Last Sunday, hundreds of Jews in Toronto drove to a secret location and stood in line as bomb-sniffing dogs, leashed to guards from a private Jewish security agency, trotted past their purses and backpacks. Attendees paid upwards of $229 to spend the first truly beautiful day of spring inside a vast suburban event space, listening to academics and journalists discuss the current crisis facing Jews, and what might actually quell it. After three years of failed campaigns to curb antisemitism, a new global strategy was defined in Toronto at the first World Symposium Against Antizionism.
Anyway that’s how I would cover it, had I been there as a reporter and not as a panelist. But there are many other possible angles:
Ben Shapiro was the headliner. Shapiro is a red-hot, bold-faced name in the press right now, the focus of an excoriating feature in New York magazine, which itself became the subject of a plagiarism scandal. His name in any headline guarantees big emotions and big interest. And there he was, right in Toronto’s backyard, available for anyone to cover.
Influencer and academic Gad Saad was there, too. His buzzy book, Suicidal Empathy, is currently the number-one nonfiction bestseller in Canada, and its core premise was recently embraced by Elon Musk. Saad also recently announced on Joe Rogan’s podcast that he is leaving Concordia University in Montreal for a new gig (in Mississippi, of all places). That yields three clickable names and a strong Canadian angle for one possible story, up for grabs to anyone who wants it.
A more critical take, perhaps suited for a progressive news outlet, might focus on the decidedly conservative bent of the whole affair. Are Canada’s Jews moving toward the MAGA right? Are supposedly anti-racist journalists (including yours truly) hypocrites for sharing a stage with right-wing populist pundits? Were the Arab and Muslim speakers at the event being co-opted by Zionists? Should politicians even allow figures like Ben Shapiro to set foot in Canada? Anyone wanting to take a shot at this event had plenty to work with.
There were so many choices. But so far, with the exception of the National Post, Canadian legacy media has made a different choice: to ignore the event entirely.
Instead, the CBC and The Globe and Mail found space for wire stories about Canadian protesters on a Gaza flotilla who were detained by Israel.
The Toronto Star and CTV News ran wire stories about ultranationalist Jews in Jerusalem chanting racist slogans.
Yet none of these outlets (all of whom were invited) sent a single reporter to an event that took place just a short drive from their respective newsrooms, an event that deeply affects people living here, in the country these organizations ostensibly cover.
Why? It’s not because the event wasn’t newsworthy or because their audiences don’t care. And no, it’s not because these organizations hate Jews. It’s because what took place at that conference last weekend fundamentally contradicts the narrative that Canadian media has been telling, day in and day out, since October 7, 2023.
In this narrative, antizionism is a legitimate political movement and antisemitism is an unfortunate but unrelated issue. Canadian Jews are portrayed as passive victims who eternally “feel unsafe.” But it’s always hard to say who or what is making them feel that way, and even if we do know some of the culprits’ names, it would apparently be improper to publish them.
For Canadian Jews to come together and actively identify antizionism as the specific force of hatred and violence that afflicts them is an occurence that shatters the media’s narrative, one they have deeply invested in.
Naya Lekht is a co-founder of Stop Antizionism, one of the two groups that organized Sunday’s event. Here’s how she explains the conspicuous absence of the Canadian media:
“A tree fell in a forest and no one was there to hear it.
This was a landmark event, not because we came to relitigate Israel facts or debate Zionist history, but because we came to name something. To examine antizionism as a distinct ideological phenomenon: the defining scourge targeting Jews in the West for the past two decades.
This symposium did not offer them the story they know how to tell, nor the one they wanted to tell. There was no Jew on the defensive, fending off antizionist libels. The lens was not on the Jews. It was on the bully. And that, apparently, stumped them entirely.
The silence is its own statement.”
