It is so damn obvious that it feels unnecessary to say it: the Jewish people have given so much to Canada.

Their names are on many of our leading institutions, some of our best-known literature, music and art, and on Nobel prizes. They are leaders of some of our most successful businesses. They are our doctors, our teachers, our lawyers. They are our friends and our family.

Canada owes much to its Jewish community who, in recent decades at least, found this country to be among the very best places to live a full and openly Jewish life.

And yet, all Canadians need to understand that the community’s future here is at risk. Many Jews say they are contemplating leaving, or have already left, because of the sudden and largely unchecked rise of antisemitism. How Canada responds will determine what kind of country this will be.

The perversion of public perceptions of the Israel-Hamas war sparked by the October 7 massacre, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, has echoed around the world, but few places have changed as much as some Canadian cities.

The stories are well-known: Jewish institutions and businesses have been firebombed and sprayed with bullets. People have been accosted in the street for being openly Jewish. Many Jews feel ostracized from their workplaces, especially if they work in academia.

“None of this has ameliorated the suffering of Gaza’s inhabitants or helped ‘free Palestine’ — whatever that means,” Torontonian Harry Khachatrian wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week in a story headlined, Canada Has An Antisemitism Problem.

“Yet politicians at every level keep responding with the same platitudes: ‘Antisemitism is vile and unacceptable.’ ‘Hate has no place in Canada.’ Apparently it does. Antisemitism has secured a comfortable suite at the Four Seasons.”

There is now a divide among Canadian Jews.

There is a growing and noisy cohort who are leaving Canada amid rising antisemitism, or considering doing so. The Canadian Press reported this week that a group out of Oklahoma called Tulsa Tomorrow is aiming to recruit Canadian Jews to the city, amid calls for the Trump administration to offer asylum to concerned Jewish-Canadians.

But there is another cohort that sees the same symptoms, and has decided to stay and fight.

This dichotomy was illustrated this week in an exchange between two prominent Jewish-Canadians. Gad Saad, a best-selling author and academic, wrote on social media that he left for the United States, in part because “Jew-hatred” in Montreal “is palpable, at the soccer field, on university campuses, in street protests.”

In response, Harley Finkelstein, the president of Shopify, Canada’s biggest tech company, acknowledged that his family had thought about leaving, but added: “We decided to stay because Jews do not secure a better future by abandoning it. We build it.”

A network of civil society groups have brought together non-Jews for the cause of building that future, Upstanders Canada and Allies For A Strong Canada among them. In June, dozens of senior business and political leaders who aren’t Jewish signed an open letter seeking stricter enforcement of anti-hate laws.

The letter, which appeared as an advertisement in newspapers including National Post, features a quote from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to Jewish community leaders on June 1 at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto: “It requires all of us to raise our voices in disgust and defiance when we see the ugly face of antisemitism.”

The business leaders’ call to action includes three recommendations for “our roadmaps forward,” which include a “zero tolerance for hate,” “consistent enforcement of anti-hate laws” and “discipline in public discourse.”

“Words from political leaders matter. This is not about restricting free speech,” the document reads. “No Canadian should be threatened, harassed or attacked because of their faith.”

All Canadians need to hold Mark Carney — and every political leader who has called out antisemitism and followed up with little else — accountable.

At Holy Blossom, Carney admitted that Canada is failing its Jewish community and launched the Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion, which he tasked with “addressing antisemitism.”

Some of the people Carney chose to run the council are not popular choices. This includes Omar Alghabra, former head of the Canadian Arab Federation — an organization that, after his tenure, advocated for Hezbollah and Hamas to be removed from Canada’s terrorist watch list.

The prime minister also said the council’s first order of business would be to “reassess the nature, scale and drivers of antisemitism in Canada,” even though the root causes of Jew-hate are, by now, well known. All this gave the impression that the advisory council was intended to do little more than create the appearance that the government is taking this issue seriously, when in fact very little is actually being done.

And indeed, two months after Carney’s big announcement, Jewish businesses are still being shot at and burnt to the ground, Jewish athletes are subjected to racial slurs and synagogues continue to be vandalized .

Carney and other political leaders need to get behind those who believe in Canada and start treating this as the national emergency that it is. This nation is already worse off for the people who have fled.

Pat Johnson of Upstanders Canada says: “We are not outnumbered. We are out-shouted.” The vast majority of Canadians who support their Jewish friends, family and neighbours need to shout louder, and to demand action.

• Jesse Kline: Carney admits antisemitism ‘crisis,’ but won’t do much about it
• Tasha Kheiriddin: Antisemitic terrorism is a national emergency. Carney needs to act like it

DEVÍN, Slovakia — The name lasted much longer than the reality. Which is perhaps not surprising given who did the naming.

It was 80 years ago that Winston Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Mo. — formally titled, “The Sinews of Peace.” The Iron Curtain itself would be torn down 43 years later. While the Berlin Wall was its archetypal symbol, there were other points of maximum opportunity — and mortal danger.

Devín, in western Slovakia, draws visitors today due to the impressive ruins of Devín Castle, which tower above the town. (Napoleon’s retreating armies tore it down in 1809.) During the Cold War, some came here for other reasons — to make a break for freedom, or to break those who desired to be free.

Some of the more important folds of the Iron Curtain fell here, at the confluence of the Morava River and the Danube. Cross either river from what was then Czechoslovakia and there was freedom in Austria. The border was thus heavily fortified, complete with communist police and their barbed wire and their dogs.

The Morava is perhaps 15 metres wide here, a short but perilous crossing. There is a monument now to the 400 people shot dead who tried to cross. It records that Queen Elizabeth II visited in 2008, honouring their memory.

Churchill was not yet Her Late Majesty’s first prime minister when he travelled to Missouri to speak in 1946. Indeed, he was not even Sir Winston. U.S. President Harry Truman made the trip from Washington, D.C., to his home state to fete Churchill, less than a year after Churchill lost the July 1945 election. Still leader of the Opposition, Churchill was nevertheless in valedictory mode, albeit prematurely.

“The president has told you that it is his wish, as I am sure it is yours, that I should have full liberty to give my true and faithful counsel in these anxious and baffling times,” Churchill began. “I shall certainly avail myself of this freedom, and feel the more right to do so because any private ambitions I may have cherished in my younger days have been satisfied beyond my wildest dreams.”

The old man still had dreams, in fact. He returned to the premiership in 1951, and the knighthood would follow in 1953. But he spoke in 1946 with remarkable clarity about threats to peace, permitting himself to observe that had those in power paid heed to his warnings about Nazi Germany in the 1930s, war might have been avoided altogether.

Less than a year before the Iron Curtain speech, Britain, Canada and the United States were allies of the Soviet Union in war.

“I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin,” Churchill allowed, speaking of the need to “welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world.”

Nevertheless, Churchill felt obliged to “place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.”

Communist tyranny was the new threat, and thus the lapidary phrase:

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.”

Here in Devín, it is the inclusion of Vienna that resonates. Until 1955, when Austria was granted independence, Vienna was similar to Berlin, administered by the four allied powers, including the Soviet Union. In 1946, a Berlin-like future was a possibility, with perhaps a wall in Vienna, the city of the waltz.

The free world instead faced the enslaved nations along the Czechoslovakian-Austrian border, along the Morava and the Danube. From the heights of Devín Castle, it is possible to see both Bratislava, and the outskirts of Vienna in the distance. A scenic, tranquil, 45-minute catamaran ride separates them today; during the Cold War the waters were rife with suspicion and terror.

It ought to be possible to see with greater clarity here, from the heights, as clearly as Churchill did, “the two great dangers which menace the homes of the people: war and tyranny.”

Yet in Slovakia, the government prefers not to see the reality of the Russian threat, immediately to the peace and security of Ukraine, and more broadly to the peace and security of Europe.

Churchill warned in 1946 about the threat of aggressive Russian imperialism. It had survived the fall of the tsar and rise of the Bolsheviks. It has survived anew the fall of the Bolsheviks and the rise of a gangster state.

The line no longer runs between Austria and Slovakia, and Ukrainian courage these last years likely means that the line will remain far to the east. That courage is rooted in strategic wisdom and moral clarity. At the confluence of the Morava and Danube both were required for many years, and both prevailed in part because the warnings of Churchill, who had been ignored in the ’30s, were heeded in 1946.

National Post

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The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) has never been more popular than it is right now. Somewhat regrettably, this sudden WNBA craze has less to do with basketball than it does with a fresh culture war icon: Sophie Cunningham.

It started when Cunningham, that gorgeous Amazonian blonde and player for Indiana Fever, cheekily pointed her finger at an opposing player — for 22 long seconds, while maintaining eye contact — after her teammate was fouled. It was the stuff memes are made of. And it was indeed an immediate meme; even U.S. President Donald Trump’s White House staff shared a version of it on X. The WNBA then forbade brands and licensed merchandising partners from monetizing “the point” in any fashion, due to a rule about not cashing in on player conflict.

For weeks, Cunningham’s pointer finger was all over the algorithms, reminiscent of another blonde bombshell, Sydney Sweeney, and the notorious “white supremacist” blue jeans ad . Like Sweeney, Cunningham was accused — sometimes peripherally, and sometimes directly — of profiting from her skin colour and heterosexuality. “Her whiteness sells. Her whiteness and straightness in a time of nationwide anti-blackness and homophobia sell even more,” Guardian columnist Howard Bryant wrote , without a lick of evidence, of Cunningham. “She bathes in it,” he wrote.

(Is Cunningham supposed to apologize for being white and heterosexual? How could she possibly please anyone who detests her for her skin colour or sexual orientation? It’s impossible to say.)

Little did the public know, Cunningham’s pointer finger was only a prelude to a larger controversy over the inclusion of males in women’s sports.

Cunningham has been talking about protecting the women’s category since at least 2022 . She first spoke out about swimmer Lia Thomas, a biological male who competed against women — and whose University of Pennsylvania swim records were rightfully expunged in 2025, following a lawsuit and deal with the U.S. Department of Education.

But the pointing incident, and a July 2026 ESPN feature article , convinced those with woke sensitivities that Cunningham was not just a devilish white woman, but also a bona fide “ transphobe .” In the ESPN piece, Cunningham made her position explicit. “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” she said.

Cunningham has since refused to retract her statement or adjust her position in any way. “I said what I said; I think it’s kinda common sense” she told one sports reporter. The subsequent calls for her cancellation, or even expulsion from the WNBA, have been raucous — but not, however, as raucous as the legions of fans supporting Cunningham’s reality-based views on biology and fairness. It is a joy to witness.

Wherever her team, the Indiana Fever play, rallies to support Cunningham follow. Her newly-released Adidas shoes sold out — in men and women’s sizes — in less than a single day last month.

She has inspired others to make her point (figuratively): American pundit Clay Travis has offered US$10 million (C$14 million) to WNBA defending champion team, the Las Vegas Aces, if they play and beat a boy’s high school basketball team of Travis’ choice, seemingly to make the obvious point that men have biological advantages. (Whether they take up his offer or not, his objective was met.)

For her part, Cunningham has proven to be a reluctant culture warrior. She has expressed that she feels “sad” that any political controversy is overshadowing her sport. While the sentiment is understandable, Cunningham should avoid looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Like it or not, women’s sports were already politicized by the widespread inclusion of males, all the way to the Olympic level . Thousands of women and girls across the globe have lost sporting opportunities and awards to males who have no business competing against them. We have to fight back.

And Cunningham is a spectacular pugilist. She is not “politicizing” sport — at all — by defending the female category; she is, in fact, arguing for the depoliticization of sport. Sports are about bodies, not gender identities. It is a twisted and obfuscating lie to suggest that politics only entered the ring when women decided to fight back against the invasion of our sports.

I hope that Cunningham will come to embrace that she can be an icon for two reasons: her athletic talent and her enormous appeal as a defender of women’s sports. That’s nothing to feel sorry about.

National Post

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Kavita Algu, a former palliative care doctor at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, recently quit after a workplace investigator found her to be disruptive and unprofessional, which the Toronto Star would like you to believe is some kind of injustice. Judging from the Star’s own “investigation” and Algu’s activism, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

According to the Star’s investigation, Algu “was never told specifically what she did wrong.” She was just a physician who engaged in Palestinian advocacy and “ultimately felt she had no choice but to leave a career she had spent years building.”

The Star’s Shree Paradkar notes that Algu wasn’t a particularly experienced public speaker when she spoke at a Toronto rally in 2024, but that she “felt obligated to speak out about the destruction of a health-care system,” which apparently included suggesting that Israel was targeting staff and patients in hospitals and committing “genocide” against Palestinians.

Of course, this wasn’t the only time that Algu had made such accusations. Less than three months after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, Algu wrote an op-ed for Spring magazine, which refers to itself as “a magazine of socialist ideas in action,” arguing that health care in Gaza was being “specifically targeted including bombings of ambulances and hospitals and sniper attacks on medical professionals.” She then suggested that what was happening in Gaza was a “textbook case of genocide.”

Algu has made numerous posts on X that would cause most reasonable people — especially Jews working at a historically Jewish hospital that was founded because they could not get jobs and health-care services elsewhere due to antisemitism — to raise an eyebrow.

Responding to comments made by Foreign Minister Anita Anand in July 2025, Algu equated Hamas, a recognized terrorist group, with the Israeli government, writing on X: “You say ‘Hamas must release all hostages, lay down its arms and play no role in…governance’. Should Israeli government officials do the same? Some of whom are wanted by the (International Criminal Court)?”

Of course, there is no evidence that Israel is committing a “genocide” in Gaza and there has been no finding of such by any credibly international body. Moreover, the International Criminal Court prosecutor who issued those warrants for Israeli officials was forced to resign last month over a sexual-assault scandal and allegations that Qatar promised to “look after” him if he set his sights on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

More recently, in response to a BBC News report in June, Algu wrote on X: “We all watched every single hospital and university in Gaza be bombed by Israel and the entire civilian population tortured and starved — while you have been telling us the slaughter is moral and just. Of course no one trusts most mainstream news.”

These claims are absolutely false, and the suggestion that Israel is purposely starving and torturing civilians is a blood libel. I can’t imagine why Jewish health-care workers would be concerned about working alongside Algu. It’s a complete mystery.

The Israel Defence Forces, in contrast with the terrorist group Hamas, are such vicious torturers that they drop leaflets, make phone calls, leave voicemails and send text messages warning civilians to evacuate areas. If genocide is what the Israelis are up to, they appear to be horrible at it.

As for the suggestion that Israel is purposely targeting the Gazan health-care system, Hamas uses underground tunnels, sometimes in hospitals, as well ambulances as cover for its terror operations. Even the New York Times, which is not known for being particularly Israel-friendly, concluded that Hamas had been using Al-Shifa hospital for weapons storage, living quarters and communications.

As for Algu’s complaint about the mainstream media, I wonder if she is bothered by the fact that Paradkar failed to mention that she is a board member of the Movement Media Hub (MMH) . The MMH describes itself as helping activists “harness the power of media,” and provides services such as “narrative and media strategy development,” press release “writing and distribution,” “social media campaign planning,” “content creation” “media coaching” and more.

The MMH boasts that it has “secured” more than 450 news segments and pieces, over 175 spokespeople, over 75 live broadcasts and more than 45 media engagements. And now, the Toronto Star and Paradkar can add themselves to that list.

Algu can also be seen in on online video reading a message from a member of Palestine Action — a proscribed terrorist organization in the United Kingdom — outside the British Consulate in Toronto. While reading the statement, Algu admits the prisoner whose words she’s about to recite was being held under the Terrorism Act.

Suffice to say, I imagine that Mount Sinai Hospital accepted Algu’s resignation while breathing a sigh of relief.

National Post