On September 21, 2026, Canadian and Jewish New Democrat Party leader wrote on X:
“Tonight Yom Kippur begins, the most somber moment of the Jewish calendar. It’s a time of atonement… This year I’m reflecting on the fact that we failed to do our part to stop an ongoing genocide committed in our name.”
The outcry was swift and fierce, as if Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy showed up unannounced, certainly unwelcome, to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Robyn Urback of the Globe and Mail huffed that blaming of Jews outside of Israel for Israel’s actions should disqualify Lewis from being a political leader, that Lewis had committed ‘textbook antisemitism,’ never acknowledging, beyond quoting Lewis, that there is a genocide in Gaza. As a pro-Israel camper, Urback is quick to thumb through the Israeli playbook that instructs that anti-Zionism should always and immediately be equated to antisemitism.
Two normally more circumspect columnists, Gary Mason and Stephen Maher, chimed in to say that they agreed with Urback. Crying Anthony Housefather, Liberal MP for Mount Royal in Montreal, called Lewis’s comments ‘despicable’ saying that they legitimize Jewish hate and would put Jewish communities at risk.
Israeli propagandists CIJA and B’nai Brith condemned the remarks saying that it was dangerous to imply that all Jews were complicit and would give rise to further antisemitism.
It seems that the permanently peeved Israeli apologists don’t know the difference between blame and responsibility. There is a collective responsibility to try to stop the genocide in Gaza. Because it was written during Yom Kippur, Lewis’s message was directed at the world’s Jewish community, but it applies equally to the global ecumenical community. We are not doing enough to stop the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.
Millions of the world’s 15 million Jews have spoken out against Israel’s decades-long barbaric policies and criminal actions against Palestinians, but others are either silently or actively supportive of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and genocide. That may not make them more guilty than non-Jews who aid Israel, but they are guilty, nonetheless.
Regardless of religion, those who turn away from what is plainly evident, those who shirk their responsibility to speak out against the genocide in Israel, are at least passively responsible for the continuing systematic theft of land and slaughter of innocents. It is the great moral crisis of our times, and it is black and white. There can be no moral equivocation, no fence sitting. Israel is the occupier and murderer. The Palestinians are the victims.
Desmond Tutu, who lived through the apartheid in South Africa, wrote “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
Maybe people who write newspaper columns that put them so clearly and obscenely on the wrong side of the greatest moral issue in 80 years, should be disqualified from mainstream media.
If eighty years ago, there were cameras in the Nazi death camps and a YouTube platform on which to show the atrocities, would there be support for the Nazis? Would millions refrain from using the word ‘genocide’? Would they say that both sides are to blame? Would they say that the Jews brought it on themselves? Would they think that the Nazis were superior to the Jews?
If those death camp images had been known during the war instead of after it, the outrage and the demand for action would have been nearly unanimous. And assuming the Americans were not on the side of the Nazis in the same way they now block military intervention against Israel, one expects there would have been a determined attempt to end the war sooner.
When the war was over, the Nazi leaders were put on trial for war crimes in an international tribunal, in effect the beginning of international criminal law, the same manner of tribunal that the Americans and Israelis now seek to dismember.
Yet now, as history repeats itself and victims turn to perpetrators, there is equivocation, there is denial, there is advocacy, even empathy for the murderers.
Despite the shriek of protest and the attacks on Lewis, many Canadian Jews are not so innocent. In fact, their wailing is a wall behind which hides a nasty truth, they are aiding and abetting a racist Israeli government that is committing war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Marcus Aurelius wrote, ‘One robs by act, another by moral posing.’ The heated outrage from Urback, crying Anthony Housefather, the fanatic Yoni Goldstein, among too many others, hides the fact that much of the Jewish diaspora share responsibility for genocide, not just because they never speak against what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but because they are active shills and fundraisers for Israel.
The B’nai Brith, the CIJA, HonestReporting Canada, the Jewish National Fund of Canada, The New Israel Fund of Canada, Birthright Israel Fund, and those Canadians who donate to Friends of the Israeli Defense Force, and hundreds of other tax-exempt organizations, support Israel through propaganda, intimidation, or raising money.
Innocent sounding names hide nefarious activities. The Jewish National Fund develops land that is not theirs, with a focus on reforestation, perhaps replacing the life-giving olive trees uprooted by Israel as it attempts to wipe out both the Arab population and any vestige of their having lived in the region for thousands of years.
My Home in Israel markets and sells property in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to Canadian Jews, land and homes they first have to steal from the Arab families that have lived there for generations.
The Great Israeli Real Estate Event holds expos in Toronto and Montreal, among other cities in which stolen or disputed land is for sale to the carpetbaggers who attend. There is a law against knowingly receiving stolen goods, yet somehow these blood merchants continue to operate.
Taking advantage of immigration laws designed primarily for Jews, some 5,000 Canadians have emigrated to Israel including many to settlements in the West Bank since 2015.
Those who protest loudest, who equate antizionism with antisemitism, do so as a distraction for the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating, and as justification for their own morally vacant positions.
So, to Robyn Urback, crying Anthony Housefather, Rosie DiManno, the National Post, the B’nai Brith, the CIJA, the New Israel Fund of Canada, the Friends of the IDF (see NAZA), the Jewish National Fund of Canada, the Birthright Israel Fund, HonestReporting Canada, hundreds of similar tax-deductible organizations in Canada and the US, j’accuse.
J’accuse all of you of enabling genocide. Your advocacy for Israel, your fundraising for Israel, your wolf cries of antisemitism while never once denouncing Israeli warmongering, your demonization of Arabs, all the disingenuous tactics to distract from the genocide, all the while refusing to even use the word Palestine, is driven by blind faith in myth, is overtly racist, and stinks of covetousness. Your closing your eyes so as to avoid seeing what you know to be true, that Israel targets and slaughters innocents, including children, screams to the world that you are enablers of the genocide of an identifiable group, the desperate people of Palestine.
All of you share blame for the slaughter whose name you can’t even say. To quote, the great American folksinger, Joan Baez, who would have been another potential deportee at Ronald Reagan’s Mississippi dog whistle stump, if you can’t bring yourself to say genocide, ‘Then give me another word for it because you were so good with words and at keeping things vague.’
For now, you can hide your fetid cheerleading for the terrorist state of Israel behind rhetorical games, but one day, hopefully soon, your vagueness will become clear. A docket in The Hague bears your name.
Paul Heno October 2026
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