Identity politics and its harvest of hate

This morning we were greeted with the news that, for the second time this year, the American Consulate in Toronto had shots fired at it. This was just before 5 a.m. The police gave chase to the suspect in a white car with no plates but gave it up due to high speed and public danger.

It was a busy week. A few days before, two Jewish owned bakeries were shot up, again, in Toronto. Hardly a week goes by where we are not hearing about these violent and senseless crimes of intimidation. Churches have been burned and vandalized.

Synagogues and Jewish businesses have been threatened by bomb threats and gunfire. Mosques have also been targeted although to a lesser degree. (Despite the rhetoric and thank goodness, there seem to be very few gender-based incidents or crimes targeted at Black people currently.)

Why is all this happening? The answers are varied, but many stem from the practice of identity politics where groups are singled out for special attention, good or bad, giving rise to anger and resentment. People are categorically labeled and given special attention by politicians and the media. The latest of these, it seems, are Americans.

The “elbows up” crowd, whipped into a frenzy of hate by Mark Carney for United States and its leader (and hence for anything connected to him, including several hundred million innocent American citizens) now appears to have spread to the Crazy Crowd on a mission of vengeance.

Carney started this as a way to get elected. His extensive education will have taught him the best ways to control a population. The most effective is fear directed at a common enemy. In Nazi Germany, the enemy was Jews. In 21st Century Canada, we are told the enemy is Americans, followed closely by Pierre Poilievre.

That the dislike of Trump and hence his countrymen has reached an almost fever pitch came home to me very forcefully when I recently posted a Facebook comment saying, “I cannot believe the incredible pettiness of my Canada in disinviting the Americans to the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge.” These 20 words unleashed a torrent of hate for Americans from my fellow Canadians, belying our somewhat smug and self-congratulatory opinion that we are a kind and tolerant nation.

I was shocked. As first I tried to reason with responders, but you cannot keep up with 1,500 comments and more than 64,000 views. And the rhetoric was often hateful. But what this illustrates is just how far this despicable “elbows up” salute has penetrated part of the Canadian psyche. And it is frightening. It smacks of jingoism which goes beyond patriotism to the extreme of national righteousness and superiority.

So before mimicking any more hate slogans, ask yourself what you really believe. Let’s start with Americans. Do you really believe that all Americans should be shunned and scorned because of their leader? Do you really believe that the American president would cause Canada to be invaded and forced to become part of the United States? Do you really believe we are superior in any way to our American neighbours?

Now let’s look at another group that is suffering hate in our once warm and tolerant country: the Jews, those folks who have heaped glory on our heads over the past century because they are smart and enterprising. Do you really believe they should be persecuted for the events between their country and their religiously fevered neighbours who set up a sneak attack, knowing the Israelis would be forced to strike back while Hamas protected their warriors by using their citizens as human shields, knowing full well that every citizen they lost would fuel the propaganda war they were waging against Israel?

And even if you believe that was justified, do you believe innocent Canadian Jewish people should be persecuted for this?

As for church burnings, many of these seem to have been stimulated by fevered Indigenous rights peoples – many of them white – who have distorted the truth about residential schools to an unbelievable degree so that the world thinks our ancestors were? Do you really believe that all priests and nuns were murderers in disguise just waiting to kill innocent children? Do you really believe that hundreds of kids went missing or were murdered by these people and that their bodies occupy unmarked graves in various church yards across the country? You know, of course, that every child has been identified and accounted for including one the list who was buried on his reserve? You must also know that the Kamloops group was given money to exhume the alleged bodies but now refuse to do so and that a Manitoba group took up the challenge, searched and alleged church basement gravesite and came up with a negative. Do you still believe this? And do you know how much harm this has done to damage reconciliation and how it has hurt the people we are trying to renew our equal relationship with?

None of these lies and consequent harms happened by accident. They are the result of deliberate distortion of facts for ulterior reasons that we may or may not understand.

Identity politics is always wrong. If you want to hate something, hate that!

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