It’s too easy to blame latest threats on Trump
Sadly, this country has its own twisted history of intolerance and bigotry
It would be handy to blame it on U.S. President Donald Trump.
It would be nice if we could just blame this ugly spate of bomb threats made against Jewish community centres across Canada on people who were inspired by America’s “alt-right” extremists, if we could read the news that Jewish community groups in Edmonton were going on alert and point our fingers south. But that’s too easy. Anti-Semitism in Alberta has a long history, dating back at least to the populist rise of former premier William Aberhart and his Social Credit movement.
Aberhart needed Depressionera scapegoats and he was more than happy to borrow the antiSemitic rhetoric of American populist movements to fan the flames here.
After the Second World War, when fascism was a political liability, Ernest Manning worked to purge the party of public antiSemites. But the beast went on smouldering underground.
It flared up again in the 1980s and early 1990s, when Holocaust denier Jim Keegstra taught in his Eckville classroom and when Terry Long, leader of the Aryan Nations, hosted a public crossburning in Provost.
In 1988, two members of the Ku Klux Klan — Robert Hamilton, then 19, and Timothy Heggen, then 29 — were charged with plotting to blow up the Jewish Community Centre in Calgary and with attempting to kill Calgary businessman Harold Milevsky. They’d intended to blame the bombings on local Muslims, to stir up anti-Arab feeling in Calgary — two hate crimes for the price of one.
They eventually pleaded guilty to conspiring to possess explosives with an intent to cause serious damage to property and were sentenced to five years. Judge Allen Sulatkcky described the two would-be bombers as immature and naive and said they had been groomed by local KKK leader Tearlach Dunsford Mac a’Phearsoin, who was never charged.
Toxic anti-Semitism has been percolating here ever since, whether the torch was carried by neo-Nazi skinhead groups such as Blood and Honour or by Freemen on the Land types like Norman Raddatz, the anti-Semite who killed Edmonton police Const. Daniel Woodall in 2015.
There’s a whole new generation of useful idiots like Hamilton and Heggen out there, losers and malcontents who are angry about their lives, tired of feeling like failures and eager to blame someone — be it “immigrants” or “feminists” or “gays” or “Indians” or “Muslims” or, as a classic default, “Jews.”
(It’s no accident radical Islamic fundamentalists and Islamophobes use similar online tactics to recruit new foot soldiers. Both are looking for lost boys — and lost man-boys — to radicalize.)
Once, a Keegstra or a Mac a’Phearsoin could only groom and manipulate acolytes in person. Today, master manipulators make virtuoso use of social media to infect patsies around the world. Time and distance are no longer barriers. Bile oozes across borders, whether it’s spreading here from outside or whether our own far-right agitators are finding international audiences. Heck, why burn a cross when you have YouTube and Twitter?
It’s been a while, though, since mainstream Canadian politicians thought it wise to play footsie with hate groups. Trump’s electoral success changed that much at least.
Now, various leadership candidates for the Conservative Party of Canada seem to have no qualms about pandering to the far-right fringe, aping the language and the hysteria of altright, anti-immigrant or misogynist websites.
Which bring us back to this week — to the point where Jewish parents in Edmonton worry about sending their children to schools, when adults worry whether their elderly parents will be safe at the seniors’ centre.
After the massacre at the Quebec City mosque, we don’t need reminding that not all such threats are empty.
Not all threats come from whom you’d expect. In the United States, authorities allege several threats to Jewish facilities came from a left-of-centre African-American journalist, Juan Thompson, who was trying to frame his ex-girlfriend. But whoever’s making these threats here is exploiting a timehonoured prejudice to terrorize people and sow division.
I was going to conclude by saying there’s never been a more important moment for Jews and Muslims to stand together, united against prejudice.
But this isn’t just about Muslims and Jews. It’s about anyone who cares about real Canadian values of tolerance, peace and basic human decency. This is a moment of truth for us all — whatever our faith, race, culture, gender identity, sexual orientation or political party. Will you stay quiet, keep your head down and hope the trolls don’t eat you next? Or will we stand together, a bulwark against hate?