TORONTO – This week is Holocaust Education Week. We say โNever Again,โ but many have forgotten what those words demand. The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It started with rhetoric, with propaganda, with a society that chose to believe lies because those lies were convenient. It started with the slow normalization of blaming Jews for every fracture, every anxiety, every failure. Demagogues discovered that the simplest path to power was to point to the Jew and say: There. That is the problem. History does not repeat in perfect form, but it echoes. And today, those echoes are loud.
I have been working on a new project and recently watched over sixteen hours of Hitlerโs early speeches. What stands out is not the theatrics, but the gradual shift. He did not appear suddenly as the architect of genocide. He built legitimacy with carefully constructed resentment, step by step, speech by speech, normalization by normalization. The public did not wake up one morning to tyranny; they slid into it, slowly, believing each step was tolerable, temporary, or justified.
In 2025, the pattern is the same. Whether itโs Zohran Mamdani in New York, Olivia Chow in Toronto, Sadiq Khan in London, or the growing cohort of political voices and activist blocs across Europe and North America who have discovered that scapegoating Jews yields applause and power, when society is anxious, it finds a convenient target. When the public demands answers, offer a simple one. When political authority is contested, unite followers against โthe other.โ The group ready-made for blame remains the same as it was in 1930s Europe: the Jews. Always.
And this is not limited to one side of the political spectrum. On the left, antisemitism is laundered through the word โZionist,โ as if renaming the Jew makes the hatred more sophisticated. On the right, antisemitism is repackaged as a crusade against โglobalistsโ or โelites.โ The language changes, but the conspiracy stays intact. Figures like Tucker Carlson have built massive platforms amplifying narratives that align cleanly with the interests of regimes such as Qatar, regimes that have spent the past two decades financing networks, media voices, student groups, and activist movements that fuel antisemitism across North America. Whether this coordination is ideological, strategic, or financial is a matter for investigators and historians, but the effect is visible: both the far-left and the populist right now meet in the same place, pointing toward the Jew and saying, again, There. That is the source of your pain.
Consider Toronto. Olivia Chow has struggled to manage even the basic functions of municipal governance, yet she has recast herself as a moral authority on the Middle East. A mayor who can barely coordinate snow removal now speaks as though she is uniquely qualified to pass judgment on a nation fighting for its survival. And when she publicly defames Israel, the consequences are not abstract. The city follows her lead. Antisemitic vandalism spikes. Jewish institutions come under threat. Hate marches multiply. The same pattern repeats: delegitimize Jews rhetorically, then claim surprise when violence arrives in the streets. The tactic is ancient: delegitimize the Jew in public, then claim no responsibility for the violence that follows.
Across the United States, modern-day brownshirts march openly, this time draped in keffiyehs rather than swastikas, chanting for a Jewish-free society. They vandalize synagogues, assault Jewish-owned businesses, and terrorize Jewish students on campuses. In Europe, this is no longer shocking because it has become normal. In Canada, it is becoming normal. The West is behaving as if it has forgotten how this story ends.
Perhaps the most tragic element is the role of progressive Jews who believe that by aligning themselves with the forces of antisemitism, they will be spared. History has already answered this delusion. Jewish socialists in Germany were not spared. Jewish communists in the Soviet Union were not spared. Jewish cultural liberals in Weimar Germany believed that their enlightenment, their art, their tolerance, and their allyship would protect them. It did not. Hatred of Jews is never conditional. It does not negotiate. It consumes.
This is no longer a polite policy disagreement. There is no neutral position. One is either with the Jewish people and with Western civilization, democracy, freedom, truth, continuity, and survival, or aligned, directly or by silence, with the forces of radical socialism, radical Islam, and the neo-Nazi right. These ideologies are not opposites; they are the same ancient hatreds, repackaged to suit the sensibilities of their followers. The storm is not hypothetical; it is here. It is in our schools, our media, our government offices, and our streets. It sits in the mayorโs chambers in New York, London, and Toronto, where power now openly courts those who despise us. And they know exactly what they are doing. Just as Hitler and Goebbels understood, they calculated that hatred of Jews could be leveraged for applause, votes, and power.
They are betting that the world will look away.
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