When I first saw Avi Lewis’s reflection, on the Jewish day of atonement of Yom Kippur, that “we have failed to do our part to stop on ongoing genocide committed in our name,” I was immediately worried about the blowback he would receive.
But I had no idea that The National Post would publish an opinion piece inciting violence against him.
In a piece titled “Jewish law tells us how to deal with Avi Lewis,” the former editor-in-chief of Canadian Jewish News Yoni Goldstein relates the biblical story of Korach, who was swallowed by the earth after refusing Moses’s summons out of Egypt. “Jewish law is fairly clear on the subject,” Goldstein explains. “When a Jew endangers the Jewish community, the community is obligated to stop them.” He also suggested that under Jewish law, Lewis could be considered a “mosar” or a “rodef”—terms used to describe dangerous traitors that were invoked to encourage and then justify the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
I am outraged that any newspaper—however right-wing, however Zionist—could publish an article suggesting violence against the leader of a national political party. A group of Jewish anti-Zionist organizations as well as the National Council of Canadian Muslims and Canadians for Peace and Justice in the Middle East is calling on the editor responsible for the article to resign, and for parliamentarians to condemn the article and The National Post.
It’s been a few days since this vicious piece appeared, yet no-one in the mainstream media or political class has denounced or even commented upon the piece—except for one Liberal politician, Salma Zahid, who had her car in her driveway set on fire. Back in 2024, politicians who roundly attacked a man dressed up as Spiderman for simply climbing on the portico of Toronto’s Jewish Mount Sinai hospital during a pro-Palestine demonstration are now silent in the face of this vicious attack against an NDP leader. The silence is stunning to me and speaks to the disciplining power of the elite’s pro-Israel consensus, as well as the threat of being accused of antisemitism.
I also think it’s a wake-up call to the Jewish community, which is treating those of us with legitimate criticism of the Israeli genocide in Gaza as traitors. Traitors to whom?
Avi points out in his post a lesson I too learned from the Nazi genocide against the Jews: “never again” means “never again for anyone.” Yet Zionists condone slaughtering thousands of innocent people in Gaza, then accuse those who disagree with them of betrayal, even though the existence of the state of Israel and its policies has been a debate within the Jewish community for more than a century.
I have been a pariah to the institutional Jewish community for decades because of my criticism of Israel, which began in 1970 after a visit where I saw first-hand the racism against Palestinian people there. Now, as more and more Jews—especially young Jews—abhor Israel’s genocide, are Zionist Jews prepared to unite their community against their own children in order to defend a state that is conducting a genocide according to almost all the world’s experts?
And where are the Zionist organizations who screech about rising antisemitism in the Palestine solidarity movement, when one of their own basically appears to call for the death of the only Jewish leader of a political party in Canada?
I have seen and experienced plenty of actual antisemitism. When I was involved in the pro-choice struggle in the 1980s, there were antisemitic threats mostly directed against Dr. Henry Morgentaler, the Jewish physician and activist who had opened the country’s first independent abortion clinic. Anti-abortion agitators would shout outside the clinic, “They only kill Christian babies there.” Later, in 1994, I was one of 12 “prominent Jews” who received a bullet in the mail to my house.
No-one at the time suggested that Dr. Morgentaler or I were responsible for the antisemitism we endured because we were pro-choice Jews.
Before The National Post article, I had a conversation with a feminist friend on social media about Avi’s Yom Kippur statement. This friend reminded me that the men who started the White Ribbon Campaign to end gendered violence said they had a special responsibility as men to address violence against women—and argued that Avi was saying the same thing about Israel. As Jews, we feel a special responsibility to speak out against Israel, which claims to represent us, and uses us as justification for its military occupation, apartheid, and genocide.
Others convinced me that the statement showed Avi was different from other politicians: he said what he believed from his heart, even though he knew he would face criticism. Almost all the younger people I know have become disillusioned with electoral politics because the politicians we support become less committed to their beliefs under the influence of the political and media establishment. Avi is different.
The fact that The National Post, which represents the worst elements of the right in Canada, chose to publish this horrendous article tells us one more thing: they see Avi Lewis as a real threat to the conservative political approach that now seems to be the consensus among both Liberals and Conservatives. And in that, I am hoping they are right.
When I went to journalism school 10 years ago, my parents thought that they would eventually read my articles in The Montreal Gazette. Today, that newspaper is a husk of its former self. But I get to explain that I’m working towards critical, independent, and sustainable journalism.
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– Amanda Siino, Development Director, The Breach
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