Hate Doesn't Need a Reason. That's the Point.

Why attacking Canadian Jews says nothing about Gaza — and everything about hate

There is no logic to hate. 

That is, perhaps, the most important thing to understand about what is happening to Jewish Canadians right now — and why it is so dangerous.

In March 2026, three Toronto-area synagogues were targeted by gunfire within five days. Swastikas were spray-painted on Jewish businesses in Montreal. The federal government rushed emergency funding to help Jewish communities protect their own houses of worship and schools. The money matters less than what it signals: that protection like this is needed at all, in Canada, in 2026.

To understand how we got here, we need to be honest about several things at once.

Collective Responsibility Is a Lie

Holding Canadian Jews responsible for governance decisions made in Israel is as ludicrous as holding Canadian Christians responsible for political decisions made in Washington. It is a logical absurdity — and yet it is exactly the kind of absurdity that hate requires to function.

Collective responsibility — holding an entire identity group accountable for the actions of a government or state they have no meaningful control over — is one of the oldest and most dangerous rhetorical moves in the arsenal of bigotry. It is lazy thinking weaponized. It substitutes a convenient target for the hard work of actual analysis.

There is a necessary and legitimate reckoning happening around the war in Gaza. Opposing a government's military policy is one thing. Shooting at a preschool is another. That distinction should be easy to hold. The fact that it is proving so difficult in public discourse right now tells us something important: we are not really talking about policy anymore. We are watching hate find its permission structure.

The attempt to cleanly separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism mirrors historical attempts to separate other forms of bigotry from their inevitable downstream consequences — anti-feminism from misogyny, anti-desegregation from racism. The separation is theoretically possible. In practice, it rarely holds.

Dehumanizing rhetoric creates conditions for physical violence. History has demonstrated this with devastating consistency.

The Oldest Scapegoat

When people are frightened, angry, or searching for meaning, scapegoating offers a ready-made answer that requires no actual thought. Jewish communities have served that function across centuries and across wildly different political contexts — white nationalist, Islamist, left-progressive. That cross-ideological reach is not coincidental. It is precisely what makes antisemitism so persistently dangerous. It is not a symptom of any one political movement. It is a disease that finds hosts everywhere.

And it spreads fastest when people in positions of influence blur the line between legitimate political critique and the targeting of a people.

Cowardice Dressed as Conviction

Let's be direct about what these attacks actually are. Targeting a synagogue in Toronto or Montreal is not a confrontation with the source of anyone's political grievance. It is displacement violence — punching sideways at people who are innocent, and who are, in many cases, themselves conflicted about Israeli policy.

It says nothing about the conflict in Gaza. It says everything about the attacker's actual motivations.

This is cowardice. It is the act of people who cannot or will not engage with the actual complexity of a distant conflict, so they direct their anger at the nearest available face of a faith they have already decided to hate.

Where Human Dignity Enters

The Human Dignity Project exists because hate does not arise in a vacuum. It grows in the absence of education, in the presence of fear, and in communities where the permission structures for bigotry go unchallenged.

Our work is built on a foundational belief: that when we understand the mechanics of hate — how it finds its footing, how it recruits, how it disguises itself as something reasonable — we become harder to manipulate by it. Education is not a passive act. It is one of the most powerful tools of resistance we have.

What is happening to Jewish Canadians right now is not a Jewish problem. It is a Canadian problem. It is a human dignity problem. 

And it calls for the same clarity, the same united response, that we rightly offered when mosques were attacked, when Black communities were targeted, when Indigenous peoples faced violence rooted in hatred.

Hate doesn't become acceptable because it attaches itself to a political cause. And silence in the face of it — from institutions, from leaders, from neighbours — is never neutral.

It is permission.