Filmed Thursday in front of Concordia University, a certain Mai Abdulhadi, masked and wearing a keffiyeh, proudly shouted her hatred of the Jews and her ardent desire to see them wiped from the planet.
In English, she cried: “The final solution is coming to you. Do you know what the final solution is?” An explicit reference to the extermination of six million Jews, planned and executed by the Nazis.
Hence also his raised arm, later, in a Nazi salute. She surely did not know that her filmed nostalgia for the gas chambers would confirm the worst. This is a worrying shift in meaning in several pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
This shift ignores a legitimate criticism of Netanyahu’s government and the strength of its response in Gaza to fall into an open rejection of the very existence of Israel as the only Jewish state on the planet.
As a movement, these demonstrations, here and elsewhere, are therefore far from defending the “two-state solution”. Many, on the contrary, fall into the assumed desire for a single Palestinian state “from the river to the sea”.
This same shift has been observed across the West since the massacre of October 7, 2023 in Israel by Palestinian Hamas.
We are no longer in the 70s
In short, we are no longer here in the climate of the 70s and 80s, where many Westerners marched in the streets to demand a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel in peaceful cohabitation.
For a year, these demonstrations have shifted towards demonizing the State of Israel as a Jewish state. A phenomenon fueled by the insidious return of uninhibited anti-Semitism.
Hence the meteoric rise in the West, since October 7, 2023, of hateful acts targeting Jewish communities because they are Jewish.
Hence, also, a representation of the October 7 attack as a gesture of “resistance” by the Palestinians when it was the work of Hamas, an Islamist and anti-Semitic terrorist organization dedicated to the disappearance of Israel.
Freedom of expression and peaceful assembly is a fundamental right, but threatening a community or calling for its death is not.
Denouncing doesn’t change anything
This is why limiting ourselves to repeatedly “denouncing” anti-Semitic acts will not change anything if we do not at the same time expose the mechanism of hatred against the Jews which serves as their fuel.
Yet it must be done. Including by the political class, whose ethical duty it is. It is about who we are as democratic societies.
Our Jewish fellow citizens, it must be affirmed, have the right to live in security without fear of being subjected to hateful invective or a criminal act.
If we don’t do this, who will be the next group targeted for hatred and violence? Attributed to the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, this increasingly forgotten quote reminds us:
“When they came for the socialists, I said nothing, I was not a socialist. When they came for the unionists, I said nothing, I was not a unionist. When they came for the Jews, I didn’t say anything, I wasn’t Jewish. Then they came to get me. And there was no one left to protest.”
