Former ambassador calls Canada ‘petri dish for antisemitism’

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WASHINGTON – Marc Ginsburg shakes his head.

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“These kids wouldn’t know the difference between Gaza and bagel,” the former ambassador says.

Ginsburg, a Clinton administration appointee, is asked if those kids – the university-and-college-level ones accusing Israel and the West of “genocide,” from Toronto to Los Angeles – could possibly be coming together spontaneously. Organically.

“No,” says Ginsburg, now the head of a Washington-based watchdog called the Coalition for a Safer Web (CSW). “No way. There’s no doubt that what Hamas had in the can was prepared weeks, weeks in advance (of Oct. 7, 2023). They lined up a whole bunch of influencers in Europe, United States and Canada, to push this Hamas content onto mainstream social media platforms.”

Ginsburg knows whereof he speaks. The former ambassador to Morocco has devoted considerable effort to tracking and exposing antisemitism – and the incitement of violence against Jews – with CSW.

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Hamas, he says, now runs a sophisticated social media propaganda effort – one that relies on popular influencers scattered throughout the West.

There is equally no doubt that those influencers – and myriad organizers, and protestors – are being paid to show up and spew Jew hatred, Ginsburg says, adding money flows in through non-profits, NGOs and charities in Canada, the U.S. and Europe from Iran, Qatar and even Russia and China.

Just hours before we met, Ginsburg spoke to a congressional committee about Iran’s efforts to destabilize democracies like America’s – and the longtime Democrat applauded the tough action the Trump administration has taken against antisemitic campus agitators, often acting at the behest of Iran, Qatar and Hamas.

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“I applaud the Trump’s administration’s decision to threaten the withholding of federal grants until these universities clean up their act … (The campus anti-Israel activists] are full-time and very capable,” Ginsburg says. “These paid disruptors are being funded. Who has chartered the busses and provided them with the transportation to go out and disrupt an airport runway or an airport roadway, to stop people from getting to an airport? This doesn’t happen because a kid who’s a freshman or sophomore says: ‘Guess what? We’re going to go out to Kennedy, to Kennedy Airport. We’re going to stop every flight, every passenger trying to make a flight.’”

The agitators, who are getting bolder, have training, resources and the backing of powerful interests, Ginsburg says. An unholy alliance of Marxist-Leninists, anarchist groups and Jew-haters have increasingly come together to promote violence and enmity towards Jews, he says.

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In a shocking report prepared in the wake of Hamas’ barbaric 2023 attack on Israeli civilians, CSW revealed:

– Hamas, Iran and Qatar “had a sophisticated social media plan ready to Spring” on Oct. 7;

– On Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, the anti-Israel forces worked to “generate support for Hamas (and) leverage foreign social media influencers” to assist;

– While protests on university campuses and in Western streets may have “appeared organic,” they were in fact “professionally staffed and funded;”

– After Oct. 7, those extremist groups – drawn heavily from leftist, Muslim and anarchistic circles – formed a new “axis of antisemitism.”

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Ginsburg points to the example of one Canadian group that was recently designated as a terrorist entity by the governments of Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden. Again shaking his head, Ginsberg says he and his colleagues at CSW spent years trying to convince the Trudeau and Biden administrations to act against Vancouver’s Samidoun, which was a front for the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

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“With the Biden administration, you could’ve hit them over the head with a 2 x 4, but they were always dragging their feet … and the Canadian government was dragging its feet a lot longer,” says Ginsburg, adding: “Canada has become a petri dish for antisemitism.”

Tough words, particularly when you consider they are coming from a Democrat and an appointee of Bill Clinton’s administration. But anyone who has looked at the evidence knows that Mark Ginsberg is right.

So, will political candidates in Canada, now in the midst of a hotly-contested election campaign, heed his words?

They should. They must, before it’s too late.

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