Zionism has always been a racist, colonial, ideology and Israel has long practiced apartheid. But it’s taken the popular uprising against Israel’s holocaust in Gaza to fully expose its supporters’ racism. Few Canadians highlight this better than Warren Kinsella who long marketed himself as an anti-racist but now blames “multiculturalism” for protesters opposing genocide.
A long-time paid political operative, Kinsella has written books about Canada’s far right. In the mid 1990s he published Web of Hate: Inside Canada’s Far Right Network and a decade ago came out with Fight the Right: A Manual for Surviving the Coming Conservative Apocalypse. In 2019 he was reportedly hired by the Conservatives to paint People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier as a racist.
Canadian Anti-Hate Network founder Bernie Farber calls Kinsella a “friend”. In 2017 one of Farber’s groups had Kinsella moderate a panel with leading anti-racist writer Desmond Cole and National Council of Canadian Muslims executive director Ihsaan Gardee on “increased racist and xenophobic attacks”. In a sign of his standing with left activists at that time, Kinsella was also added to a private Toronto Facebook group set up to oppose overtly racist groups (I was also in this group until someone complained my criticism of the apartheid lobby was “antisemitic”).
But a significant contradiction was always there. While claiming to be an anti-racist activist, Kinsella actually spoke at a 2009 meeting of the far right, openly racist, Jewish Defence League. Seven years later he condemned Green Party members for opposing the explicitly racist Jewish National Fund and was previously on the board of the Canada-Israel Committee.
It has become steadily more difficult for Kinsella and other staunch Zionists to claim anti-racism. And over the past seven months it’s completely fallen apart.
For his part, Kinsella has encouraged Israel’s genocidal violence and fanatical in his hostility to those opposing Canadian complicity in Israel’s barbarism in Gaza (as well as the West Bank, Syria and Lebanon). On October 10 he wrote that Israel “must enter Gaza and drive Hamas and its ilk into the sea. It must wipe them off the face of the Earth. It must show no mercy.”
Kinsella has repeatedly claimed that protesters are funded by some (unstated) nefarious force. In December he wrote about a meeting with arch-Jewish supremacist Beryl Wajsman in which the editor of The Suburban claimed protesters are “paid” to march in Montreal. Kinsella wrote, “Pro-Hamas protesters can get up to $50 for each protest they attend, he claims, and they’ve divided the city up into grids, with leaders responsible for each grid. Most of the protesters, according to Wajsman, are non-residents and students from Arab countries.”
In January he doubled down on this absurd claim with a commentary headlined “Who is behind funding for pro-Palestinian protesters?” and more recently Kinsella repeated elements of this nonsense in “Pro-Hamas protests organized and well funded”.
Anti-Arab racism underpins much of Kinsella’s commentary on the subject, but it took a particularly overt form in a recent column headlined “Is this, at long last, the result of multiculturalism?” The article claims Canada’s multiculturalism “experiment hasn’t worked out” and concludes by calling for the deportation of anti-genocide protesters (“it’s time to kick them out”).
Kinsella’s piece is dumb. Are those protesting the genocide in the US doing so because they live in a “melting pot”? How come Jews in Canada who promote Israeli violence aren’t a reflection of multiculturalism? And if multiculturism causes people to protest genocide isn’t that an argument for multiculturism?
Kinsella’s anti-Muslim/Arab/immigrant diatribe is odious. But it’s good to see Zionists drop their liberal pretense.
Zionism has never valued all humans equally and honesty is always the best policy.
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