By Obaid Omer, October 18, 2024
A growing chorus of antisemitic and anti-Western voices has spread across Canada and other democracies since the horrific October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel. These protesters, regardless of their religious or cultural backgrounds, are all singing from the same tired and twisted playbook: they condemn Israel as a colonial state that must be dismantled.
While this is music to the ears of our enemies, average Canadians are left to wonder why the Jewish people, with roots that stretch back millennia in Israel, are being labelled by these mobs as “occupiers” of their own land.
It all stems back to post-colonialism, a formerly obscure field of academic study that has since metastasized into the mainstream.
In their book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay explain how Post-Colonial Theory emerged in anti-colonial era of the 1960s.
As formerly colonized countries won their independence, a new generation of scholars began to study the impacts of “decolonization.” From the beginning, these post-colonial academics focused solely on European colonialism, while ignoring the Arab/Islamic colonizers that swept out of the Middle East and across North Africa centuries ago. For instance, the Arab conquest of North Africa in the seventh century overwhelmed the native Copt and Berber populations, who saw their culture, language, and traditions all but obliterated. Today, these cultures only exist in small pockets in a region now dominated by Arab/Islamic culture.
At the same time, leaders of the civil rights and black power movements in North America began to find common ground with Palestinian activists. They also spoke out in support of the anti-colonial movement in Algeria.
In Canada, radical separatists in Quebec – inspired by the Algerian Front de libération nationale, a socialist-Islamic guerrilla group – formed the Front de libération du Québec and launched a wave of domestic terror attacks in an effort to forcibly “decolonize” Quebec of Canada’s rule.
What post-colonialism is all about
Early scholars of post-colonialism focused on the impacts on the identities and psyches of colonized people. Frantz Fanon, a scholar of the Algerian freedom movement, went so far as to call for violence to help the colonized recover from their trauma. By the end of the 1970s, post-colonial theory took a postmodern turn. Where postmodernism sought to break down the hegemony of the West on discourse, post-colonial theory aimed to deconstruct Western colonialism – including decolonizing thought itself.
Today, post-colonial deconstruction seeks to eliminate “Western” thought and replace it with the thought of colonized people. It is taking place today at universities across the West, where “decolonizing” the curriculum has become an overriding goal – in essence, replacing the ideas of “dead white men” with those of people of colour and other “equity-deserving” marginalized groups.
Post-colonialism, Israel, and Islam
With the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Britain publicly announced support for the creation of a Jewish state. Britain was given the Mandate for Palestine by the League of Nations in 1922. There were conflicts between Arab, British and Jewish factions. In 1947, The UN formed UNSCOP and proposed a plan for Jewish and Arab states to replace the British Mandate. On May 14, 1948, Israel officially became a state. Immediately after being formed, Israel was attacked by the armies of 5 Arab nations. Israel won the war after 15 months of fighting. Israel has faced multiple wars since.
Post-colonialism activists accused Israel of being a vassal of the US while at the same time claiming that Jewish interests held dangerous sway over American politics. By the 1990s, animosity toward Israel among the extreme left had turned to outright hostility in the US and the West in general.
In addition, academics and activists began to inject the concept of “intersectionality” into their teaching, with critical race theory and other ideologies intertwining with post-colonial theory. In this framework, European colonization was inherently evil. By extension, Israel, as a “colonizer state,” deserved to be dismantled “by any means necessary.”
The October 7 terror attacks that saw Hamas use to rape, murder, and kidnapping as tools of “resistance” caused the mask to slip off post-colonialism. To post-colonialists, Hamas terrorists are freedom fighters whose every action, however vile, is justified. This insidious ideology, fuelled by outside agitators and even authoritarian regimes like Iran, Russia, and China, has infected college campus and cities across Canada and the United States.
Ironically, pro-Palestinian activists regularly ignore evidence of Arab colonization (such as the building of the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the site of a Jewish temple in the seventh to eighth centuries) while calling Israel an apartheid state that warrants destruction. To them, violence is a necessary tool to achieve decolonization and “globalize the Intifada.” And Israel isn’t the only democracy in their sights. Adherents of post-colonialism also view Canada and the US as illegitimate colonial projects to be dismantled.
A lack of political leadership
With antisemitism rising across the West, too many political leaders, especially on the progressive left, are playing both sides of the issue. Post-colonial theory has impaired their vision: they see the Middle East solely in black and white. To them, Islam is a subjugated religion, and the Palestinians are an oppressed people, ruled by Jewish colonizers.
This leads to an abdication of leadership when we need it the most. Consider the situation that arose in 2021 during pro-Palestinian protests in Montreal and Toronto. When clashes broke out between protesters and counter-protesters, Jewish Canadians were chased through the streets by a baying mob. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first reaction, however, was not to condemn the antisemitism on display. Rather, he urged Canadians to be wary of Islamophobia. This has been a common refrain both leading up to, and after, the October 7 terror attacks.
The Trudeau Liberals and the NDP under Jagmeet Singh are both heavily influenced by critical social justice ideologies, including post-colonial theory. This ideological capture causes them to ignore the ideologies’ inherent antisemitism. Repeatedly, the federal government has shown its bad judgement in this area – from hiring Laith Marouf as an “anti-racism” expert, to selecting Birju Dattani as the head of the Human Rights Commission.
Across the Middle East and North Africa, Islamic fundamentalists are using the ideology of post-colonialism to impose theocratic rule and deny their citizens of basic human rights and freedoms. These values, treasured in most of the Western world, are derided as attempts at colonization. Too many progressive academics in the West support this dangerous view.
If Canadians are serious about combatting antisemitism, they must hold their political leaders to account. Canada must reject post-colonialism and champion human rights and equality (rather than equity) for all. We must also support Israel, which continues to fight courageously for its survival, while surrounded by a sea of Islamist nations – including many countries that were themselves colonized by Arabs centuries ago.
Obaid Omer was born in India and grew up in Canada. He is an advocate for free speech and Enlightenment values and a contributing writer to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
