KINSELLA: Mark Carney acknowledges antisemitism in Canada but fails to meet the moment
· Toronto Sun
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TEL AVIV, ISRAEL – Where does hate come from?
Lots of things – e nvy, resentment, ideology, economic distress, ignorance, indifference.
I’ve been writing about hate for 40 years, and I can tell you that indifference ranks pretty high up on the list, lately.
Mark Carney is a practitioner of indifference. He visited a Toronto synagogue last week –ostensibly to deliver a prime ministerial denunciation of the variant of hate that is antisemitism– and he couldn’t once articulate the causes of the problem, or its remedies.
He offered up some platitudes and quoted philosophers, instead. He acknowledged antisemitism in Canada, yes, but he just seemed a bit … indifferent to it all, and what to do about it. The orgy of antisemitism that has beset the country he leads doesn’t really affect him or his social circle. But he’s been hearing about it from G7 leaders over canapés during his international travels, and it’s all a bit embarrassing.
So, he made a speech. Box, checked.
Here in Israel, where I was for the Tel Aviv International Documentary Festival– promoting a film I helped put together about antisemitism’s causes and remedies– lots of people mentioned Carney’s speech to us Canadians. They, too, were unimpressed by the Prime Minister’s failure to meet the moment.
Antisemitism exploded globally after Oct. 7, 2023
To them, however, indifference wasn’t the biggest problem. To them, the global explosion in antisemitism we’ve all witnessed since Oct. 7, 2023 – when apathy about antisemitism culminated in the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust – has one cause above all: social media.
Over and over, I heard that from Israelis.
Antisemitism has always been with us, they said. But it is now amplified by algorithms and hashtags and AI and bot farms and the total indifference of Messrs. Musk and Zuckerberg. And Carney.
The data bears that out. The Antisemitism Research Centre of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) issued a report about the problem while I was in Israel. CAM found that antisemitism has become so pervasive online, now, one no longer needs to search it out. Antisemitism will simply find you.
CAM studied Instagram, which is overwhelmingly favoured by young people, among whom antisemitism has gone viral, as they say. Even with Instagram posts about a subject as benign as “wellness” – fitness, diet, clean living – antisemitism pops up like some noxious weed.
Wrote the CAM people: “Across three days of 45-minute sessions (on Instagram), accounts were served content that escalated, without any active user intent, from clean eating advice and fitness motivation to conspiracy theories and explicit antisemitic content, including translated Nazi propaganda.”
Wellness videos descended into coded or explicit antisemitism a third of the time. Fitness videos, a quarter of the time. It is an extraordinary discovery: Jew hatred is now popping up on the screens of fitness buffs before they “have built any meaningful interaction history.”
People were being “independently routed” to antisemitic content on Instagram, in other words, without even asking for it.
Think about the implications of that. From mainstream content, to anti-establishment framing, to conspiratorial content, to coded antiseptic narratives, to explicit antisemitism, all within a matter of minutes. Served up to you when you’ve only gone looking for tips about calories and workout routines.
In the newest Harper’s magazine, which also came out when I was in Israel, there is a fascinating essay about all of this by Tony Price , a Toronto music producer who is a bit of an expert about how things show up on the little computer found in your pocket or purse.
Writes Price about the music industry (but about more than that): “We’ve crossed into a new situation wherein an entire layer of (content) now simulates the conditions under which virality appears to occur naturally … The goal is the systematic shaping of perceived reality.”
The people trying to sell you things – a weight-loss pill, the new Shawn Mendes album, Globalizing the Intifada – use burner fake-fan ecosystems, coordinated content blasts, comment-section engineering, micro-influencer seeding and trend-baiting, writes Price. There are even firms you can pay to do all of this for you, of course, and they’re quite proud of what they do. It’s creating “a groundswell,” they boast.
The problem is that it is all a lie.
“Reality is no longer measured after the fact,” writes Price. “It is staged and then fed back into perception loops until it feels real.”
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Disinformation, manipulation and fakes, showing up like an uninvited guest who won’t ever leave.
The new antisemitism, amped up by social media, is the uninvited guest.
As Tony Price writes: “(It’s) the quiet reconstruction of the conditions under which discovery appears to occur. Not by introducing music to listeners – but by staging the conditions in which it feels as though it arrived on its own.”
Online Jew hatred is like that now, too. It is showing up everywhere, unbidden and unopposed.
Perhaps that’s why Mark Carney doesn’t seem to care about it, either.
– Kinsella’s new book is The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda