***A personal letter from Mark Milke about the Aristotle Foundation’s work on antisemitism and Israel***

When the board, staff, and I set up the Aristotle Foundation to champion reason, democracy, and civilization, we never thought we’d have to address antisemitic mob behaviour on Canadian streets and campuses.

Regrettably, since the massacre of over 1,200 Jews and non-Jews on October 7, 2023 in southern Israel—and recall how the victims and kidnapped ranged from babies and partygoers to pregnant moms—apologists for Hamas showed no shame in blaming Israel for October 7th and/or denying our ally any practical right to defend herself.

Some have even accused Israel of being the genocidal power because of the tragedy of civilian casualties in Gaza given Israel’s proper decision to fight Hamas.

You often hear the excuse that the demonstrations across Canada are not antisemitic or anti-Jew but anti-Israel and its policies. If that were true, the only protests in the past year would have been at the Israeli embassy. Instead, antisemitic protests have occurred in front of Jewish coffee shops, synagogues, hospitals, and seniors’ centres and demonstrations have taken place at university grounds.

There are at least three reasons why you’ve seen a rise in antisemitism and radicalism across Canada this past year.

First, Iran’s repressive, theocratic regime is behind Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, and funded demonstrations in North America.

Second, there’s a failure to reason properly about Israel, 1948, and ever since. Israel, as with any country is not perfect, but that’s never been a reasonable standard.

Israel has, for decades, signed treaties and returned land in exchange for peace. (The 1978 Camp David Accords with Israel is the most famous example.) But that willingness to compromise and to live with Israel has been rejected repeatedly by too many Palestinian leaders over the decades.

Palestinian leaders could have signed a permanent treaty including in 2000 when US president Bill Clinton brokered one, and could have enforced that deal on their side. Instead, from Yasser Arafat to Hamas there’s been a deliberate choice to choose terror and the victims are Israelis and Palestinians alike, the latter victims of their own leaders.

Lastly, tribalism is at work. But as I’ve written in the past year, one’s national origins or religious sympathies are not a barrier to moral clarity and proper assignment of blame for war and civilian deaths.

My ethnic background is German. Growing up, I never heard any of my four grandparents whisper a smidgeon of antisemitism or sympathy for German Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Quite the opposite: They blamed Hitler for the Second World War, and this despite one grandfather having lost three brothers in that war. Today, blame for the tragedy of war and civilian deaths lays squarely with Hamas.

All the above is why the Aristotle Foundation’s scholars refuse to be silent on antisemitism’s rise in Canada. We also refuse to abandon moral clarity on Israel.

In the past year, we have written and spoken out on this issue. Know that we will do even more work in the coming year to educate Canadians about antisemitism and radicalism.

Antisemitism and attacks on our liberal democratic ally, Israel, are not “just” an attack on Jews, Arabs, Christians, and Baha’i who live in Israel. They are also an attack on Canada and on the tolerant, open civilization painstakingly and progressively built here and in the rest of the West, and increasingly in recent decades, in non-Western nations as well.

Mark Milke

President, Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy

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