Ari Isenberg

Un Montréalais in the USA

[Hussain Abdul-Hussain @hahussain]

This is not an argument you want to have, Jeremy. Geographic names, like Palestine of Herodotus, never became a sovereign state. The only time Palestine resembled a state was a binational Arab-Jewish one created by Britain in 1920 and died with partition into Israel 1948 and Arab countries annexing the remaining parts.
Many geographical names in the region never becom states: Bekaa, Hijaz, Jazeera, Kenana, Hasa, Sawad, Najd.
Look them up. Read some books.

[Sarah Ettedgui @SarahEttedgui]

What happened today in Côte-des-Neiges demands that we pause before rushing this horror into the political box that feels most convenient.

Early reports describe a suspect who left behind writings steeped in misogynistic incel resentment, grotesque dehumanization of women, hostility to pornography, anti-capitalist fury, and calls for armed revolutionary violence. This is not a tidy ideology, but a toxic collage: incel-style misogyny often branded “far-right,” revolutionary anti-capitalism tagged “far-left,” and anti-pornography rhetoric that can spring from religious conservatism, certain strains of feminism, personal grievance, or all of the above.

Violent extremism rarely stays intellectually consistent. It scavenges whatever feeds the rage.

Speculation has naturally turned to the proximity of the attack to Aylo, formerly MindGeek, the Montréal-based parent of Pornhub, whose offices sit along that stretch of Décarie. Given the manifesto’s reported themes, the question is understandable. But it remains speculation until investigators establish motive. What is already public is disturbing enough.

A man apparently consumed by hatred travelled to Montréal and opened fire. A police officer was killed while protecting the public. A civilian lost his life. Another officer was gravely wounded. Families are forever broken. A neighbourhood is traumatized.

A Muslim police officer died protecting this city. A Jewish civilian was among the dead. These are not details to weaponize for narrative advantage. They are reminders of the Montréal that actually exists: one where people of different faiths, languages, and origins share streets, schools, and sorrows, and of the kind of hatred that seeks to tear it apart.

Hatred does not remain abstract. It does not stay confined to manifestos, comment sections, or algorithmic rage chambers. It eventually steps off the screen and into public space. It finds human targets.

This is why we must confront radicalization wherever it appears, even, or especially, when it refuses to fit our expected templates. It can be misogynistic and conspiratorial. Anti-capitalist and anti-woman. Anti-liberal, anti-religious, or an incoherent blend. My husband and I witness its echoes daily in the hateful graffiti we scrub from these same streets.

Communities must resist the tribal reflex to claim the tragedy for one side or another. The deeper lesson is simpler and harder: ordinary Montrealers, Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, francophones, anglophones, newcomers and lifelong residents, left and right, are all made less safe when any form of extremism is romanticized, excused, or ignored.

Let investigators do their work without the distortion of premature certainty. But let us also refuse to look away from the ideological poison that appears to have nourished this attack.

A police officer is dead. A civilian is dead. Another officer fights for recovery.
Montréal owes them better than partisan point-scoring, selective outrage, conspiracy theatre, or death videos circulated for clicks.

May the victims’ memories be a blessing. May the officer who died protecting all of us be remembered with the dignity and gratitude he earned. And may this city, our city, choose unity instead of division in the days ahead.

[Senso di giustizia💙 @sdigiustizia]

🔴 L'OCCIDENTE DORME MENTRE I CRISTIANI VENGONO MASSACRATI. GUARDATE QUESTO VIDEO: IL SILENZIO DEI LEADER MONDIALI È VERGOGNOSO❗️❗️❗️👇👇👇

Molti hanno risposto ai miei post sui massacri di cristiani in Africa per mano islamista, sostenendo che la colpa non sia del fondamentalismo ma di conflitti tribali o locali.
Guardate questo video e ascoltate attentamente. Nessuno, se non i musulmani, griderebbe "Allahu Akbar" con gioia nella voce dopo aver trucidato degli innocenti.
Ed è vergognoso che così tanti cristiani e leader mondiali restino in un silenzio assoluto di fronte a tutto questo.
Questo è ciò che ci aspetta presto in tutto l'Occidente. Sono già tra noi, e i massacri non tarderanno ad arrivare. E a quel punto, cosa faremo?
È straziante… sia per i massacri, sia per l'apatia generale 💔
@MorEdge_Insight

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

Another revealing report by @UNWatch

A 104-page investigation has just been released, showing that the United Nations’ top human rights experts have abandoned the role of independent monitors and are now political activists or corrupt individuals paid by dictatorships to undermine democracies.

The report profiles 13 of the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteurs. Here are just a couple of examples:

- Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women, has refused to acknowledge the October 7th massacre, denied Hamas sexual crimes against Israeli women and amplified Hamas-aligned propaganda.

- Alena Douhan, the UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures, received $1.3 million in funding from China, Russia, and Qatar.

- Ben Saul, the UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism, received $150,000 from China. Though he routinely castigates Western states, he has refused to issue any statements on China’s persecution of the Muslim Uyghurs, which Beijing justifies as “counterterrorism.”

- Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN special rapporteur on the right to health, said “Hamas are not terrorists,” and endorsed “the legitimacy of armed struggle.”

- Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, accuses Canada of committing genocide. Though Venezuela routinely bars UN monitors, Fakhri was specifically invited for a visit, which he used to lavish praise on the Maduro regime.

- George Katrougalos, a former Greek foreign minister serving as the UN independent expert “on a democratic and equitable international order,” received $100,000 from China in 2025.

In the same year, he promoted Xi Jinping’s book and praised the Chinese dictator’s “vision of openness, development and dialogue” and “shared future for humanity.” He also traveled to Tehran that year, where he met with the regime’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi to jointly lament “Israeli and American crimes.”

- Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, turned a blind eye to gross and systematic violations of free speech by the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Myanmar, as well as internet shutdowns by Iran and Turkey, yet she devoted an entire UN General Assembly report to condemning Western states for allegedly repressing pro-Palestinian protests.

@unwatch founder @HillelNeuer comments:

“Alena Douhan, the UN special rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures, who defines Western sanctions on dictatorships as illegal, received $1.3 million from China, Russia, and Qatar. No one is even checking how this money is being used.

If a judge took $1.3 million from one of the parties, they would be immediately disqualified and removed from the bench.

If a journalist openly endorsed a terror group on social media, they would be fired on the spot.

Yet the UN’s rapporteurs operate without ethical constraints or consequences — and there’s not even a procedure to remove them. The result is a powerful bloc of compromised officials who enjoy not only diplomatic immunity, but complete impunity”

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

Since everyone is so interested in Herzliya, let's get the facts out in the midst of these lies.

Herzliya is not built on stolen land. That is categorically false. The land was purchased legally by Jews from the neighboring Arab villages, so unless you think Jews shouldn't be allowed to buy and own land in the Middle East at all, then it was a legal sale.

Herzliya to this very day maintains Sidna 'Ali Mosque, a Mosque built for a local Saint. If Herzliya is just a colonist project that has no respect for Palestinians, why not knock that Mosque down for more hotels? It's right on the beach, after all.

And can we just talk about how ironic it is to say that Herzliya is and will always be Arab land only when the famous ruins to the North are from a settlement called Apollonia, you know, from when the Romans conquered it?

This land has been conquered and re-conquered many times over. What never changed was Jewish tradition that kept that land sacred to us, no matter what name it was under.

[Nicole Lampert @nicolelampert]

Excellent from @LordIanAustin on yet ANOTHER debate on the evils of Israel:

As he says: ‘Over the last few years, Parliament has discussed Israel more than any other issue, not just any international issue, more than any domestic issue: more than the economy, unemployment, crime, the NHS.
‘The public out there look at Parliament and think this is utterly mad, utterly, utterly mad.’

Lord Ian blames Parliament for helping fuel antisemitism adding:

‘Does Parliament not understand that singling out the world's only Jewish state, holding its standards not applied to anywhere else, falsely accusing Israel of committing these terrible crimes? ‘This is bound to drive hostility towards people who are identified with Israel, which is the vast majority of the Jewish community, and I have to say this is why I believe Parliament is playing a large role in driving the explosion of anti-Semitism that we've seen on the streets of Britain.’

[Mark Dubowitz @mdubowitz]

Why I won’t debate critics of Israel?

Brillant as you would expect from Sam Harris: https://t.co/DPLaaAG9B0

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

I'm forever grateful to Canada for the years that I've spent building my life here. But I truly think that it is in a death spiral. Stage 5 Suicidal Empathy is fatal. I don't think that Canadians will ever wake up from their parasitized stupor.

[Rupa Subramanya @rupasubramanya]

Jews are leaving Canada because of rising antisemitism.

Palestinians are coming to Canada because there's rising antisemitism in Canada.

Welcome to modern Canada.

[Tristin Hopper @TristinHopper]

Canada imported a LOT of European immigrants after WWII who had regressive ideas on Jews. But it was made very clear to them that the price of admission to Canada was taking these views to the grave. The modern-day immigrant from the Islamic world, by contrast, encounters whole university departments endorsing every single Jew-hating grievance fantasy they can imagine.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

Since going to the Stop Anti-Zionism conference in Toronto last week, I've been thinking. Is Anti-Zionism "just" Anti-Semitism in new clothes, which is Anti-Judaism in new clothes?

The answer is a qualified no.

Anti-Zionism certainly is Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism dressed up for the post-WWII age. That's not only impossible to deny, it's shockingly accurate. Anti-Zionism disguises and continues those wretched lines and legacies.

On the other hand, Anti-Zionism is different because it is more. Anti-Semites hate Jews (and not other Semitic-language peoples, by evil design). Anti-Zionists hate Jews and everyone who supports Jews. It's a broader category of malice. It targets more people, definitely and explicitly: Jews and those who support them.

Christian Zionists, whether theologically or eschatologically so or not, are lumped in effectively as Judaized under Anti-Zionism. So it goes for all people who believe the state of Israel ought to be able to defend and secure itself against eradication in Eretz Israel without being held to ridiculous national double-standards.

Anti-Zionism, by adopting "politically correct" clothing for unjust Jew criticism, by necessity has to attack those who support Jews as well. In the language of the friend-enemy distinction upon which it runs, the "enemy" category is necessarily broadened to demonize not only Jews but also their broader network of support in the wider world.

The logic of this wretched "distinction" upon which it runs is that Jews and those who support them are declared the enemy, and everyone who doesn't join in against this enemy is complicit in supporting the enemy, thus also an enemy. This is the evil logic of the Soviets and the Maoists and the Nazis. It is the logic of Woke.

But Anti-Zionism isn't just Anti-Semitism in new "postwar" clothing. It is bigger than that and does greater evil and greater mischief.

[The International Legal Forum - ILF @The_ILF]

Prime Minister @MarkJCarney’s speech yesterday addressing the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing Canada included many pertinent points.

The problem is that it largely avoided fundamental issues: why antisemitism has surged, how it has mutated, who is fueling it, and what concrete actions will be taken to confront it.

The Prime Minister stood in one of Canada’s largest synagogues and admitted that “Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians” and that “if that covenant fails for one of our communities, it fails us all.”

He highlighted the important role that the @TheIHRA definition plays in identifying and addressing antisemitism - for if you can’t define it, you can’t combat it.

While the Prime Minister may have hit some of the right notes, he ultimately failed to deliver where Canadians needed leadership most - to name and shame those fuelling and peddling antisemitism in Canada’s streets.

There is no need for a Council to investigate this - five years of overt antisemitism, with the past two and a half featuring incessant hate rallies, shootings, and violence targeting Canada’s Jewish community and anyone who supports the Jewish nation state has made the perpetrators of anti-Jewish hatred known to all who wish see.

Not once did the Prime Minister mention liberal values that have been hijacked, redefined, inverted, and weaponized to normalize ever-mutating lethal antisemitism. Not once did he refer to Islamic extremism and its role in the antisemitism crisis across Canada. He failed to mention the progressives who boast about diversity, equity, and inclusion yet keep Jews out of their spaces.

He touted his own policies and praised police, instead of calling for the most basic laws to be upheld, and for perpetrators of crimes to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And he did not commit to utilizing his own government’s IHRA Handbook.

He failed to look inwards, and consider the role his own government is playing in funding organizations guilty of peddling antisemitism, including terror-affiliated entities. While talking about “not importing foreign conflicts,” he failed to recognize the affect his government’s obsessive anti-Israel policies have on the Jewish community in Canada - from claiming Israel has a right to self defense even while cutting export permits for military equipment, to rewarding Palestinian leadership with recognition of a state in the wake of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust without requiring any reform.

Significant and troubling concerns have already emerged regarding the identities and backgrounds of several named members of the Council - one of the Prime Minister's flagship proposals.

Most poignantly, while standing in a synagogue speaking about the 3,000 year old history of the Jewish people, he failed to mention the Jewish people’s millennia-old connection to the land of Israel, effectively attempting to erase Israel from Canadian Jewish identity.

By missing these points, the PM’s statement will serve to continue the normalization of antisemitism. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z”l warned: “Antisemitism is a virus that mutates so that new antisemites can deny that they’re antisemites at all because their hate is different from the old. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated for their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were hated for their race. Today they are hated for their nation state, Israel. What all three have in common is that they are different ways of saying that Jews have no right to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights of other human beings… Anti-Zionism, denying Jews the right to their one and only collective home by misrepresenting Judaism, is the new antisemitism.”

[Sarah Ettedgui @SarahEttedgui]

The Racial Coding of the Jew

Like classical antisemitism before it, contemporary antizionism depends on the racial coding of the Jew.

In much of today’s academic and activist discourse, the Jew is coded as white, European, settler, colonial, privileged, and structurally powerful. This coding performs a function. It allows people to remove Jews from the history of Jewish peoplehood, strip them of their ancestral connection to the Levant, and place them instead inside a Western racial framework where they can only appear as oppressors.

This is why the “but Mizrahi Jews exist” argument is bad. Because it tries to answer racism by accepting the quiet underlying assumption that Jewish legitimacy depends on proximity to brownness.

Yes, Mizrahi, Sephardi, Ethiopian, Yemenite, Persian, and other Jews exist. But Jews are not non-white only when we can produce the “right” kind of Jew for the antizionist’s ideological courtroom.

A Jew should not have to be brown enough, displaced enough, or visibly exotic enough to be released from the accusation of whiteness.

There is a word for this: racialization.

It turns Jewish identity into a racial lottery. If your grandparents were expelled to Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, or Syria, your Jewishness may be legible as “indigenous” or “non-European.” And, if your grandparents were exiled to Poland, Germany, Russia, France, or Hungary, your Jewishness is recoded as “white settler colonialism.”

But Jewish exile does not become less real because it passed through Europe. Jewish peoplehood does not become less ancient because some Jews were deported, displaced, or scattered into places later classified as “white.” And Jews do not lose their origin story because their diaspora route was different.

Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Yemenite, Persian, and other Jewish communities are not different peoples who accidentally share a religion. We are branches of the same ancient people, shaped by different exiles, host societies, languages, persecutions, and histories of survival.

Those differences should never be weaponized to make Jewish legitimacy depend on skin tone. Because once we accept that categorization, we have already allowed our detractors to define the terms of Jewish identity. And those terms are dangerous.

In Nazi racial ideology, the Jew was not hated because he was too white. He was hated because he was racially inferior, foreign, parasitic, rootless, and contaminating. In contemporary antizionist ideology, the Jew is not hated because he is racially inferior. He is hated because he is recoded as racially dominant, foreign, colonial, artificial, and contaminating.

Same attempt to racially categorize the Jew and place them outside the moral community.

In one framework, the Jew is too alien to belong. In the other, the Jew is too privileged to be harmed. In one, the Jew is a racial threat from below. In the other, the Jew is a racial oppressor from above. But either way, the Jew is not allowed to simply be what Jews are: an ancient people from the Levant, dispersed across the world, carrying a civilization, a memory, a language, a land, a law, a faith, and a peoplehood that long predates the modern racial categories being imposed on us.

This is why antizionism sits in close proximity to racist ideologies. Because a great deal of antizionist discourse depends on a racial fiction: that Jews are not a people from the Levant, but white Europeans who invented indigeneity to justify colonialism.

That ideological fiction erases Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews by treating them as an exception to Jewish identity. And it erases Ashkenazi Jews by treating exile in Europe as proof of European origin. It erases Jewish history by treating diaspora as migration without coercion, dispersion without trauma, and exile without collective memory. It erases the fact that Jews did not become a people in Europe, but carried peoplehood into Europe.

Antizionism still subjects Jewish peoplehood to a racial test.

[Eve Barlow @Eve_Barlow]

Great work https://t.co/lLgI3ekg0G

[Meg Keene @MegKeene]

Being pro-Israel is career suicide in publishing.

The data I’ve pulled from Publisher’s Marketplace shows that since 10/7 *ONE* Jewish fiction deal has gone to someone who has made public pro-Israel statements, and she was already an established author. Jews as a whole, regardless of their stance on Israel, have not faired much better.

(I have a data driven OpEd on this that I’m trying valiantly to get a mainstream publication to pick up. If any editor in the non-Jewish media is interested please let me know.)

[Jason Brodsky @JasonMBrodsky]

Absolutely insane and antisemitic statements like this are the natural byproduct of the increasingly unhinged U.S. political discourse demonizing Israel.

[Ari Isenberg @IsenbergAri]

I’d love to see Struble, Gallagher, Kappy, and a bit of a shake up for tonight. But of course, I hate for anyone to be scratched. It’s just the reality of dressing 18. Any clues about lineup @HabsInHighHeels @PFrioletRDS ? #GoHabsGo

[SK Tedeschi @skedeschi]

24/ What makes the "Nakba" unique is only that it was never allowed to resolve. Arab states reject Israel’s legitimacy because its Jewish. International bodies such as UNRWA helped entrench a system where the conflict remained permanently alive rather than settled.

End.

[Meg Keene @MegKeene]

The report Silenced No More opens with these words from @CochavElkayam:

“There are moments in history that rupture the moral order by which societies define themselves. Moments that do more than shatter lives; they unsettle the very boundaries by which human conduct is understood. October 7, 2023 was such a moment.”

In the week after that black Shabbat, my Rabbi described what happened as a spiritual violence. The atrocities were so unbearable that it was hard to wrap words around them. They were so profound that they required a re-ordering of our understanding of the world. Having spent hours with this report, I can attest that they profoundly change the soul of anyone who bears witness. One of the witnesses of the gang rapes, tortures, and murders at the Nova Music Festival said he heard:

“Women screaming. Screams that pierced the heavens, and cut the soul to pieces.”

The report describes evidence as “materials [that] are almost unbearable in their brutality,” and “their cruelty and magnitude … rendered them impossible to comprehend and harder to believe.”

The scale and horror of the atrocities was the point. In committing crimes that defied our very humanity, in celebrating them, live streaming them, and then getting much of the world to deny them almost instantly, to blame the Jewish state, to blame Jews as a whole, Hamas accomplished their goals. They turned the worst evil imaginable into a carnival of hate the West was happy to justify, to endorse, to at the very least dismiss as ‘part of something complex and nuanced.’

As if the sheer scale of evil could ever be nuanced.

When you fully realize what happened that day, you know the cost of denial was our souls.

In advance of writing this, I spent hours reading the report. After getting through every page of testimony on the Nova Festival before I had to stop, take a break, breathe, try not to vomit.

I visited the Nova site this summer. I looked at photos of the young people that died. And they were so young, so hopeful, so full of joy. To read about how they died was to kill something inside me. Because what I read was beyond comprehension.

There was gang rape, of men and women. Women were stabbed while they were being raped, raped after they died. Women were shot with their rapists still inside them, and then their corpse was passed to another man to rape, while the men around joked and laughed and praised God.

Women were bound and tortured. They were shot in their genitals. Their uteruses were ripped out. They were raped and tortured in front of their partners, who were forced to watch and then murdered.

A witness said, of hearing multiple gang rapes and executions, that when the woman was killed, “you say: ok, it’s over at least, she’s done with it. The moment they were killed, I said, ‘Oh my God, finally it’s over.’” And indeed, women being raped begged for death.
Women were found split in half, beheaded, exploded by what was placed inside their vaginas. Men were found with their genitals shoved into their mouths. In some cases bodies were found staged, a woman holding a man's severed penis. People were doused in gasoline and burned alive. Nail guns were used to drive nails into women’s groins. Spikes were driven into their vaginas. Knives, axes, screwdrivers, tools, were all driven into a single woman’s body. Women were gang raped, and after surviving they burned alive.

Children were killed in front of their parents. Parents were killed in front of children.

Dead bodies were taken, along with hostages and paraded down the streets of Gaza to cheering crowds.

Hostages were subjected to sexual torture and slavery. The torture was so extreme that a new form of violence had to be defined for this report: Kinocide.

“In documented cases, victims were abused in front of relatives. In at least one case, family members were coerced into acts of sexual violence against one another. The Commission defines this as kinocidal sexual violence, violence deliberately designed to destroy family structures by weaponizing familial bonds.”

All of this violence was documented, streamed live to the world. We knew. We always knew, because they wanted us to know.

They didn’t hide it. In fact, the perpetrators cheered it, celebrated it, called home to their families to boast of how many Jews they had killed. Gazan civilians followed after the initial invasion, joining in the orgy of violence. Women’s dead and broken bodies were paraded through the streets of Gaza, while crowds cheered and the women were spit on. Hostages, women and children, were also paraded, jeered and mocked, before descending into their own hell of sexual torture.

On October 9th, 2023, I had to get on a group call for my coaching program.

There was no war yet. Or there was a war, and it was still taking place on the streets of Southern Israel. The IDF was still fighting terrorists on the ground, trying to clear the area.

Like every other Jew, I was shattered. I could look at my screen of 100 women and pick out the other three Jews by their dead eyes and fractured faces.

The lead coach asked to lead a prayer. And who she prayed for was not Israelis, not Jews, not survivors of the attack. She prayed for us and our perpetrators in equal measure. I hit mute. I stared at the wall. I tried not to throw up. And I realized this was a sign of what was to come.

In the moments after October 7th, Jews were already being asked to commiserate with the people that committed, supported, and cheered on, these crimes that break the boundary of what it means to be human. We were asked to rise above the devastation of the soul. And then we were asked to put what happened aside. To leave our hostages to the depraved sex and torture tunnels of Hamas. To move on. To be the bigger people.

When you look at the facts, the details, the truth of what actually happened, you realize how impossible that request always was.

Because society was unwilling to face what happened, it chose denial. That was it’s drug of choice, it’s way to survive the horrors. Just like in the Holocaust, the women and men who suffered these demonic fates were re-framed as sub-human. The victims were not imagined as the people. For society to justify looking away, the victims could not be young adults that went to a music festival, or families slowly waking up on a Sunday morning, kids watching cartoons, women going for a run, families ready to enjoy the holiday.

Instead, the atrocities were framed almost immediately as something that would never happen to us, something deserved.

To justify and erase crimes of this magnitude, society has to make the Jewish state somehow so monstrous that they deserve this. We have to make up lies. Dog rape. Organ stealing. Child murder. Genocide. And since no state, and no people, could ever deserve this, no matter what their purported crimes, the other choice is to deny that it ever happened, to look away.

My latest in full on Substack: https://t.co/hJrwGBP939