Moral Vision, Empirical Rigour

J. L. Granatstein’s review of The Great White North: Inside Far-Right Activism in Canada features some rather disturbing assumptions about what constitutes extremism in this country. What begins as a clear-sighted, informative overview of the dangerous far-right factions currently active in Canada pivots midway into an alarmist diagnosis of Canadian social unrest in the wake of the events of October 7, 2023, and the war on Gaza. The logic of the review crumbles when the author’s reactionary takes on the “far left” take over.

That Granatstein paints the student encampments and other anti-Zionist mobilizations as an “explosion” of antisemitism and, therefore, as extremist, and that he mentions these in the same breath as a small number of violent attacks on Jewish institutions, is beyond misleading. Canadians’ constitutionally protected right to protest the carnage visited upon Gaza is part of an unprecedented and long-overdue wave of global solidarity with the oppressed in Palestine. By conflating this with the hate-fuelled mechanisms of the far right, Granatstein plays into a moral panic that does an injustice to the important contents of the book he is reviewing.

The language with which we discuss the conflict in Gaza and the Middle East matters. To see such a distinguished historian as J. L. Granatstein use such careless words about it dismays me. Granatstein writes of the “Israeli retaliation against Hamas’s Gaza strongholds” after what he rightly terms the “brutal Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.” He writes similarly of the outrage “Canadian Muslims” felt at “the scale of the Israeli response in Gaza.” These are evasive characterizations of a campaign that has comprehensively destroyed many of Gaza’s cities and killed tens of thousands of civilians. On November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, for the war crimes of “starvation as a method of warfare” and of “intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.” It is only if we pass over these facts that it becomes plausible to suggest that protests in Canada against Israel’s way of war have primarily been expressions of leftist antisemitism.