JUSTICE! JUSTICE, YOU SHALL PURSUE

MY REMARKS YESTERDAY AT THE BC LEGISLATURE.

Me.

Yesterday, I was honored to be invited to speak at the vigil for the hostages at the British Columbia Legislature, in Victoria. These were my remarks.

On these Legislature grounds and at thousands of other locations around the world, Jews and their allies have been gathering for more than a year-and-a-half to hold in our hearts and in our hopes the well-being of the hostages in Gaza and the desperate wish for their redemption.

We are united in our humanity and our resolve.

We are the people who stand for peace and coexistence — and yet, paradoxically, we are condemned as the advocates of war and intolerance by people who are filled with hatred and bigotry.

We live in a world turned upside-down, where what is so clearly right is vilified and what is so clearly wrong is venerated.

I can only imagine the pain you feel. I know that my Jewish friends have been confronting the hardest times many of you have ever faced. You have been betrayed by the people you thought were your friends. And it is not only the hateful posts you see online and the sadistic things people have said to your faces. It is the silence. It has been the absolute, inescapable refusal by those you thought you could depend on to even say — let alone do — the right thing that has often wounded you the most.

You are exhausted. You are hurt. You are angry. And you should be. And I am sorry.

I am so sorry that you are exhausted. I am so sorry you are hurt.

But I am not sorry that you are angry.

I am glad that you are angry.

Anger is a response to injustice.

Jewish tradition says “Tzedek, tzedek tirdof” — “Justice! Justice you shall pursue.”

And your anger is a response to the injustice facing you and all people today who understand the difference between right and wrong.

Do not suppress your anger. Let your rage drive you in the pursuit of justice. Let that anger motivate you and to build a better world.

*

I want to talk for a moment about the power of words.

You have heard hurtful and hateful words on the streets of Victoria. You have heard dangerous rhetoric — hostile speech hollered by hate-motivated hordes. “From the river to the sea!” they yell. “Globalize the intifada!” they scream.

This week, we saw those words turn to action. Two young Jews were murdered in cold blood on the streets of Washington, DC.

This is what “Globalize the intifada” means.

Maybe it was a mad man who pulled the trigger Wednesday night — we don’t really know his mental state. But it was the hostility and dehumanizing rhetoric of millions of unhinged, radicalized extremists that loaded that gun.

How many of us were truly shocked when we awoke to the news on Thursday morning? It was almost inevitable, wasn’t it? How long can a society maintain a fever pitch of raging hatred targeting an identifiable group before some loose cannon or lone wolf comes to see cold-blooded murder as justifiable homicide?

We cannot allow this level of rhetoric to go unchecked. It is up to people like those who work in this building to set the boundaries around what is acceptable discourse in our society. Instead, it is some of the very people who should be exemplifying civility and tamping down the incendiary rhetoric who are the very ones perpetrating it.

Today, the Government of Israel raised its threat level for Israelis travelling to Canada, in part due to atrocious events like a massive hate rally that took place in Toronto recently. If our country is not a safe place for Jewish people, we are not the Canada we were raised to believe in.

Enough! We have had enough. Do we have to wait until there is blood on the streets of Victoria before the people we call our leaders will call out the unrestrained hatred we are seeing against the Jewish state — and against Jewish people?

*

You may not know, as we stand in our provincial capital, that this week in our nation’s capital, a religious conference is taking place. It is bringing together Christian church leaders in what they are calling a “Call for Repentance Conference.”

What are they repenting for? Is it antisemitism? Is it the situation some of these clergy and parishioners have helped create, in which we have seen a severn-fold increase in attacks on Jewish people and institutions in this country?

No. They are repenting for the role of churches in what they call the “settler-colonial” occupation of Palestine.

Before I go on, I want to acknowledge and thank the Christians who are here today. It is hardly my place, as an agnostic Christmas and Easter cultural Christian, to judge the genuineness of another person’s commitment to Christianity. But it seems to me like you are the kind of people of whom Jesus would be proud.

But in a perverted and — I would venture to add — a deeply unchristian extrapolation, some misguided clergy are gathering in Ottawa this week to apologize for what they portray as their churches’ shortcomings in opposing the national self-determination of the Jewish people.

They have adopted a narrative in which those who came later usurp the title of indigenous people from the Jews who were on that land thousands of years before the people who claim to be indigenous arrived. It shouldn’t fall on me to tell them: That’s not how indigeneity works.

I find it interesting — this mania to repent and apologize.

We see it in the Jewish community as well. I know that, especially here in Victoria, there are Jews who have made it their primary business to apologize for their identity and for the supposed sins of other Jews, including the manifestation of Jewish national self-determination, the state of Israel.

With all this apologizing going on, I thought … who am I to miss out on a trend?

So I am here to apologize.

As a Canadian — as almost all of you are — I apologize to Jewish people everywhere on behalf of our country. Our prime minister, a few years back, apologized for the tragedy of the SS St. Louis, a ship filled with Jewish refugees from Nazism that was turned back from our shores. It’s easy to apologize for errors of the past. It is more difficult to fix the problems of the present. But sometimes it seems like we’re not even trying.

Last week, our government shamefully issued a joint statement with the governments of France and the UK that Hamas called “a significant step in the right direction.”

When one of the world’s cruelest, blood-soaked jihadi terror squads endorses your foreign policy, you know your country is heading off a cliff. As a Canadian, I apologize — and I promise — and I urge you — to contact the prime minister, the foreign affairs minister and your MP to express your disgust.

As a lifelong political progressive and activist, I apologize to every Jewish person here and everywhere for the people who I have marched with who have made a grievous moral error. They have adopted a biased, binary, intolerant, hateful, antisemitic narrative that betrays every value that genuine progressive activists should be defending. On their behalf — because they won’t do it — I apologize.

As a gay man, I apologize for every person who has ever made a social media post or carried a self-destructive poster like “Queers for Palestine.” These delusional, self-defeating whackadoodles certainly do not speak for me. But, dammit, I will speak for them — because they do not have the integrity to say what needs to be said — I’m sorry that so many of my people have betrayed your people.

As a person who has always supported trade unions and free collective bargaining, I apologize to you for the betrayal shown to Jewish Canadians by the union movement that your parents and grandparents helped build. I won’t cross a picket line — but Canadian trade unions have crossed every line of human decency by defaming and scapegoating the Jewish state and Jewish people who stand with it.

On behalf of trade unions — because they simply refuse to do what is right — I apologize to you for their deplorable betrayal.

On behalf of all who support equality for women, I apologize for the feminist organizations that betrayed the most sacred values of believing women, who instead victim-blame and deny the use of rape as a weapon of war when it is perpetrated against Jews. For them, I apologize, because rape is not resistance!

For everyone who should apologize to you but won’t, let me speak the words that need to be said to Jewish people in Victoria, across Canada and everywhere, including and especially in Israel.

I’m sorry.

*

But there are two other words that need to be said even more than “I’m sorry.”

I’ve been hanging out with Jews pretty much all the time for more than 30 years.

I know that Jewishness is an identity filled with joy, intellectual richness, spiritual abundance, powerful relationships and above all, unity of peoplehood. That unity has never been more evident and it has never been more inspiring than it has been in the past year-and-a-half. The tenacity, the resilience and the fortitude of the Jewish people in Israel and around the world have been among the greatest models imaginable of the human capability to thrive under extreme circumstance. “Pressure makes diamonds” is one of my favorite sayings — and the history of the Jewish people is proof of this. Rarely more so than at this moment in history.

Jewish people, in the last year-and-a-half, to say nothing of the last several thousand years, have given non-Jewish people like me so many reasons to believe, so much inspiration, so many examples of resilience, so many narratives of triumph over adversity. We have seen genuine heroism, like some of the heroes of October 7, who I met in Israel a few weeks ago, who saved unnumbered lives by fighting off, almost singlehandedly, the barbarians who broke down the figurative and literal walls of civilization that day.

But I have seen small acts of heroism closer to home. By people like you, who have been voices in your circles of influence contesting things you should never have to contest. Students of Hillel, who are on the frontlines of the outrages on campus. And so many people — Jewish and non-Jewish — who see and feel injustice and refuse to rest until you have done all you can to fulfill the Jewish responsibility of tikkun olam.

Jewish people — and the Jewish state — have given more to the world than the world has given back.

In return for all that Jews and Israel have contributed, the world betrays and maligns you. For that, I apologize.

But I will also say something else the world seems determined not to express.

Your collective will in the face of a world gone mad is a calm at the centre of a storm. A North Star in a society that seems to have lost its moral compass. The conscience of a civilization that has utterly lost its bearings.

And so, the most important thing I want to say today is thank you. Todah rabah.

Finally — I’m going to steal a line from Janet, who may have coined what I think should be the mantra for allies of Jewish people, for all time.

And when you dance again — I want to dance with you.

Todah rabah.