Ariella Kimmel: The crucial things that Mark Carney didn't say about antisemitism
The Prime Minister offered platitudes and comfort. It wasn't enough.
By: Ariella Kimmel
Mark Carney took to the stage this week at the Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto to give what was billed as a declaration of the crisis of antisemitism in Canada and the government’s actions to combat this pernicious form of hatred.
The prime minister opened his speech by invoking the Hebrew prophets Isaiah and Amos. But the teachings from these prophets were not generic social-justice slogans, they were speaking to a specific people, in a specific land, with a specific name: Israel. To lift Isaiah and Amos out of that context, to deploy their moral authority while carefully avoiding the words “Israel” or “Zionism,” strips the prophets of the very people and place they were speaking about.
That rhetorical sleight of hand wasn’t just a small mistake by the prime minister; it was a missed opportunity to speak frankly and clearly about the hate that has been plaguing our country for almost three years.
At a moment when Canadian Jews are being targeted in ways we have not seen in generations, and when antisemitism is no longer a fringe phenomenon but a street-level, campus-level, and institutional reality, the speech that needed to be delivered was not a carefully calibrated address to a pre-screened audience inside a synagogue, but rather a clear, unapologetic, national statement.
What we got instead from Carney was the politically safe route with a speech about antisemitism, to Jews, in a Jewish space, with little real cost and even less real consequence. The message, once again, is that this is a Jewish problem, rather than a Canadian problem. If this moment is as serious as politicians keep insisting it is — and, let’s be clear, it is — then it demands more than moral platitudes expressed in comfortable rooms to sympathetic ears. Had this speech been delivered in Parliament, that would have given it the weight it deserved, while making it more difficult for those who indulge or excuse radical anti-Zionism to continue pretending this is merely a “policy disagreement” about foreign affairs, instead of what it has become in Canada: a justification for targeting Jews.
While full of nice words, Carney’s speech danced around the central engine of contemporary antisemitism. This is most clearly seen in what was missing, rather than in what he said. He gave an entire speech on antisemitism in 2026 without uttering the words “Israel,” “Zionism,” or “October 7,” meaning there was no reference to the worst mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, the event that triggered this worldwide wave of antisemitism we are now living through, driven by a campaign of delegitimization and demonization aimed at Israel, and at Zionism as a concept.
This is not a small omission; it is the whole story. Since Oct. 7, the surge in threats and attacks against Jews in Canada has not come from old-school neo-Nazis suddenly emboldened by obscure corners of the internet. It has overwhelmingly come from those who cloak themselves in the language of “anti-Zionism” and “social justice,” and from Islamist extremists who view Jews here as legitimate stand-ins for a war thousands of miles away. The chants we hear in our streets are not criticisms of the Israeli government; they are calls for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state and, by extension, the erasure of Jewish self-determination as a legitimate concept. “From the river to the sea” is not a zoning complaint, but a call for a world in which millions of Jews no longer exist where they live today. “Intifada” is not a poetic metaphor, but a call for violent uprising, historically defined by suicide bombings, shootings, and the deliberate killing of civilians. These are the vile chants echoing outside Jewish community centres, schools, synagogues, and in our downtowns. They are chanted not in theoretical debates but in the faces of Jews, in Jewish neighbourhoods, outside Jewish institutions. There was nothing Carney said that clearly stated that these actions have crossed the line from speech to criminal harassment and intimidation, and that law enforcement must act.
Canada does not suffer from a lack of laws to handle the problem. Harassment, threatening people, and vandalism are all already illegal. Yet repeatedly, police have stood back, paralyzed by political calculations, fearful of being accused of “criminalizing protest,” even when protests have ceased to be protests and have become stalking and terrorizing. What we needed from the prime minister was a firm call to enforce existing laws. Not more committees, or more “dialogue,” or more diluted statements about generic racism that flatten every form of hatred into the same vague word cloud.
Let’s be blunt about it: the primary threat to Jews in Canada today does not come from the far right, even though that threat exists. It comes from those who have mainstreamed the idea that Zionism, which at its very core is simply the belief that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, is inherently racist, illegitimate, or evil. Once you accept that premise, it becomes very easy to justify targeting Jews who dare to identify with that “evil.” Suddenly, a mezuzah is a political symbol, a synagogue is “complicit,” a Jewish overnight camp is “supporting genocide.”
So, what would a meaningful speech have sounded like? It would have started with clarity, not vagueness: “The antisemitism we are seeing in Canada today surged after Oct. 7, and it is being driven primarily through radical anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism has become the main vehicle for antisemitism in our time.”
That sentence alone would have sent a shockwave through the political and cultural spaces where the demonization of Israel and Zionism is par for the course, while forcing an uncomfortable but necessary conversation. A serious speech would have called out the chants for “intifada” and “from the river to the sea” for what they are. And then, crucially, it would have been paired with a directive to law enforcement to enforce the laws on the books evenly and fairly.
A meaningful speech would have been honest about where this problem lives politically, challenging not only the fringe far right, but the progressive and Islamist networks that have legitimized the idea that hounding Jews out of public life is a form of “social justice.” Finally, it would have come with a simple, measurable test: “Judge us not by the words we speak in synagogues, but by whether Jews can send their children to school, walk to synagogue, operate their businesses, and show their identity in public without fear or police presence. If that does not materially change in the months ahead, then we have failed, and you should hold us accountable.”
That is the kind of speech that would not die after a few news cycles. Canada does not need more elegantly phrased concerns; what we need is a direct confrontation with the radical anti-Zionism that is being used as cover to terrorize Jews. When the prime minister steps up to that podium, he has a choice to either offer comfort or demand change. At the podium in Holy Blossom, he chose comfort when the country, not just the Jewish community, needed change.
Ariella Kimmel is president of Winston Wilmont, a public affairs firm, and a volunteer within the Jewish community.
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Thank you Ariella. This is absolutely bang on. Carney missed the opportunity to effect real change. Change that is sorely and urgently needed. Many of us who are not Jews are appalled by what has been happening in Canada since October 7 and are shocked by the degree of antisemitism in Canada that was apparently latent and has now become overt. We are also disgusted by the cowardice of politicians who fail to rise above vote-getting and show moral leadership.
Great article. I'm sure Mr. Carney means well, but he has to stop trying to avoid upsetting the racists on the left who deep down... just hate Jews.
First, there's the basic fact that Canadian Jews are CANADIAN. They're not legitimate stand-ins for Israel. Protestors in predominantly Jewish neighbourhoods insisting they're protesting against Israeli policy are like protesters targeting David Suzuki's grandchildren for protests against Japanese government policy. And I think we'd call people who targeted Canadians of Japanese ethnicity by the tag "racist".
Second, anti-semitism is it's own problem. It's not "anti-semitism and Islamophobia" or on other occasions talking about Islamophobia by itself. Imagine a Canadian political party that condemned anti-Japanese racism without generalizing farther when it came up... but whenever they talked about anti-Indigenous racism or residential schools, they had a habit of generalizing into a wider condemnation of anti-asian bigotry. I don't think that would be well received because of what it would imply about anti-indigenous racism being less of a problem.
And that's before we get into the fact that anti-semitism is targeted **racism** while Islamophobia includes a simple (and legitimate) dislike of the religion known as Islam. There's no "legitimate racism". But there are legitimate, accepted and tolerated dislikes of religion. No one is required to think positively of Christianity. People are allowed to say "Christianity sucks, Jesus was a delusional idiot, it's an evil belief system and the world would be better if everyone quit being Christian". Islam isn't special. Canadians are allowed to say "Islam sucks, Mohammed was a delusional idiot with a penchant for underage girls, it's an evil belief system and the world would be better if everyone just quit being Muslim."
Finally... a word about the target the anti-Israel protestors insist they're upset about... the state of Israel itself. One claim I hear is that the state of Israel is illegitimate because it's an ethno-Jewish state in which Jews have special rights. (It's true, they do). Okay... Is virtually every single Muslim majority state in the world illegitimate? I don't hear that from the same people protesting against Israel which leads me to the unfortunate conclusion is the reason is because they're racists.
This gets into foreign affairs, not the Prime Minister defending Canadians against racist attacks, but our foreign policy and how our Prime Minister speaks about the world shouldn't be grounded in racism. Which means we should be seeing our Prime Minister insisting that Israel has the same right to exist as Canada, Japan, Italy or India and the same right to defend itself against invasion, attack and existential threat.