Moral Clarity part 7: Words with consequence

A man on a balcony in a Canadian downtown takes a microphone and leads a public prayer for the violent eradication of the “Zionist aggressors.” “Allah, count every one of them, and kill them all, and do not exempt even one of them,” he says in Arabic. Below him, a crowd of hundreds respond with cheers.

The speaker was Montreal Imam Adil Charkaoui, and the venue was the city’s Oct. 28 “Stop the Genocide in Gaza” rally — one of dozens of Canadian events organized over the last 30 days by the Palestinian Youth Movement, a group that has openly praised the Oct. 7 massacres and called for continued violence against Israel.

Charkaoui’s speech may very well have been overlooked entirely if he hadn’t posted it online himself. He posted it (from multiple angles) to his Twitter, Instagram and Facebook profiles — along with lengthy screeds calling for the violent destruction of Israel, and denouncing Western media and politicians as Zionist collaborators.

If this does not constitute hate speech and incitement to violence, then I don't know what does.

I disembarked from the social media joyride (house of horrors) about two years ago. It initially took over my life on the day trump rode down the golden escalator. For a year before the election I tried my darndest to warn anyone who would listen about the five alarm fire a trump presidency would represent. I argued that he would try to burn the house down and dismantle the international order we've been relying on for safety and relative peace since 1945. To me it was obvious how dangerously divisive and damaging he was going to be at home and abroad. And once he was improbably elected I ratcheted up my efforts, opposing him as much as I could, like a cyber-shepherd crying out from the digital hills. Two things happened. First, the echo of my voice bounced back at me across the cyber valley, straining relationships with family and friends (and in a couple of cases ending them). Second, I realized how I had completely underestimated how dangerous trump would turn out to be. I didn't fully grasp how he and his enablers could leverage the power of social media to amplify, harden and exacerbate social and political divisions. About 6 months before the 2020 election, confident trump was going to lose, I decided I'd fought the good fight and had had enough of the vitriol. I deleted my social media accounts for good. Sure, I might miss the latest news on what my high-school graduating classmates of 1981 are up to these days, but if that was the price I had to pay for not having to wade through the cesspool of online inaninity, hostility, ignorance and uncivility, it was more than worth it.

I was rudely awakened from the blissful stupor of my online absence in the last couple of weeks, thanks to my wife and kids. As the war rages on in Israel and the heartbreaking death toll mounts every day, another battle is being fiercely waged for digital terrain.The social media war is taking a stressful sleepless toll, especially on my kids (they're adults, the youngest is 19). They've been sharing with me some of the insensitive, offensive and often blatantly antisemitic social media posts of their 'friends', acquaintances and co-workers. Messages, comments, infographics and memes, that either bluntly or implicitly side with the terrorists, justify their barbarism, and/or call for the destruction of Israel and extermination of its citizens in the name of social Justice. In response, my kids are experiencing another kind of trauma. They seem to have transitioned through stages of shock, outrage, fear, disbelief, disappointment, and have finally settled into a malaise of mistrust and grief. They’ve had to learn to accept a new reality of insecurity, one that disconnects them from many of their former friends, and reconnects them to others from our community who are feeling the same way. My kids have also been communicating a lot with each other to try to sort through their emotions, thank goodness for having siblings. I've tried to add my two cents to the discussions, providing some background and historical perspective. Admittedly, my efforts have been lame. For my kids this experience is very emotional and immediate. The aspect that has given them the most heartache has been the realization that their peers don’t care. It’s not like they try to sympathize but can’t. They just don’t care to even try. They see no problem with sharing and promoting incendiary messages that have the obvious potential of putting the security of their Jewish friend and her community at risk. When my daughters try to explain the insecurity they are feeling, their peers are often unapologetic, callous and combative. My kids can't comprehend how the desire to virtue-signal could be more important than the physical safety of a friend. One message received by my daughter was, 'Don't let your sense of safety be warped and exploited to become something that is worth the lives of thousands of childen'. Of course, this clueless social Justice warrior isn't Jewish and is writing from the safety of his cushy office on Bay Street in downtown Toronto.   

Here in Montreal, in the week after the speech quoted above was delivered and shared uncountable times online, two molotov cocktails were thrown, one at a synagogue and the other at a Jewish community center in the west end of the city. Yesterday there was student violence downtown on campus at Concordia University. Last night shots were fired at two Jewish schools in central Montreal, one located less than a block away from my daughter's apartment in a heavily orthodox Jewish neighbourhood. Suddenly we are all feeling like we're living back in another time and place. A time of atrocities that we only read about in history books, and a place we heard about from our elders who fled. The only difference is that these days the hate spreads at the speed of light, and violent mobs can organize with the press of a button. Coincidentally, today is the anniversary of Kristallnacht.