That phrase riffs on a medieval prayer litany from when Viking invaders marauded England. I pose a question pertinent to our troubled times: how did we get to a point where total strangers feel justified screaming at other total strangers because of their cultural or religious identity tied to a conflict thousands of kilometres away? Concrete example: over the past few years, radicalized individuals — fed cherrypicked, slanted, and often downright false information on social media — have become inflamed about the conflict in Gaza. They often feel justified screaming at and sometimes attacking adults — occasionally with children present — based on the distorted information they absorb. Recently, a non-Jewish academic at the University of Sydney approached two Jewish women celebrating Sukkot, screamed at them, and pointed fingers at children in Gaza. .STIRLING: ‘Climate Barbie’ and the cost of virtue-signalling .Bore I continue, we can cease playing the game where “anti-Zionist” is anything other than old-fashioned Jew-hatred in shifting guise: these women faced verbal assault because they were Jewish at a Jewish event. While Israel and Hamas have signed an agreement to end this conflict, we must win another battle here in the West. People rightly focus on deradicalizing Gazan society, but we must deradicalize a segment of our own population. I conducted an experiment and joined discussions on TikTok run by so-called Palestinian activists. I learned inside this nauseating cesspool of name-calling and ignorance that Western activists represent the worst element. They approach the issue with strident self-righteousness and a complete lack of epistemic humility; complexity and nuance die there. .I confess to cringing whenever I heard an English accent, because those voices often displayed the most smug lack of self-awareness. As a civil person and Anglophile, I found that troubling. Most alarmingly, Western activists repeatedly described Israelis as “nonhuman.” I heard every anti-Semitic trope imaginable: they are bloodthirsty, they are coming for children, they are disgusting, and so on. The public assassination of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk illustrated how dehumanizing rhetoric and self-righteousness can radicalize the wrong person to commit the unthinkable. On TikTok, so many groups pop up that moderators can hardly close even the worst ones. Tragically, many activists fail to see how radical Islamist elements have duped them into acting as those elements desire. In an asymmetrical conflict, Hamas knows it could never win the IDF in conventional warfare (witness them hiding in holes while much of Gaza starves), so they wage a PR war in our countries, exploiting a large minority of activist and humanitarian types predisposed to their propaganda who swallow it hook, line, and sinker. I thought of this strategy when I repeatedly heard “the whole world hates you” in livestreamed groups. Besides assuming anyone who questioned them must be Israeli or Mossad, this slogan reflects a PR tactic they believe worked. A large segment of the political, media, and academic elites have turned on Israel, but the jury is out on the general populace. That gives me hope. Still, these groups target average Westerners to make them angry at Israel and become angry voters. .OLDCORN: Ottawa shouldn’t ask the Supreme Court to rewrite the notwithstanding clause.We should not treat this merely as a freedom of expression issue and move on. Even committed civil libertarians must see how these useful idiots turn warped worldviews into actions that intimidate and assault people on our streets simply because they belong to one group. Society is not a free-for-all where anyone can scream their thoughts at others anywhere. We have liberty, but it is ordered liberty. Canada and any sane Western country must place clear guardrails around discourse, especially online. If we recognize Gaza needs deradicalization because radical discourse creates a clear and present danger, we must start recognizing the same here: we need to deradicalize our own before things get worse.Joseph Quesnel is a policy commentator based in Nova Scotia.
