Barbara Kay warns Ezra Levant that Canada’s Jewish golden age may be ending after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, atrocities—beheadings, rapes of children, and live-streamed executions—mirroring ISIS and Nazi brutality without pretense. While UK leaders like Sunak and Braverman condemn Islamic extremism, Canada’s silence, campus "apartheid weeks," and pro-Hamas chants ("from the river to the sea") normalize Jew-hatred, leaving Jewish students targeted in Kingston and Toronto. Kay contrasts this with Israel’s pre-war optimism, like Dubai’s peace deals, and fears a Hobbesian "war of all against all" as Western moral decay aligns with Hamas’ cult-like violence, eroding support for Israel’s survival. [Automatically generated summary]
I have a heart-to-heart conversation with Barbara Kaye.
She's a columnist with the National Post.
She's also Jewish, and like me, she's shocked at what has happened overseas, but more, she's shocked by the response around the world, the embrace of the barbarity and cruelty.
We'll talk about this.
Let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
It's a video version of our conversation.
Just go to rebelnewsplus.com and click subscribe.
It's eight bucks a month.
All right, here's today's show.
Tonight, has the golden age for Jews in Canada come to an end?
I'll talk with my friend Barbara Kaye.
It's October 25th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious f**k!
Whether or not the Nazis had limits, they They did not disclose the full extent of their Holocaust.
They didn't use the word death camps.
They called them prison camps or work camps.
In fact, if you look at the entrance to Auschwitz, to this day, you can see the iron-wrought gate, the wrought iron gate that says Arbet Mach Frei.
Work will set you free.
A dark joke for those who were about to be exterminated there, but it was a way of saying to the outward world, this is not as horrific as you may think.
In fact, the Nazis prepared a propaganda video about what was going on in one of the death camps.
I think it was Theresienstadt.
And they had a kind of Potemkin village.
They showed people being well-fed.
They showed that, you know, yes, it was a prison, but like normal prisons, people were taking care of.
There was first aid, and certainly, certainly, no one was being murdered.
And the reason the Nazis did this, I believe, is because although they certainly indulged in anti-Semitism of the worst variety in public, and they marshaled hatred by directing hatred at the Jews and blaming the eternal Jew, the global Jew for all the problems, they knew that underneath it all, ordinary Germans had a basis of Christian morality left, a basis of civilization.
Germany, remember, was one of the most modern, progressive, educated, cultured countries in the world.
And had they known the depth of depravity, the mass murder, the diabolical plans, the satanic plans of Hitler, I think perhaps even they would have rebelled.
And when Eisenhower and the Allies liberated concentration camps, he directed local townspeople to walk through the concentration camps so that they would be forced to confront what had happened just miles away from their homes for years.
And many of them were shocked.
Some of them, in fact, seeing what had happened in their communities, committed suicide, local Germans who did not know the depths of the depravity.
Confronting Atrocity00:15:00
And in that way, Hamas is different because rather than hiding the depth of their depravity, they live streamed it.
They were instructed to publicize it.
They were instructed to be as brutal as possible, to torture.
They were instructed the ways in which to torture, to rape, and to deform, and to cut off heads and fingers and toes and other parts.
Hamas, in that way, I put it to you, is worse than the Nazis.
And what's even worse is rather than that causing so much of the Muslim world to recoil, I'm sure it has for some, but hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions around the world, including here in Canada, upon seeing this depravity went out in the streets and rejoiced.
Joining us now to talk about this is our friend Barbara Kaye, senior columnist at the National Post, whose latest column is called The Insidious Hatred that Spawned the Holocaust and Hamas's latest pokrum.
Barbara, nice to see you again.
Thanks, Ezra.
Thanks for having me.
Well, the shock I feel from what I saw some 18 or 19 days ago was not just my concern for the state of Israel, which I love as a democracy and it's the ethnic homeland of Jews, but rather the depths of the barbarity, which I couldn't process.
And I still have trouble processing.
And it wasn't a Palestinian plan A or plan B or one state solution or two states.
It wasn't a political haggle.
It was the most anti-human, diabolical thing I'd ever seen in my life.
It was as if the Yad Vash Shem Holocaust Museum had come to life in full color and much worse.
I think what hit me so hard two and a half weeks ago was not the threat to Israel and a democracy and not even the death toll, but the jubilation of the cruelty.
And that's with me still.
I'm reeling from that.
I can't believe it.
I'd like you to talk now because I've just been emoting.
I'm just plainly saying how I feel.
But that's an important thing to clock, isn't it?
It's very hard to process.
I think that Jews of our generation, my generation, in their wildest dreams, could not imagine that this would be happening again and seeing Einsatzgruppen invading Israel, which we thought was totally secure, that that was the one place where Jews would be safe.
I'm finding it very difficult to see that jubilation.
It's very sickening, and it reminds me very much of the scenes that we heard about and saw a little bit of when ISIS some years ago and the Islamic State was rampaging through Syria and Iraq and burning people alive and dropping people caged into the river to drown.
And I mean, the sadism, the sadism of the way they kill people was extremely shocking.
And to me, Hamas is ISIS.
They have the same values.
They have the same goals.
So it's terrible.
And of course, it's made all the worse by, as you say, seeing scenes of Muslims rejoicing around the world.
But even worse than that, seeing students and non-Muslims who are rejoicing with them and talking about any means necessary as a form of resistance.
They call it resistance.
They call it a response to colonization.
So that anything that resists colonization, you can forget about morality.
You can forget about basic human decency, that it's all tolerable, or it certainly is when Jews are the victims.
I don't remember anybody when ISIS was rampaging through the Middle East.
I don't remember anybody on this side of the world that was rejoicing with them or saying, yeah, those people had it coming or we're on their side or anything like that.
And yet, here, this is the same.
And I just would like to add to what you, your eloquent introduction.
You know, as you say, Hitler did make an attempt to sort of say, well, oh, no, no, no, it's not death camps, it's work camps.
Hitler's ambitions were only to kill all the Jews in Europe.
Hamas's plan or wish and Hezbollah is to kill all the Jews in the world.
That's in their charter.
They would like to eliminate all the Jews in the world.
So in fact, their ambitions are bigger and wider.
And we are all Jews in all countries of the world where supporters of these ugly ideologies are present.
Our targets, we're targets as much as the people in Israel.
So this was never about colonization.
This is Jew hatred, pure and simple, dressed up as colonization.
You know, I remember some of the atrocious videos of ISIS, and social media was certainly not as developed back then as it is now.
But I remember seeing a cell phone video of an ISIS terrorist cannibalizing, cutting out the heart of a victim and eating it.
It was the most shocking thing.
It was a snuff film, and part of me wishes I never looked at it.
I remember ISIS lining up Coptic Christians in a row and slitting their throats.
Slitting their throats was their preferred method of death.
They actually didn't torture and abuse the bodies as much as Hamas did in southern Israel, although I understand the ISIS terrorists in the Bata clan nightclub in Paris did atrocious torture and dismemberment and disfigurement to their victims.
But here's the thing about the Bata Klan Club in Paris, where 130 people were murdered by ISIS, and about the Coptic Christians, and about the more moderate, sorry, not moderate, the less extremist or fundamentalist Muslims that ISIS killed in Syria and Iraq, about the Yazidis that ISIS killed.
ISIS mass raped the Yazidis.
Sex slaves.
They took them as sex slaves and kept them for months and years.
And they said that was allowed to them.
I had the terrible experience of interviewing one such rape slave.
They had open-air slave markets.
Here's the thing.
ISIS was in some ways as bad as Hamas.
And yet there was no jubilation.
What is the difference?
Why was there no jubilation at Harvard and University of Toronto and in Mississauga's Gaza Plaza?
Why was there no jubilation when ISIS slit the throats of the Coptic Christians, when ISIS slit the throats in the Bata clam?
What is the commonality amongst all those cases and what's the difference in the case we're here to talk about today?
I don't think the Jews.
Yeah, it's the Jews.
I mean, let's say it.
And there's a lot of pent up the universities have been incubating this Jew hatred in the form of anti-Zionism and pretending that it's, no, it's not about, it's not about Jews.
It's about Israel.
Israel is this evil entity because they represent This imperial quality, whatever.
But it never was.
It never was about that.
It was always about Jew hatred.
And these people that support Hamas, people that are not even Muslim, but that have been indoctrinated into the cult of Jew hatred through the university's ideology of intersectionality and all that other crap.
They've been groomed to Jew hatred and that it's okay, that it's okay to hate Jews because Jews represent an evil.
I mean, they call it Zionism, but it's not.
It's just pure Jews don't have the right to their state.
They don't have the right to have their homeland like other people.
They don't have the right to anything.
They don't have the right to live.
It's that simple.
And yet, their narrative is the one that the media, much of the media, not all, thank God, are glomming onto as well.
It's understandable because of 75 years of oppression.
That is never understandable.
I don't care, even if it was 75 years of oppression, which it has not been, to be able to have that come out of your mouth, beheading babies, raping children, killing their parents in front of their eyes, roping parents together with their children and then setting them on fire, burning them to death.
How in the name of God can this be something that you're allowed to do if you feel you've been oppressed?
And that's the astonishing thing: is that all the caring people, the anti-hate people, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, every single province and territory has something called a Human Rights Commission.
I have not heard from any of these people who care about a microaggression.
Uh-oh, trigger warning, microaggressions.
What about these monstrous aggressions?
What about hatred so brutal it calls for the extermination?
From the river to the sea is code for kill every Jew between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.
It's a call for extermination.
And I have not seen a single person who for my entire life has called themselves the nice people, the human rights people.
We care more than you.
We're more tolerant than you.
We're here to chide you.
If you consider us, take one step outside of our preconceived notion of what you should say.
We're going to call you Nazis.
Here's actual Nazis and not a word from these people.
In fact, these people are the ones who are the most hateful.
The diversity, inclusion, and equity people are the ones propagating the hatred.
It's stunning to me.
And as you pointed out, it's not just Muslim immigrants to Canada.
It is white woke leftists too.
That's a huge part of it.
You see them walking in demonstrations.
I saw a clip of some smug white students who were at the university tearing down pictures of the hostages.
Pictures of the hostages.
How is this something that's offensive to them?
That these are innocent hostages and they're actually tearing down their pictures off the wall and looking very smug as they do it, like righteous.
See what we're doing?
Because these are Israeli hostages.
Anything that hurts Israeli citizens or Israeli, they're down with that.
We have a serious soul searching to do.
These universities have some, I mean, they won't, but they should be aghast at what their own students are doing.
They're supposed to be able to, as you say, inclusion, safety.
I don't feel safe.
I got misgendered.
I don't feel safe.
This is taken very seriously.
Jews have not felt safe in universities where there's a significant Jewish population for decades.
And they have been begging the universities to help them to create an environment in which they do.
And it's very clear that the environment that is making them feel unsafe is this relentless pro-Palestinian, these groups, you know, Solidarity for Palestine and all these groups that support them and their apartheid weeks and the relentless campaign to demonize Israel.
It is now spilled over and it has created in the students that they have brought seduced into their narrative of how they're the most oppressed people in the world.
They have been indoctrinated to believe, maybe they don't even know it themselves until they see themselves jubilant about this situation.
That hating Jews is okay because Jews are hyper-privileged white people.
White people, of course, are, you know, you don't worry about them, anything bad that happens to them.
But Jews are the worst of the white people.
They're hyper-privileged.
This is the message that Jewish students have been getting.
You know, anyone who would, like, they kidnap babies.
They kidnap two-year-olds.
They kidnap three-year-olds, but actual babies.
And they took them back into Gaza.
And the thing about kidnapping a baby is you've got a prisoner who you can hold on to for 50 years.
You know, they kidnapped some people in their 80s and 90s, but they took babies, obviously, for human shields.
If you're willing to take your own Palestinian children as human shields and put your rocket launchers in schools to either deter an Israeli airstrike or to welcome one so you have a PR incident, imagine the cruelty they're going to do to these children.
And they killed the children on purpose, obviously.
To kill a child, especially practically a newborn, shows that there's no politics involved.
There's no, well, you did that or you committed this moral sin.
Genocide's Genetic Eradication00:06:37
It is literally, if you look at the root of the word genocide, you're trying to eradicate the entire genetics.
You're trying to destroy every single human being.
It's Stone Age stuff.
Well, it is because they say their line is: well, every civilian has to go into the army in Israel, and therefore, even a two-year-old child is going to grow up to one day be a soldier who's going to oppress us.
I mean, this is, but it makes me think about our own tradition, how the Pharaoh, you know, who said these Hebrews, they're becoming too numerous.
And so they said, kill the firstborn boy from every family.
That was going to be the Pharaoh's solution to the problem of this tribe that he was nervous about getting too numerous amongst us.
And it does feel like we're back to 3,000, at least 3,000 years ago or more.
This is the kind of thinking.
This is the kind of tribal, you know, we cannot have these people amongst us.
They're too numerous.
They're too strong.
They're too this.
They're too that.
And That is something that Jews have served as this kind of a scapegoat, not just for the Pharaohs and then for the Romans and then for, I mean, it's been, it's been our history.
We're still trying to figure out why.
What did we do that was so terrible?
I don't know.
But here we are, scapegoats again, and in a very brutal, sadistic, horrible way.
And the people that support these animals, these Nazis, I call it a form of pathological altruism.
They think that they are supporting resistance fighters, freedom fighters, people that are oppressed.
They have just simply are ignorant, but they want to be in on something revolutionary.
This is what young people thirst to be part of a revolution.
They want to see blood run in the streets.
They don't want it to be their blood, but they get, to me, I don't know, Ezra, maybe call me a little crazy, but there is something in human nature that gets an erotic thrill.
This is like this willingness to see this kind of depraved bloodlust manifest itself.
I think there's a kind of erotic component to it for a lot of young people who say, this is my revolution.
I'm in on this.
I'm in on something very exciting.
And one Cornell professor, I don't know if you read about him, told a Palestinian, a pro-Palestine rally that he found the pogrom exhilarating and energetic.
I saw that, and that was a black professor.
Imagine if he had seen the beating of a black slave or a lynching.
Imagine someone whose historic lineage in America during slavery may have seen a lynching.
Imagine coming full circle to be erotically aroused by death pornography, by a snuff film.
It is like a snuff film.
Yeah, it is.
Well, it is literally a snuff film.
You know, it's funny.
I'm thinking again about how the Nazis who were atrocious, obviously.
I mean, that is the defining yardstick for how atrocious you are.
But what do you do if that yardstick's not big enough?
Think of the neo-Nazis or the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, six years ago with their tiki torches and their khaki pants.
And they were chanting, we will not be erased or we will not be replaced or the Jews do not control us or something like that.
Like it was racism about, you know, they said something.
I can't remember what it was exactly.
They said all those things.
It's true, I remember.
And, you know, basically, they indicated that this was a racial battle for them.
They didn't like the Jews much.
They didn't like non-whites.
But other than expressing their racism, they didn't say, so, violent revolution and kill all the Jews.
So from the river to the sea, kill all the Jews.
So let's have a violent Intifada, violent revolution.
Like in the streets of Toronto, in front of the Israeli consulate last week, one of their chants was Intifa Revolution.
I forget the, but they were talking about revolution.
They were talking about violence.
They were talking about riots.
They're talking about martyrs.
So they're not just saying, we hate Jews.
We hate Jews.
We hate Jews.
They're saying, we hate Jews, obviously.
That's a given.
That's the starting point.
So now what?
So now what?
From the river to the sea.
Now what?
Violent Intifada revolution.
So they were moving to action.
The global condemnation of a couple hundred white guys in khaki pants saying, we hate the Jews, we hate the Jews.
Full stop.
They didn't say, so now we're going to go kill him, compared to 100,000 in London, England last Saturday, thousands in Toronto and Montreal who went the next step.
And the New York Times is running defense for Hamas, blood libeling the Israeli defense forces.
They just rehired their key Gaza reporter who's publicly praised Hitler, but they said he's being very objective in his reporting this time.
So where are all the people who condemned Charlottesville?
And by the way, I condemn Charlottesville too.
I'm a Jew.
I don't like when people say we hate Jews.
But where is everybody?
The last example, here in Toronto, there's a restaurant with a Jewish lineage called Cafe Landwere.
It's just a name.
Started in Berlin in 1919.
The family had to flee the Nazis.
Now there's this chain of restaurants.
It's a pretty good restaurant.
It's got nothing to do with Israel or Hamas or Gaza.
It's just a restaurant, but it was known as a Jewish place.
And so you had Palestinian pro-Hamas supporters outside.
So this is a Zionist place.
Imagine if you had TT Torque bearing white Nazis outside Cafe Landwer or outside a mosque or a Muslim shimorma place.
You would have the whole country in DEF CON one or whatever.
Where's everybody?
Where's everybody, Barbara?
Ceasefire Negotiations00:06:50
Well, that's a good question.
Where's our emergency act?
I mean, you know, honking trucks got us an emergency act.
And this is people that are screaming a slogan.
You know, free Palestine means kill all the Jews.
Really?
We know that.
Everybody knows that.
But they pretend that it's just an, you know, oh, that means they want to negotiate for a two-state solution.
Not.
That's at least at least we can dispense with the depraved hypocrisy that really, if only they had their own state, or if only they had the right, you know, they'd gotten the right offer of a decent state of their own, that this wouldn't have arisen.
At least we know the truth.
It's been laid bare, but nobody's reacting as if the truth has been laid bare.
They're reacting as though, well, we need to have a ceasefire.
We need to both sides, both sides.
We don't want to have more violence.
We don't want to have disproportionate response, which they, by the way, started saying two minutes after the pogrom was revealed.
They started saying, we're feeling grief over the disproportionate response that we know is coming.
Like nothing had even started yet.
There had been no response.
And already they were changing the narrative to poor us.
We're going to be leaving.
Yeah.
You know, the late Norm McDonald's, the Canadian comedian who was on Saturday Night Live and did some movies, he had a tweet, I think, seven years ago, going from memory.
He said, what if Al-Qaeda or ISIS detonated a bomb and killed 50 million Americans?
Boy, the backlash against innocent Muslims, I'm really worried about that.
But that's the joke.
I mean, sometimes you have to laugh.
The Babylon Bee had a meme, you know, Admiral Emperor Hirohito calls for a ceasefire right after hitting Pearl Harbor.
Like no one said to America after the ashes of 9-11, hey, ceasefire, guys.
Don't respond disproportionately.
No one said that to Russia after the Besslandslaughter.
I mean, I don't know any other country in the world that is told, hey, have a ceasefire, don't be disproportionate now.
I mean, I am not opposed to the fact that the Allies in the Second World War burnt Tokyo, nuked Hiroshima Nagasaki, burnt Dresden because those were strategic decisions at the time that were decided by the commanders of the responding militaries that this will bring war to a close more quickly.
And I don't know if the sneaker, the sneak attackers of Japan are in a position to say don't hit civilian centers.
And I don't know if Nazi Germany was in a position to say don't firebomb Dresden.
Yeah, well, I mean, I mean, you mentioned Japan.
I did mention in a previous column, I said I think the attitude has to be: look, we're dealing with, it's very different, obviously, a different culture and a different war and a different time, but the Japanese had the same fanaticism and fight to the death and beyond.
They were not going to surrender.
They had that kind of fanaticism.
Well, the kamikaze was okay.
So it was more honorable to die fighting for your country than to surrender to because they were racist and they were, you know, they hate for, I don't even know why they hated the Americans, but anyways, they did.
Israel should be looking at Hamas through those eyes, that they're dealing with people that you cannot reason with them.
You cannot say, look, we don't want to have to destroy, you know, half your infrastructure and all of that.
But we're going to if you don't, you know, they'll never, they'll fight to the last fighter and they'll fight to the last civilian, and the civilians will be part of their.
So Israel doesn't need to have a nuclear weapon to destroy Hamas, but they they a lot of blood will be spilled doing it.
And that's tragic.
That is tragic that that's the only way to get rid of this toxic, horrible, ISIS-like look-alike Hamas.
And it's the only way to tell other players in the region that Israel has, this is a new era.
There's no more ceasefires, no more, although I hear that they're thinking very carefully about delaying the invasion, which, you know, they got to have all their ducks in a row.
But I guess we're on the same page with this.
This is an enemy that is, there is no placating.
There's no offer you could make.
There's no reasonable offer you could make.
This is hatred, pure and simple.
So there has to be a response that allows Israel to say, we have to consider our own security.
We have to consider our own survival.
International law allows.
Or what, you know, what would be a proportionate response to, we'll rape the same number of women, we'll kill the same number of Gaza babies.
Like, you can't, there's nothing is, nothing in international law says that the numbers or the type of response has to be the same.
You know, proportionate means that you have to do only so much as you need to do to cover your objectives.
And the objective in this case is to finish off Hamas.
There's nothing in the laws of war that call for proportionality.
What started after Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor was several thousand dead and several ships sunk.
What that unleashed was millions dead.
There was no proportionality there.
In the end, you know, the death count across Europe was in the tens of millions.
There was no proportionality.
I don't even think that's part of the laws of war.
You don't deliberately target civilians, but neither do you defend from civilian areas.
Look, I'm not an expert in the laws of war, but we don't even have to be so grandiose.
Let me point out something that's been irritating me for a week.
Trudeau's Hasty Response00:08:00
Justin Trudeau hastily said that an explosion at a hospital that was originally reported to have 500 casualties in destroying that hospital.
He was asked what he had to say about the fact that Israel did it, and he condemned it.
He didn't use the word Israel in his answer, but the word Israel was in the question, so it was obvious.
A week later, or four days later, after everyone else in the world realized that there was no Israeli attack on the place, thank God that hospital was not destroyed.
There were not 500 casualties.
There was a fire in the parking lot that was likely caused by a Palestinian rocket.
So Trudeau, his cabinet minister on a Saturday night, says, oh, yeah, it wasn't Israel.
But Trudeau's original tweet called for accountability.
There must be accountability, he said.
Okay.
So now we know who did it.
Where's the accountability?
Exactly.
Every single day, there have been rockets shot from Gaza into Israel.
Incredibly, after 17 days, they're still able to muster hundreds of rockets being shot a day.
That's astonishing and troubling to me.
There's no comment or condemnation of that by Trudeau or by anyone.
There's no protests against that.
And that's what makes me so sad.
I'm not, I mean, I'm sad for Israel because it's a democracy and I have an ethnic solidarity with them because I'm a Jew, but I'm a Canadian first.
I'm fourth generation Canadian.
This is my home.
I have no intention of going anywhere else.
But for the first time in my life, I wondered just how safe it is here for me or for the next generation, because there are thousands of people on the streets braying for the death of Jews, not of Israelis somewhere overseas, but of Jews and targeting Jews here and threatening Jews at Jewish schools here.
And there was someone in Kingston who was charged with attempting to ram his car into a pro-Israel rally.
And what strikes me is the stunning silence from authorities.
Olivia Chow, to her credit, after some missteps, made a pretty good pro-Israel statement.
The mayor of Edmonton did not.
He lit up the bridge in that town in the Hamas colors.
Mayor of Mississauga is deeply in bed with Islamists.
I think that so many leaders, so many premiers, so many MPs have absolutely gone silent on this.
And that's terrifying to me.
And I wonder how scared I should be.
And I don't know the answer, and I don't know if there's any good answer.
Yeah, I try not to be paranoid, but I think we should be concerned.
You know, the Jews in France and England and in Holland, they have been scared for good reason.
There have been attacks, and there have been killings, and there have been really some gruesome incidents.
It's been going on for more than 25 years.
And I don't know what's wrong with people here that they would sit and look at what's going on in Europe and say to themselves, oh, that's their problem.
That's their problem.
That's not going to be our problem.
I don't get it.
And I think it will be our problem.
Maybe not, God forbid, to the extent that it has been in Europe and some of the tragedies In France, that you alluded to.
So I think we're only seeing the start of something very dark here in Canada and in the United States, but more in Canada because the United States is a very big country.
And I think the numbers of people that they have to worry about, yeah, there's students and there's, but the actual activists, they're confined, I think, mostly to the universities.
They can easily handle, I think, any security problems, even though there could be incidents.
But Canada, I think there's an awful lot of people on the left who are extremely gullible and who have been happy to.
And we have a government that is extremely reluctant to recognize that there is in this country, there are people in government, in institutions, in unions that are promoting a very pernicious line of pattern.
So I am certainly worried about what could be coming down the pike.
And I don't like to be a false alarmist, but I don't like what I'm seeing in the government, the equivocation amongst the cabinet.
There should not be equivocation on this.
This is a terrorist organization.
And I don't like the fact that other heads of state have been very reassuring to Israel.
They've gone to visit Israel.
They've expressed solidarity.
Our prime minister has said as little as he can.
He did make one statement, you know, expressing sympathy with Israel.
But apart from that, he's kept a very low profile.
Well, I mean, I love Canada and I should have faith in my fellow Canadians.
And I know that the majority of Canadians do not support this.
I think that most Canadians are not street activists.
Most normal Canadians don't go out and protest.
I find it astonishing some of these protests, people have a Taliban flag just kicking around.
People have a, I mean, they just have it ready for the great moment.
And I find that terrifying.
I've got to think that not only old stock Canadians are shocked by what they're seeing, but many other newcomers here, not just other races and religions, but I've got to imagine many Muslims don't like what they see, but maybe they're afraid to speak up.
And if Justin Trudeau won't condemn it, well, why would they?
And I can imagine, I think leadership from the top matters.
And I've seen in the United Kingdom, they have a terrible problem on their streets.
But every day I see another senior cabinet minister and the prime minister there himself, you know, the immigration ministers say they'll deport non-citizen racists.
I see their equalities minister denounce this.
So many different cabinet ministers, including minorities like Rishi Sunak, Suella Braberman, Kemi Badnock.
Those are all either new immigrants or from immigrant families.
And they are hard line against the Islamic extremism in the streets.
And we have not seen the same thing in our country.
And I find it depressing.
But I don't want to be too depressed.
You know, the Jews have a saying, Lechaim, which means to life.
And I know that the Catholics also say where there's life, there's hope.
And so no matter how dark it is, and these really are forces of darkness on the other side that prefer martyrdom to life, I think we have to keep our hope and we have to remember that Canada is a great place and that most of our neighbors actually are appalled by this.
And to that, to speak, sorry to interrupt you, but I just wanted to add, to speak to that very idea, I don't want to give a negative impression that nobody seems, that I believe that nobody seems to care.
I want to mention the fact that in the last couple of weeks, I have heard from so many of my Christian readers, and I mean Christians that are active Christians, and their messages have been so touching and so moving to me.
And they have said, we share your pain.
Please don't think that nobody's on your side, although it looks like that.
Many Touching Messages00:07:12
We love Israel.
We know Israel is, you know, this is not Israel's fault.
And we blah, blah, blah.
But I've had lovely, lovely, warm messages of support and fellowship and encouragement.
And as I write back to them, I say, you probably don't even realize what this means to me because right now, as a Jew, it's very easy to feel very lonely and very scared and to say to ourselves, do we really only have each other?
So every message that comes from somebody who's not Jewish, but who recognizes that there's no one side and on the one hand, there's no on the one hand, on the other hand here.
This was, as you say, as bad as Hitler, as bad as anything.
And anybody who thinks that there's some kind of a justification for what happened in Israel for political reasons has lost their moral compass 100% and has been sucked into a cult that is extremely dark.
And it is very harmful to our civilization, what's left of it.
And, you know, you see people talking about the suicide of the West.
If you Google Suicide of the West, you'll see like you get about 50, over 50 million hits because this is the title of books and of articles and of talks, of podcasts.
And this, what happened, the reaction to this tragedy, the attempt to equivocate on it and say, on the one hand, but on the other, I think is an indicator of just how far down the slope we are from where we were before in terms of our moral compass, in terms of what we knew that decent people do and that decent people don't do.
And the bright line between protest and atrocities.
Well, listen, congratulations to you on your columns.
And the National Post, I have to say, has been excellent.
Oh, they've been amazing.
They've been amazing.
I was pretty down.
I was pretty down a week ago.
I was quite depressed.
And my thoughts were mainly for here at home because it was not the perfectly safe country I grew up in.
I think I was born in a very lucky time and grew up in a very lucky place.
And we're in difficult times again.
I think we lived in an anomaly of history.
And we're reverting to history's more natural state.
Hopefully we don't go full Thomas Hobbes, the Leviathan, where he talks about life being nasty, brutish, and short.
A war of all against all.
Feels that way.
Feels that way.
I agree with you that you grew up in a good time.
My life started during a very dark time.
It was during the Holocaust.
But my youth, I believed that anti-Semitism was over, that it wasn't really going to be never again.
And most of my life has been lived in terms of that issue has been the world is a better place for Jews and all of that.
Now I see that I will not in my lifetime ever see Israel proud and strong or morally strong again because the fallout from this psychologically for Israelis is going to pursue them for many, many years to come.
So that bubble has burst.
It's burst in terms of Israel and it's burst in terms of how I feel about being a Westerner in general and a Canadian in particular.
I share your sense of pessimism.
And I know it's a sin to despair and I try to find the bright side.
Right now, it's very hard to find a bright spot, a bright side to anything that's going on.
And I can think of many potential dark sides.
So that's not a very happy note to leave you on, is it?
Well, we'll do our best.
I mean, we keep on fighting.
We have to do it.
We wake up every day and we fight.
And that's our fighting spirit over here.
And one of the things we're doing is we have a reporter over in Israel, Avi Yamini, who's been there all week.
We've set up a special website for him, thetruthaboutthewar.com.
What can we do?
Well, we can have a reporter to show what's really going on rather than relying on Hamas spin that's being cycled through the Western media.
So that's one of the things we'll do.
And if we have other big ideas, we'll share them with you.
Barbara, great to see you keep up the fight.
My friend, keep your spirits high, and we'll do our best as well.
Thanks.
Thanks, Gezer.
Misery loves company.
Well, I have been miserable because I think my utopian delusion, I mean, let me just throw one more thing at you, Barbara.
I know we just said goodbye, but a month ago, we led a mission to Israel and then to Dubai.
We went for a week to Israel with 40 enthusiasts, and we took six journalists.
And then we flew from Tel Aviv over Saudi Arabia, landed in Dubai, and spent three days in the United Arab Emirates.
We went to a Holocaust Museum in Dubai.
We went to a synagogue in Abu Dhabi.
We stayed at a Hilton hotel in Dubai with a kosher kitchen.
We met a Chabad rabbi.
And I honestly, truly in my heart felt that we were in a post-historic moment where peace was coming almost the end times.
The lion lying down with the lamb, beating swords into plowshares.
Imagine that, walking through a Muslim country and seeing a mosque.
And instead of being afraid, being interested and curious and excited by it and feeling totally safe and feeling like we were in a new era and going home, feeling a sense of healing.
And then from that...
That is, or that's...
You just, in the last minute, you just gave the actual reason why Hamas felt they had to do this.
That's exactly what they're afraid of.
That's exactly what they can't stand.
The thought of the other Arab nations making peace with Israel and normalizing relations.
That was actually their motive in putting this horrible thing together.
But I agree with you.
A couple of weeks ago, we were on top of the world.
We were, I mean, it was like a miracle, as you say.
And you lived it.
You lived it.
You went over there and you saw the potential.
You saw how life could be.
And it was beautiful.
It was beautiful.
Well.
Well, it's not over.
I should tell you that while there have been pro-Hamas rallies in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Edmund Cowlery, etc., there have been no pro-Hamas rallies in Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
And that's something to think about.
Barbara Kay, we'll let you go.
Thank you so much, my friend.
Thanks, Ezra.
All right.
Well, a heavy show today, and forgive me my kvetching, but I wanted to tell you how I felt.
And I was inspired by Barbara Kaye's column in the National Post, which I recommend to you.