As fascist-led race riots roiled the United Kingdom earlier this week, mainstream media’s years-long normalization of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment has been a crucial factor contributing to the hate-fueled chaos.
Built on years of normalized racist rhetoric about immigrants, Muslims and foreigners, the British media’s blatant racism—like much of the Western media class—became even more bellicose as its commentariat reflexively denounced all anti-war, anti-genocide demonstrations for Palestine as being either “hate-filled” and “anti-semitic”. Blanket attacks on the protesters, a disproportionate number of whom are racialized and thus already acceptable targets of racist rhetoric, have undermined public trust in multiculturalism as a positive social value.
The orgy of racist violence in the U.K. should be a warning to Canada’s own media and commentariat, who have also spent a substantial part of the past year ceaselessly denouncing the Palestine solidarity movement. The race riots should be a warning to the likes of Marcus Gee, Rosie Di Manno and Andrew Coyne, who position themselves as erudite members of the commentariat, that by slandering what is perceived as a predominantly racialized movement, they are playing with the same dark forces that unleashed several days of fascist pogroms across the U.K.
Rosie Di Manno: More police violence
Toronto Star sports columnist Rosie Di Manno—whose purview as a sports columnist apparently includes defending Israel and Zionism at all costs—has penned numerous articles attacking protesters for protesting genocide. Apparently, no crime Israel commits is ever sufficient justification for any protest, if they are even acknowledged as crimes. Two articles bear particular importance for Israel’s most fervent defender in the pages of Toronto’s “progressive” daily newspaper.
The first is a November 9, 2023 column titled “The city is a tinderbox and all it will take to ignite is a single match”, a true masterclass in fomenting fear just through headline writing. Mincing no words, Rosie accuses the marches of spreading “the coarse symbology of antisemitism [that] has marched hand in hand with the protests”. She does not cite any examples to prove the association between raising a Palestinian flag and hating all Jewish people (an accusation made even harder by the presence of Jewish allies), but you, the reader, should trust that any watermelons, red triangles and Free Palestine graffiti tags are animated by antisemitism and not opposition to genocide, the elephant in the room that Di Manno has ignored for months.
Going into the late fall and winter, the images of the massive protests, featuring large numbers of racialized people, were unavoidable even in the mainstream press. So when a prominent columnist of Toronto’s progressive daily newspaper cynically mischaracterizes these protests into hate marches and does so on a national platform, she disseminates racial hatred coated as concern for Canada’s Jewish community—except for anti-Zionist Jews also attending the marches, leading direct actions and being physically attacked by Zionist Jews for their allyship. Di Manno’s care and concern for Jews, like most gentile Zionists, stops once they oppose Israel.
The second article, titled “This has gone on too long and too unchecked,” recounted the now-infamous Land Day march on April 3, 2024, where the police kettled, attacked and ran horses through the marching crowd, a gross violation of the Charter rights to freedom of speech, thought and public assembly. But not so, according to Di Manno.
The police violence that day revealed something darker and more sinister—about the protesters, not the police service. She wrote that the violence was largely due to “the flaccid police response” over the months of protests, which is not the way anyone who actually attended a protest would describe the police response. And a mere “flaccid police response” has still cost the taxpayer $4.6 million on disproportionately large deployments related to the protests, according to her own column. Manufacturing consent for a violent crackdown on even protest marches, Di Manno claims that the cops, who have repeatedly brutalized protesters in the streets for months before Land Day, have been “far too tepid…towards the rabble-rousers.” Put less eloquently, Di Manno is essentially calling for further police violence against the protesters.
Who is on Di Manno’s list of rabble-rousers? In a time of rising fascism, best epitomized by the fascist pogroms of the U.K. race riots, she presents her list of troublemakers, apparently composed of “the usual suspect firebrands—Marxists, anarchists and the like…along with pro-Palestinian incendiaries, all mixing in with more well-intentioned protesters.” What are the Marxists, anarchists and pro-Palestinian incendiaries that “more well-intentioned protesters” are not also demanding? Di Manno doesn’t make this clear as her column extensively and exclusively quotes the Toronto police’s propaganda department, and not a single protester, Marxist rabble-rouser or well-intentioned citoyen. What is clear though is that Di Manno has been writing about these protests from the comfort of her cottage, otherwise there would be some quotes from the latter type of protester.
Marcus Gee: The radical minority
Globe and Mail staff columnist Marcus Gee, typically the urban affairs columnist for Canada’s imitation of the New York Times, has similarly devoted several columns to full-throated defences of Israel abroad and Zionism at home, complete with racist jabs at the Palestine protest movement. In an October 29, 2023 column titled “Denounce and refute, don’t muzzle”, Gee briefly invokes the liberal principle of protecting your right to free speech even if he disagrees with it, before launching into a criticism wholly focused on the protest movement as a pack of ne’er-do-wells, calling them a “radical minority” repeating “awful untruths and terrible slurs [that] are being thrown around at rallies and online”.
The framing of the protesters as a “radical minority”—complete with the popular perception that the rallies are attended in large part by racialized people like Muslims, Arabs, racialized, non-Christians—legitimates hatred against all the groups present at the marches and protest actions, and makes it seem like the majority of Canadians are A-OK with living through live-streamed genocide. It goads bigots and racists into more aggressively disrupting not only rallies, but also community events involving children with a sense of impunity that genocide apologists should never have. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
In a November 3, 2023 column titled “The wave of anger against Israel goes far beyond ordinary scrutiny”, Gee again slanders the protest movement as embodying a “wave of hate and anger…that is chilling”. What is not chilling, it would seem, is genocide. Gee makes sure to lecture a world that “persists in viewing their [Jewish] homeland as an illegitimate state established on stolen land”, an unintentional admission that the Zionist project is unpopular with the majority of the world, who have experienced the evils of colonialism not so long ago. Gee has nothing to offer beyond that begrudging sentiment, preferring to write instead about the “genocide libel against Israel” ten months into a live-streamed mass slaughter.
Andrew Coyne: The clash of civilizations
Last but not least, there’s Andrew Coyne, who occupies a place of honour in Canada’s commentariat akin to the New York Times’ very own insufferable Thomas Friedman. Like his similarly white and ostensibly liberal compatriots, protesting genocide is presented as a clash of civilizations taking place on the streets of western capitals and major cities triggered by the events of October 7th. Rather than acknowledge that there is limitless legitimate criticism of Israel, Coyne accuses the protesters of hating the West, as if they are guests in the white man’s walled garden—a garden that Coyne should know “owes its very existence to the soil and subsoil of the underdeveloped world”, in the words of Frantz Fanon.
In his Oct. 12 column titled “The Israel-Hamas war is a test of our moral mettle. Will Canada pass?”, he conjectures that the protests are animated by “a kind of self-loathing.” Summing up the analytical capabilities of Western chauvinism today, he wrote, “They hate Israel because they hate the West: because Israel is a part of the West, and they have absorbed the idea that the West is the root of all evil.” Many of the evils that exist in the world today, such as fascism, capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism, are indeed Western developments that harmed much of the rest of the world. This historic fact seems to elude Coyne.
Casting a wide net with the amorphous use of “they”, he openly implies that there is a segment of the population in Canada that reflexively hates Canada too because, like Israel, it is “a part of the West”. These foreign and native-born immigrant populations should apparently be grateful that they were allowed to enter the pinnacle of civilization, humanism and progress that the West supposedly represents, so long as they never fundamentally criticize how the West behaves in their home countries or protest it over here. That same week, just five days into the genocide, Israel had already dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza. Not that that grotesque fact warranted any acknowledgement in Coyne’s column, otherwise the protesters may appear justified.
Playing with fire
By manufacturing this unreality where people marching against genocide are unequivocally “hateful” and dangerous, the Canadian commentariat buttresses hostile attitudes towards immigrants and racialized populations already spread through misinformation on social media. These columnists have contributed to an increasingly poisoned social and political atmosphere that is supposedly the fault of the predominantly racialized crowd protesting the most widely documented and denied genocide in history. While more sophisticated than the hamfisted front-page producers of the British tabloids, the end result is the same: fanning the flames of social division that threaten to erupt into fascist pogroms.
Incapable of honestly relaying to their readers what the protest movement is about and the straightforward demands it has, these columnists obfuscate reality and willfully endanger the social cohesion of the country in the service of a country on trial for committing the crimes of apartheid and genocide. Despite being a foundational Canadian myth, any pretense of a commitment to multiculturalism disappears the moment it challenges Canada’s relationship with imperialism and settler colonialism. After months of sustained racist attacks from Canada’s commentariat, could they be egging on the same race riots that their British counterparts fueled?
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