incredibly aggressive hostile traumatizing behavior. It's not acceptable. And you deal with it through through the same disciplinary measures that you would regardless. You know, and the fact that it's hate motivated makes it more serious. Why did that not happen? Well, confusion. Jews don't fit. Like, excuses are made. This happened to be a school with a very large Muslim population. And the kids were yelling at. in Arabic at the Jewish student. And there's this context where, first of all, administrators get very nervous. This feels like very controversial stuff.

Where's this going to go? What if the media finds out who's going to say what? They know the parents are, you know, very, very angry and politicized about this. I believe the principal said to the mother, like, what do you want me to do? Like, I can't suspend all of those kids. Like, by virtue of the fact that there were so many kids ganging up on her daughter, he couldn't do anything. and claimed not to remember which kids were doing it, even though he was there for it.

We're betraying the basic social contract, right? I got to care about you and your kids. You've got to care about me and my kids. If I see something happening to your kid, I should probably do something to help them and vice versa. When you start questioning that, it's not like the politics.

Like something is broken that really needs to be sorted out there. We're forgetting like the basic rules of civil discourse. because people are getting sucked into some bizarre ideology whereby, like, maybe it's okay in this instance. Maybe it's justified. Maybe it's actually a good thing. And people are arguing that too. Maybe there's a moral obligation to.

This was argued by a guy named Dave Mezzlin on my podcast who feels that any building with an Israeli flag is a legitimate target. Including synagogues, says Dave. Right. Now, you start from like, okay, maybe, maybe, I guess that's a political thing. A flag is of an, you know, well, which buildings have Israeli flags? pretty much every synagogue, pretty much every. So really, it's like, who is a safe target now?

The same guy who says he's against anti-Semitism says every synagogue with like a couple exceptions is a legitimate target for protest. And when you actually look at the protests, they involve violent imagery. They often involve, go back to Europe. And they set the stage and there's plenty of research to show that they are followed by vandalism and violence. They legitimize it. So, yeah, this is a threat to Jews as.

as a community in Canada. And, you know, he got there very quickly. As you quoted earlier, he said, yeah, that's right, because the community has blood on its hand. The community, collectively. That is a breaking of a central principle. We don't have collective punishment. We don't say, because you're Italian or because you're Russian, you're on the hook for

what Putin does. Why for Jews? It's just a clear double standard. Jesse, I want to ask you one last question, and that is a question. I think Jews all over the world have asked themselves for about 4,000 years, which is, how do I know when it's time to get up and leave? And obviously, during the 1930s, there were far too many Jews in Europe who asked the question and did not get to the correct answer quickly enough, and 6 million died in the Holocaust.

And after listening to your series, I'm wondering if you have reached the point where you are now asking yourself, as a Canadian Jew, do I need to leave Canada? What do you think? I want to explore this in some detail. No, I have people I know who have left. I get emails from people who heard the series saying, is it time for me to go? And I feel strongly otherwise, and I hope to impress upon people why I feel strongly otherwise. But before we get into that, I want to engage with but I think a lot of people listening to this are thinking like, what? What are you talking about? Because that is the response whenever this comes up in a broader context, not just among Jews.

And sometimes even within you, like, are you out of your mind? And there are two ways in which that idea is rejected. One is mockery and the other is allegation. So the mockery is you guys are the most privileged people, you're rich Jews. Like you're experiencing a little bit of discomfort for the first time in your life. lives, you're hysterical, you're paranoid, you're, like, that, you know, and, and, and you get laughed at that this is a, uh, yeah, get out of here. Go if you're, if, if you're, if, if you're, if, if you're, if, if, if you're, if, if you're, if, if you're, if, is a basket of anti-Semitic tropes, you know, the paranoid nervous Jew.

Like, that's what's being described there. And again, and it's deeply racist and it's deeply discriminatory because it's not something we do when any other minority, vulnerable, tiny minority talks about at a time when there is demonstrable, it's statistically proven harms. We don't make fun of people or scorn them for those concerns. The other thing you get, which is even worse, is allegation. that in discussing this, in bringing this up, there's an agenda, that you're trying to essentially assert a Zionist mentality that Israel is the only safe place for the Jews. And people,

they laugh at that too. The mockery and the scorn and the allegations can go hand in hand. They say, yeah, as if Israel's so safe. Yeah, please go there. You're not going to be safe there either. So that we're doing this out of some kind of a Zionist plot that we're shilling for Israel when we consider the possibility of making alia. So I want to just deal with both those things and identify them as deeply racist. That being said, no, I have, I don't, I don't like hearing that from Jews. I don't begrudge any Jew whatever they feel they need to do for their own safety or out of their own.

And every Jew has the right to make alia. That is what Israel exists for. Make alia means move to Israel. That's right. That is a right that Jews have, just as there are many nations that. have rights of return, you know, there's, Germany has, if you have an ethnic connection to Germany, there's many countries that welcome members of their own diaspora. It is not, people like to use this ethno state.

All right, if you want to use that, because there's an ethnic component to that, let's apply it fairly because there's many countries that have that Japan. I'm a Canadian Jew, I'm a diaspora Jew. I feel much more comfortable as a minority. I don't know what it is. I've been to Israel. It was weird for me to be a member of a majority. I'm used to being other.

But beyond that, I have, like, Jews are pretty recent in Canada, but I have, like, roots in history here. And the last 100 years or so, I have a grandfather who, you know, the family story goes, he was toiled away on a tobacco farm, he lived in the ward, the Jewish ghetto in Toronto, was impoverished. It was an errand boy for the ladies of the night who worked and, you know, would go buy cigarettes for them and worked his way up. and through law school at a time when there were quotas for Jews. And then became somebody who, you know, developed projects for, you know, commerce and, you know, like became a respected guy in the community and a lawyer and worked as a classic story. I have another grandfather who sold fruit and vegetables and chickens.

And in the same way that there's like a lot of immigrant families live in little corner, you know, they have little corner stores. That's what my family had in Winnipeg. They lived above it. You know, the labor was free because they put their kids behind. my dad and his brother is behind the cash register. You know, and, and my, my, my dad worked hard and became a doctor so that I could become profligate, like I could become a scurrilist journalist, you know, and throw it all away,

not be a white-collar professional like him. This is a story that, that echoes the stories of Jews in Canada, one after the next. We, we have, you know, I don't take much, you know, any personal accomplishment, but the progress that's being made as a people in this country, the contribution, that you have made to this country, we have been gradually getting to a place of belonging and inclusion, and that's the work of my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents on one side, to a point where a Jew like yourself could, like, you know, host a federal leaders debate and non-Jews will welcome you into their homes and not think of you as other or, you know,

too garlicky or some sort of a problem, you know? We worked really damn hard and not just for our own benefit. I think we've made tremendous contributions to this country in all sorts of ways, culturally and economically. This is my home. I'm not going anywhere. I'm not feeling like I did two years ago when my world began to fall apart. I'm off my back heel. I'm calling this what it is. And I urge Jews to stand up for themselves. You know, we have a place here. And it's, it was hard won. And I know that there were Germans who felt the same way and should have left and should have seen the writing on the walls. I don't think we're heading in that exact same direction. It's always different. The Holocaust was different than the anti-Semitism that came before.

It's always different. It always uses the technology of the day. You know, new technology is used for porn and anti-Semitism. That's the only constant. This is a big thing we're up against, but we can do it. We've done it before. Like, Steve, we're having a very Jewish experience right now. Which is? We're being oppressed. You know?

I hate it. I don't like to be. People say, oh, you love playing the victim. I don't like playing the victim. I was much more happy as a white man. As a privileged white man, life was a lot better. I find racism really boring to cover as a journalist. There's a hundred other things I'd rather cover.

It's stupid. You know, racism is really stupid. But I'm up for this fight. history has taught me how to fight it, and I'm up for it. We are happy to remind people that the name of the series is called What is Happening Here. It is produced by the founder and host of Canada Land, Jesse Brown. Jesse, it's always great to talk to you.

I have to say, I'm a listener of Canada Land. You really put yourself out there, which is a gutsy thing to do. And thanks for doing the work that you're doing. Much appreciated. Thank you, Steve. Thank you over the years and thank you now for your attention to my work. It really means a lot to me. And one of the things I've learned from Jesse is there's something called Patreon, which I know he uses, and we do here too.

So if you go to patreon.com slash the Paken Podcast, you'll find all sorts of goodies there. Check it out. You can join us, support us a little bit if you like the work we're doing. We're always going to have this Paken podcast be for free. But for those who want to put a few bucks in and support keeping the lights on and all that other stuff, we encourage you to do that. And of course, all of our programs are archived at my website, Stevepaken.com. Peace and love, everybody, and we'll see you next time.