Canadian Crusaders
James Pew, a Canadian historian and Woke-Watch commentator, is a reluctant Jeremiah. He is convinced that the pro-Palestinian protests in the western world indicate the beginnings of a war of Christians against Muslims, in which war the Jews, in particular the state of Israel, are Christian allies. He views the protests as indicative of the Muslim intent to instigate such a war:
When Muslims protest (which they often do) they wave flags of Middle Eastern countries, they block traffic and pray in the street, they scream death to Canada and Israel, they celebrate effigies of terrorists, they burn Canadian flags, they congregate in Jewish neighbourhoods to deliberately intimidate Jewish people.
Since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, Muslim violence in Canada has resulted in a 640% rise in anti-Semitism in Canada — a figure Pew sources in Terry Glavin’s Free Press article, “The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada.” Pew concludes:
One thing is clear, this hatred that is understandably making Jewish Canadians feel unsafe, is not coming from the Anglo Canadian sphere, nor the Franco, nor the Indigenous. This is an entirely new element, an existential foreign threat: Islam. There is a domestic component as well: the embrace of radical Islam by the far left. We must oppose this at all costs.
Despite his sense of urgency, though, Pew still hopes that his attempts to awaken and give direction to the West are mere histrionics, that he will be seen in the future as a “maniac:”
The very openness of Islam’s expansive operation occurring under conditions of multiculturalism in a historically high-trust society, may just be the dynamics that will ultimately destroy Canada. I hope that is hyperbole. In two or three years from now, I invite readers to bring up this essay and point out what a pearl-clutching histrionic disaster I was. I hope it turns out that way, I would be happy to be the maniac who was way off base.
Because of his uncertainty about his prophesy, Pew proposes to Canadians, and to the West in general, a non-violent response to Islam. It worked with the Soviets, he says, so maybe it will work with Islam:
Since there are few Western leaders with the balls to actually ban Islam and rid the West of the problem, we must find another way. Unfortunately, this may mean in the final equation that the West fell because the people and their leaders didn’t have the stomach to deport those who were parasitizing and attacking the society from within.
Back to the realm of the pragmatic. Instead of expulsion, Islam must be contained in the West. Similar to the official policy the Americans took during the Cold War where international Communism was dealt with by a policy of containment. The Americans could have initiated a hot war with the Soviets, but they didn’t have the stomach for it – I’m glad they didn’t.
“Containment,” would involve police or security-service monitoring of all Islamic publications, Islamic media, and the sermons of Imams in mosques:
The religious community of Muslim Canadians owes it to the rest of Canada – a country that welcomed Muslims and Islamic culture – to submit to having their Mosques surveilled and their books, media, and religious texts examined in an ongoing fashion by our Canadian agencies who deal with intelligence. Their religious sermons, classes, talks, seminars, conventions, should all be surveilled, and investigated in an ongoing fashion.
The Islamic community would front the costs of this monitoring, or else:
If there are good Muslims who love the West and claim to practice a non-expansionist peaceful version of Islam that is compatible with our Judeo-Christian culture, then they should do everything in their power to help contain radical Islam in the way I am describing. Why wouldn’t they? Highly suspicious if they refused, is it not?
Note the “if.” Pew is still afraid that Muslims are hot-wired for violence:
Islamists do not value human life the same way people of the West do. Our Judeo-Christian roots teach men to protect our women and children at all costs. Our Western values prevent us from using children as human shields, or strapping them into suicide vests so they can blow up Jews along with themselves. A Judeo-Christian moral framework precludes one from marrying 9 year old girls, or from covering women and girls from head to toe in black cloaks, or from stoning to death a women for infidelity who was actually raped but there were no witnesses to attest to the woman’s story, or from throwing homosexuals off of rooftops, or burning kidnapped Yazidi women to death for refusing to convert to Islam to become the sex slaves of their captors, or from committing tens of thousands of massacres and acts of terrorism, etc.”
Christians and Jews are, as opposed to Muslims, peaceful, and Jews are at home in majority-Christian societies:
If an acquaintance encountered me and one of my Jewish friends having coffee, they would see two men who are culturally indistinguishable. They might mistake us for brothers. If they sat down and joined us, an hour could go by without ethnic backgrounds ever entering the fray of conversation, and they most likely would still not know that one of us is Jewish. We are compatible, and in many ways the same. We are not exactly the same, but sameness is not what is important, compatibility is. Jewish Canadians are good Canadians, when they protest (which they rarely do) they wave Canadian flags and sing the Canadian and Israeli national anthems.
Pew candidly admits (he pretty well has to as a credible historian), that “our Judeo-Christian moral framework” did allow the containment and extermination of great numbers of Jews, right up to and including the holocaust. He could’ve added too that it also allowed 300 years of African slavery, the transport of some 12.5 million Africans to North and South America. It allowed another 100 years of Jim Crow apartheid in the American south.
Pew makes no comment on slavery, but about antisemitism he says that Christians engaged in it because they (Germans being his prime example) are inclined to conspiracy theories:
The conspiracy theory element is attractive to Western minds – especially minds that are not fully formed, or not fully informed on the long and deeply complex history of anti-Semitism and Israel. I can’t blame others for not being up to speed on such a rich and intricate story, however, I do implore them to exercise extreme caution when tempted by the outlet for frustration that the conspiracy theory provides. We have seen this before, the Jews were scapegoated by the Nazis as the conspirators pulling the strings around the globe through the levers of finance controlled within their Jewish dominated banking system. It is so easy to fall into this explanation. It is so easy to just blame the Jews.
It seems that unformed or uninformed Western minds can fall back on such scapegoating, jumping to the conclusion that Palestinians are being bombed because Jews are bad people. They need to study up on the history of anti-Semitism in the West, Pew says. This anti-Semitism is based on conspiracy theories and a sort of superiority that eases them upwards into many elite spheres of society:
Anti-Semitism is both a hatred of Jewish people and a conspiracy theory involving a global cabal of Jews who control the world through the banking system and the media. Jew hatred has an ancient history, but the modern period of anti-Semitism involves the pernicious influence of the half-plagiarized, fully fabricated documents from the early 20th century known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The “Protocols” are supposedly the plans of the Jewish elite to bring about a totalitarian global government ruled by them. They are detailed, comprehensive, systematically laid out, and not unlike a horoscope, are written in general enough terms that one could easily imagine it describing our present day or situation. This leads many conspiracy minded folks in the West to believe that there might be something to this Jewish conspiracy theory.
While Canadians once did believe that there was something to the protocols, and while Pew knows that a few still do, Canadians have the evidence of many years of peaceful Judaeo-Christian co-existence to convince them they were wrong. Pew asks Canadians to look at Jews for what they are. The merits of Jewish culture in itself, not the Protocols, explain Jewish prominence in Western life:
I confidently assure readers there is nothing more to Jewish over-representation [in business and the professions] than evidence of the winning ethno-cultural formulation of Jewish heritage. If you live in a culture that prioritizes learning and tradition, as do the Jews, you can expect to see many examples of your people flourishing in well-earned stations of achievement. When you consider the intelligence of the average Jewish person, merit seems a far better explanation for Jewish success, than does a complicated multi-generational global conspiracy unfolding over centuries with a singular objective of world domination unwaveringly pursued.
If Canadians are still unconvinced, Pew invites them read up on history. If those with unformed or uninformed minds find this too hard, they can read his books:
It means you don’t have to do any of the work that was involved when I wrote The Case for Israel, and then later, Israel, A Promised Land. It means you can avoid a major reading effort, and an even greater effort put forward when weighing the moral components of the issue.
It’s embarrassing to have to question the objectivity of a historian who claims expertise and yet candidly admits to reservations about his conclusions. He also admits to some uncertainty of who the enemy actually is — there could be good Muslims, though he seems pretty sure there aren’t. He modifies his accusations against the “left” by referring to it as “the extreme left” — those Canadians who welcomed Islamic immigration — seemingly saying that some on the left are more reasonable. He exhibits good feelings for Jewish people, though a lot of Jews might be reluctant, after two millennia of Christian hatred, to trust Pew enough to join him and other Christians, in particular evangelical Christians, in a crusade against Islam. And he offers to save unformed or uninformed Canadian minds the trouble of sorting out a complex moral issue, that might be too much for them, by reading a couple of his books.
It seems to me that such a person would be open to respectful questioning of his research and opinions.
First, his take on the protests is that they are staged entirely by Muslims and directed against Jews in general and not just against Israeli-government policies. However, the fact is that many Jewish Canadians participated in the protests, and those Jews obviously considered them aimed at Israel, not at the entire Jewish race. The December 2024 sit-in at Confederation Hall involved 100 Jews. Groups represented were “World Beyond War,” “IfNotNow,” “Showing up for Racial Justice,” “United Jewish People’s Order,” “Independent Jewish Voices Toronto-York Region,” and the “Jewish Faculty Network.”
On 24 October 2023, at the office of the Israeli Consulate General in Toronto, Rabbi David Mivasair urged Netanyahu and his government to stop attacking Gaza. He represented hundreds of Toronto’s Jewish Community who were there to object. Signs read “Jews Say No to Genocide” and “Jews Against Apartheid.”
“Independent Jewish Voices” and “Jewish Faculty Network” also represented Jewish students and faculty in the encampment in front of McGill. The protest, one of hundreds on campuses across Canada, was largely peaceful, though at McGill police had to push students back when they spread across Sherbrook Street outside McGill’s gates. Quebec’s Superior Court quashed an injunction to remove the encampment, deciding that the students were staging a nonviolent protest.
Pew also ignores the many, many anti-war protests staged by citizens in Israel.
Second, Pew forgets that in Canada, and in most of the West, legal protests are taken to be essential to democracy, events where citizens exercise their rights to free speech and assembly in order to protest what they feel to be governmental or corporate wrongs. In facilitating these protests, which come from both left and right, governments are expected to walk a fine line in determining legality and enforcing punishment. The Wobbly protests (the Winnipeg Strike), the protests against the Vietnam war, the protests against apartheid in the southern US and in South Africa (in both of which protests Canadians participated), the protests against G7 meetings (against neoliberalism), the Wet’suwet’in blockades of roads and highways across Canada (against the GasLink pipeline), the Trucker’s Convoy (against vaccination and Justin Trudeau among other things) — all of these got out of hand in both government and public opinion, all were suppressed either violently or moderately, all involved arrests of leaders, and all settled into Canadian history as important in informing the government how people felt and influencing politicians and the electorate.
Compared to these events, the protests against Israel are minor. It seems odd that anyone, especially an historian, would take them as a prelude to apocalyptic war. Also, the extremities that Pew claims to be exhibited in these protests are common to all the protests mentioned above. For example, the Trucker’s Convoy pretty much carried out all of the features of Palestinian protests that Pew mentions, if you substitute “death to Trudeau” or “fuck Trudeau” for “death to Israel,” the celebration of effigies of Donald Trump to the celebration of effigies of terrorists, and the harassing of Ottawa citizens for the harassing of Jews, and if you consider the shipment of arms that convoy leaders attempted to get across the border into Alberta, the truckers were easily as extreme as any Palestinians. In the US, the January 6 attack on the capitol building, against Trump’s loss of the 2020 election, were far more extreme.
Third, Pew’s view of the coming Muslim-Christian conflict makes angels out of Christians and demons out of Muslims. It seems unlikely that Christians have done a complete reversal of attitudes since the holocaust. It also seems unlikely that evangelical Christians, though hoping for Jewish assistance in the war of Gog against Magog that will occur in the Holy Land, have entirely shed their belief that Jews killed Christ and should be punished. He seems also to forget that Jews are still associated, by conservatives, with left-liberalism, something Pew himself hates. In post-war America, Jews, even those like Oppenheimer who gifted America with the atomic bomb, were beyond the pale, assumed to be Marxists and linked to anti-Christian secularism.
Also, Pew has no concept of what neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Proud Boys, many of whom are into Christian nationalism, would like to do to Jews. He asserts that all the contemporary violence against Jews is being perpetrated by Palestinian sympathizers and not by Christian or Nazi anti-Semites taking advantage of the situation. That Nazis were involved may be indicated by the number of swastikas painted on synagogues. The history of extreme-right attacks on Jews and synagogues goes far back in Canadian history, long before the Palestinian protests erupted.
Fourth, Pew’s view of Islam is monolithic. He thinks the various sects of Islam all agree on the treatment of women, the status of Jews and Christians, and the iniquity of the West. He particularly ignores the existence of secular Islam, prominent in all Islamic countries, especially in Iran (where it is most threatened) and Indonesia (where it is spreading). In the West at present, the great representative of secular Islam is Salman Rushdie, a Muslim from India. His book, Satanic Verses, is a parody of the Koran, equivalent to Monty Python’s Life of Brian. In Satanic Verses, the devil is more admired than the angel, and the “Mercedes of Secularism” is a vehicular refuge for those dropping out of the march to Mecca. Rushdie has stated his message to the world of Islam clearly: “take on board the secularist – humanistic principles on which the modern is based.”
Finally, Pew’s outrage at Palestinians seems too obviously caused by outrage at their obstruction of Western foreign policy, particularly American foreign policy, and particularly that policy as influenced by southern US evangelism. Palestinians are the Cubans of the new Western-versus-Eastern cold war. Just as the Cubans fought a just war against a dictator and the Mafia, and found allies in the only place allies could be found (the socialist government of Mexico, the USSR and then China), so the Palestinians are fighting against an apartheid state and finding allies in the only place they can be found, the enemies of America (Russia, China, Iran) and radical Islam. Just as Cuba outraged America in its rejection of capitalism and democracy, so do the Palestinians with their lack of interest in the coming war of Gog – Magog that evangelists and people like Pew believe is about to erupt.
I think that, if Pew continues in his present line of thinking, his other prophesy will come true. He will, in the future, be seen as a maniac. If he actually succeeds in arousing the West to war and enticing the Jews to fight beside the Christians, he’ll go down in history as a latter-day crusader. This, as a historian would know, is the same thing as going down in history as a maniac.
