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I first met my future son in late 2003. I won’t call him my stepson. I have never liked the word. Stepson seems to arrive carrying centuries of rather dreadful public relations.

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Jason Arday is dead. He leaves behind a wife and children who must now bear an immeasurable loss. Whatever one thinks of his conduct, scholarship or public claims, there is nothing here to celebrate. A death is not a debating point, and grief should not be conscripted into anyone’s political campaign.

Before his death, substantial questions had been raised about Arday’s academic work, qualifications and autobiographical claims. Cambridge had begun an investigation. Students had also alleged inadequate teaching or supervision, and there were reports that student complaints were met with accusations of racism or white privilege.

Arday had apparently imbibed the poison that any criticism of a black man is always made in bad faith.

It remains important to establish who made those accusations and in what circumstances. Those are the facts to be examined. But Arday himself is no longer available to answer them.

Arday did not award himself his doctorate. He did not appoint himself to successive university positions. He did not make himself a professor at Cambridge or produce the publicity that turned his appointment into an international morality tale.

Committees approved him. Senior academics endorsed him. Administrators promoted him. Communications departments converted him into an emblem of institutional virtue.

That scrutiny cannot begin with Arday’s arrival at Cambridge. It must follow the entire chain from his undergraduate education and doctoral supervision through every appointment, promotion, reference, publication and honour that carried him there.

Each institution should disclose what it verified, what concerns it received and how it responded. Appointment records and internal correspondence should be preserved and independently reviewed. Students and faculty members must be able to give evidence without professional retaliation.

The questions are elementary. Who read his work? Who checked his qualifications? Who examined the more improbable parts of his public biography? Who dismissed earlier warnings? Who decided that further inquiry was unnecessary—or ideologically inconvenient?

Arday was institutionally useful. His biography supplied an irresistible story of adversity overcome. His appointment advertised the moral enlightenment of those who made it.

This was not colourblindness. They saw his colour perfectly well. That was part of his value to them.

If they promoted him because his identity and biography served their own reputational purposes, they did not honour him. They used him. They placed him in the institutional shop window, enjoyed the admiration his presence attracted and left him exposed when the story could no longer withstand examination.

This is why the investigation cannot be one of those ceremonial exercises designed to survive a news cycle. There must be no polished report announcing that “lessons have been learned” before everyone returns quietly to the same offices and hiring committees.

Due process is essential. No one should lose a career because of speculation, association or political disagreement. But due process is a means of determining responsibility, not a promise that nobody will be held responsible.

If an independent investigation finds that officials knowingly ignored disqualifying evidence, suppressed complaints, retaliated against students, misrepresented Arday’s record or applied standards they would not have applied to another candidate, resignations and dismissals should follow.

It would be grotesque for the institutions that profited from his ascent to treat his collapse as an unfortunate natural event for which nobody was responsible.

It also requires asking the question universities would prefer to avoid: How many more Jason Ardays are there?

This is not an invitation to suspect every Black academic. It demands that universities stop behaving in ways that cast suspicion on accomplished Black scholars who earned their positions without favour, embellishment or theatrical sponsorship.

The problem is not limited to race. It arises whenever an institution prefers an identity, biography or politically useful narrative to demonstrated ability. Qualified candidates of every background lose opportunities when committees select the person who offers administrators the most flattering story.

Meritocracy has never been perfect. It can be corrupted by patronage, inherited privilege and prejudice. The answer is to make standards fairer and more exacting—not to replace standards with ideological pageantry.

Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed that his children would “not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” Character is a demanding standard because it recognizes the complete person: virtues and failings, achievements and responsibilities, dignity and agency.

Indeed, what to make of it when criticism of a Black person is treated as presumptively racist? An accusation about the complainant's motives does not answer a complaint about poor teaching. A question about plagiarism is not resolved by examining the politics of the person who noticed it. Scholarship requires answering evidence with evidence.

To presume that Black scholars require protection from ordinary professional scrutiny is not respect. It is condescension.

It is also destructive. If every setback is persecution and every critic acts in bad faith, self-examination becomes impossible. Encouraging someone to attribute every failure to outside hostility teaches an external locus of control. Success remains his achievement, but error is always someone else’s fault.

A person who believes that nothing is his responsibility must eventually believe that nothing is within his power to change. He cannot learn from criticism because he has defined criticism as aggression. He cannot correct a mistake because acknowledging it would validate an enemy. He is left with the consoling but paralyzing identity of permanent victim.

No young person should be taught to react to adversity by asking only which prejudice caused it. Young Black men will sometimes encounter genuine racism, and they should be prepared to identify and resist it. But they must also retain the capacity to distinguish an injustice imposed from outside from a failure they possess the power to correct. Resilience depends upon both capacities.

The danger now is that Arday’s entire story will be reduced to a simple narrative in which a racist society hounded an innocent man to death. Such a narrative would be emotionally convenient and intellectually dishonest.

Nor would that narrative serve his family, Black scholarship or racial equality. It would serve those who crave the sugar rush of public righteousness: the open letter, the denunciation, the performance of solidarity and the applause of people already in agreement. These gestures cost their authors very little. Arday paid a far greater price for the institutional story constructed around him.

Jason Arday’s death is a tragedy. It neither vindicates his critics nor absolves his defenders. It is tragic because a human being is dead, children have lost their father, and a wife has lost her husband.

We should mourn him and show mercy to those who loved him. But mercy does not require falsehood, and mourning does not require silence.

Jason Arday is dead. His enablers are alive. They hold titles, occupy offices, sit on committees and continue to exercise power over students and scholars. Now some are feeding off his carcass, proclaiming that all criticism of him was driven by systemic racism.

I eagerly await Al Sharpton and other such racialized confidence men to join the feeding frenzy.

But before that the institutions that pushed Arday forward must answer for their actions.

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Introduction

History is not chemistry.

No historian possesses a master database cataloguing every siege, humanitarian corridor, civilian warning, territorial withdrawal, hostage crisis, or underground battlefield. Wars resist laboratory comparison. They differ in terrain, technology, purpose, law, and moral character. Historians can identify precedents and patterns; they cannot reduce human conflict to a controlled experiment.

That is the necessary qualification. It should not become an excuse for refusing comparison altogether.

Not every feature of Israel’s war against Hamas is literally without precedent.

Tunnel warfare has precedents. Urban warfare has precedents. Hostage-taking and humanitarian corridors have precedents. The argument is that modern history offers few, if any, conflicts in which so many extraordinary features have appeared simultaneously—and none in which a democracy confronting them has been subjected to quite the same combination of military expectations, moral suspicion, and historical amnesia.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and associated armed groups crossed Israel’s border under cover of thousands of rockets. Approximately 1,200 people were killed and 251 abducted into Gaza. Entire communities were overrun. Families were slaughtered in their homes. Children and elderly people were dragged into captivity. Sexual violence was committed. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and the most extensive hostage crisis in Israel’s history.

Instead, the moral chronology began to dissolve almost at once. The massacre receded into the background while the response moved to the foreground. The invasion became “context”; the counteroffensive became the crime requiring explanation. Israel’s right of self-defence was ceremonially affirmed and then surrounded by expectations that threatened to render it unusable.

The framework for the war in Gaza is not counter-terrorism; it is war. The war in Gaza is arguably a unique challenge in the history of war. No urban battle had an adversary spend twenty years preparing for battle. No army has had a strategy where the enemy wants their own civilians to be killed so as to maximize their propaganda value. No army has ever forced its civilians to stay in the combat zone like Gaza, where Egypt notably did not allow non-combatants to cross the southern border into the massive Sinai Desert.

What follows is not an argument for Israeli perfection. It is an inquiry into historical exception.

Almost no Western government denied Israel’s right to defend itself. Most affirmed it explicitly. The expectation imposed upon Israel was stranger: it could defend itself, provided the defence did not produce the consequences historically associated with war, especially with urban war.

Israel was expected to destroy a heavily armed terrorist organization embedded beneath one of the world’s densest urban environments, recover hostages hidden underground, protect its soldiers, distinguish combatants who frequently wore no uniform, and somehow avoid civilian deaths on a scale no army has achieved in comparable urban warfare.

The world did not merely ask Israel to obey the laws of war. It expected something approaching a surgical operation against an enemy that had deliberately designed the battlefield to make surgery impossible.

No army has demonstrated an ability to fight an underground urban enemy without killing civilians. The United States could not do so in Fallujah. The coalition could not do so in Mosul. Russia did not seriously attempt it in Grozny. The battles for Manila, Hue, Aleppo, Raqqa, and Mariupol all left civilians dead and cities in ruins.

Yet Gaza presented challenges even those battles did not. Military historian and urban warfare expert John Spencer has argued that no modern army has ever confronted a battlefield in which an enemy constructed hundreds of kilometres of tunnels beneath a densely populated city, prevented much of the civilian population from taking shelter within them, booby-trapped entrances, and repeatedly emerged from beneath hospitals, schools, mosques, apartment buildings, and other civilian infrastructure to attack before disappearing underground again.

The International Committee of the Red Cross states the matter with bleak simplicity: urban warfare kills, injures, and displaces more civilians—and destroys more essential infrastructure—than fighting in open terrain. That is why urban warfare is feared.

The relevant question is not whether every Israeli action was wise or lawful. It is whether any democracy has defeated a comparable enemy while achieving the casualty standard Israel was expected to meet—and whether those demanding such an achievement can identify the military method by which it could have been accomplished.

“Surgical” is not a strategy. It is an adjective employed by people spared the obligation of explaining the operation.

The military expectations imposed upon Israel were extraordinary for another reason. No modern war has ever made the distinction between combatants and civilians a central battleground of propaganda.

Under the law of armed conflict, civilians lose their protection from direct attack while they take a direct part in hostilities. A man or woman carrying ammunition to a fighting position, transporting weapons, firing rockets, acting as a lookout, or emerging from a tunnel to attack soldiers is not rendered a civilian simply because he or she wears jeans and is 14, 15, 16 or 17 years old.

Yet throughout the Gaza war, Hamas frequently asserted that those killed were civilians, often without distinguishing fighters from non-combatants. Those figures were then repeated around the world before any independent verification could occur. The result was a conflict in which the debate often shifted away from military conduct itself and toward competing casualty narratives.

The informational environment was equally unprecedented. Approximately one-fifth of Hamas’s rockets are estimated by Israeli and other military assessments to have fallen short and landed inside Gaza itself. Those failures posed an obvious danger to Gaza’s own population. Yet in the public narrative, almost every explosion was instinctively attributed to Israel, while comparatively little attention was paid to the casualties and destruction caused by misfired Palestinian rockets or by Hamas’s own military practices.

Spencer argues that the closest historical comparison is not a counter-insurgency campaign but the Battle of Manila in 1945. There, approximately 35,000 American troops fought some 17,000 entrenched Japanese defenders while attempting to liberate thousands of prisoners of war and civilians trapped inside the city. By the battle’s end, roughly 100,000 civilians had been killed, and much of Manila lay in ruins.

Few historians regard those civilian deaths as evidence that the United States lacked the right to destroy the Japanese garrison. Rather, they are understood as one of the terrible realities of urban warfare.

The same historical amnesia surrounds many other conflicts.

During the Korean War, civilian deaths are estimated in the millions over three years of fighting, averaging well over 50,000 deaths per month. During the Somali civil war and the humanitarian catastrophe of the early 1990s, between 200,000 and 300,000 civilians died from violence, famine, and state collapse despite repeated international relief efforts, including those led by the United Nations.

These catastrophes rightly received attention, yet they never produced the sustained global protest movement, continuous social-media mobilization, or singular moral focus directed at Israel.

None of this establishes that every Israeli military decision was correct. Democracies remain accountable for the lawful use of force. But it raises a question critics rarely answer. If Israel was expected to defeat Hamas while avoiding civilian casualties on a scale unprecedented in the history of comparable urban warfare, what operational method would have achieved that result? Condemning the outcome is not enough. One must also explain the alternative.

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Conquering powers have sometimes returned territory, usually through negotiated settlements, military pressure, or imperial collapse. It would therefore be foolish to claim that Israel alone has relinquished land. It is equally foolish to repeat the caricature of a state pathologically incapable of withdrawal.

Under its peace treaty with Egypt, Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula, including settlements, air bases, oil fields, and an enormous strategic buffer acquired after repeated wars. The territory was several times Israel's size. The treaty required the withdrawal of all Israeli armed forces and civilians and the restoration of full Egyptian sovereignty.

Israel later withdrew from southern Lebanon. In 2005, it dismantled every Israeli settlement and permanent military installation in Gaza, forcibly removing thousands of its own citizens. Under the Oslo process, it transferred substantial governing authority to the Palestinian Authority.

Returning strategically valuable land is not the normal reflex of victorious states.

Victors generally consolidate their gains until compelled to surrender them. Russia has not returned Crimea as a confidence-building experiment. China does not regard Tibet as a negotiable inconvenience. Turkey has not withdrawn from northern Cyprus. Morocco has not abandoned its claim to Western Sahara.

Israel relinquished territory repeatedly in the hope that land might be exchanged for peace. The result was not always peace. From Gaza came Hamas rule, rocket fire, tunnel construction, and ultimately October 7.

Advance warnings are not an Israeli invention. International humanitarian law requires effective warning when circumstances permit, and other armies have issued warnings in previous conflicts. A warning does not automatically make a subsequent attack lawful. It must be meaningful, civilians must have a realistic opportunity to seek safety, and those who remain do not forfeit their civilian status.

What is unusual is the scale and variety of the warning system Israel developed over successive Gaza conflicts: telephone calls, text messages, leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, social-media announcements, mapped evacuation zones, designated humanitarian routes, and notices preceding major operations.

An International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) case study of the 2014 Gaza conflict observed that the IDF frequently communicated warnings through multiple channels simultaneously, at times taking precautions beyond reliance on a single method.

A warning does not reach only the mother gathering up her children. It also reaches the fighter moving his weapons, the commander relocating his headquarters, and the hostage-taker shifting his captives. Every warning that protects civilians also diminishes surprise and may confer a military advantage upon the very force being targeted. Israel repeatedly accepted that trade-off in an effort to reduce civilian casualties.

Humanitarian corridors are not unprecedented. Civilians have been evacuated through negotiated passages from eastern Aleppo, Mariupol, Sumy, and other battlefields.

Such corridors can save lives. They can also fail, be attacked, or become instruments of coercion. Their creation never relieves an army of its duty to protect civilians who remain.

What is unusual in Gaza is the sustained expectation that Israel must create, protect, and continually rearrange evacuation routes and humanitarian zones inside territory governed by the enemy while preventing that enemy from exploiting them.

A route intended to save civilians can also become a route through which fighters escape. Combatants can enter a humanitarian zone without a uniform. A pause intended to permit civilian movement can allow Hamas to move weapons, relocate commanders, prepare ambushes, or conceal hostages elsewhere.

Israel was expected to create the corridors, protect the people using them, prevent Hamas from exploiting them, and guarantee that no subsequent military necessity would alter their status.

Humanitarian corridors save lives. That should count morally. In Israel’s case, attempts to create them often seemed to generate another category of accusation.

Again, the point is not that Israel’s corridors were flawless. The effort itself was exceptional in scale and duration, particularly when directed toward civilians living among an enemy that treated their presence as a military resource.

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During conflict, countries have permitted humanitarian relief to reach enemy-held territory. Wartime relief has precedents, and international law imposes duties concerning humanitarian access.

Nevertheless, the underlying situation remains extraordinary. During substantial phases of the war, Israel facilitated the entry of food, medicine, fuel, water, and other supplies into territory governed by the organization it was fighting. Aid passed through crossings inspected or operated with Israeli involvement while Israeli soldiers were fighting and dying only miles away.

Did Nazi Germany feed occupied France? Germany extracted enormous resources from France and imposed burdens that contributed to deprivation. Did conventional armies normally provision the populations governed by their enemies while battles continued? More often, war brought sieges, blockades, requisitions, and deliberate exhaustion.

Israel was required simultaneously to destroy Hamas and sustain humanitarian access to the society Hamas governed, a society that polling consistently showed supported Hamas.

Israel had to offer resources to a population among whom its enemy lived, recruited, taxed, and exercised coercive power. Israel had to offer aid to a population that hid hostages amongst them. But aid was necessary because civilians needed it; it was vulnerable to diversion because Hamas remained the governing armed organization.

If Israel inspected aid, it was accused of obstruction. If aid entered and Hamas or criminal groups appropriated it, Israel was blamed for its distribution. If too little arrived, Israel was condemned. If more arrived, the increased flow was treated not as mitigation but as an admission of prior guilt.

Every modern conflict produces propaganda. Democracies exaggerate and conceal. Dictatorships lie. Terrorist organizations lie.

What is unusual is not that Hamas produced propaganda. The remarkable development is that institutions governed by a designated terrorist organization became routine sources of factual claims for journalists, activists, universities, and members of the public.

During the campaign against ISIS, few serious observers treated an ISIS ministry as a disinterested civil authority. Nazi communiqués were not repeated by Allied broadcasters as presumptively neutral statistics. Saddam Hussein’s government was not granted automatic credibility merely because it issued information through an office bearing an administrative title. His pronouncements became sources of ridicule.

Yet claims originating in Hamas-controlled Gaza repeatedly travelled through Western media before their origins or evidentiary limitations could catch up with them. In recorded history, there has never been an ongoing battle in which ongoing counts of non-combatants were formulated; it is an artificial construct designed for maximum propaganda value.

The initial reporting about the explosion at Al-Ahli hospital offered the most spectacular example. An immediate claim that Israel had struck the hospital and killed hundreds swept around the world. Canada’s government immediately condemned Israel. Protests erupted, embassies were attacked, and political meetings were cancelled before later visual evidence and intelligence assessments showed that it was a Palestinian terrorist cell that had fired the missile that had killed their own people.

The correction walked. The accusation had already flown.

The extraordinary development was not merely that Hamas generated propaganda. It was that so many Western institutions seemed eager to outsource their skepticism.

History has produced many terrorist organizations. Some attracted political sympathizers and romantic admirers. The Red Army Faction, ETA, the Shining Path, the Tamil Tigers, the IRA, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and others each attracted defenders or apologists somewhere.

What remains extraordinary is the degree to which sympathy for Hamas, or euphemistic descriptions of its violence, became normalized within parts of elite Western culture.

Its slogans appeared at universities. Its massacre was “contextualized” before bodies had been identified. A pro-Hamas social media and anti-Israel propaganda campaign was set up well before Israel responded to the massacre of its civilians.

But Hamas’ violence was described as resistance by people who would never have extended the same indulgence to ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, or a white-supremacist organization.

Professors at universities were not only publicly proclaiming Hamas support, but administrations like the University of Guelph treated criticism of support for a terrorist organization as somehow verboten. In spite of calls for violence against Jews, which included “Intifada now” or “Export the intifada,” governments, police forces and university administrations pretend that such threats were passive and political.

At some demonstrations, the moral energy was directed less toward the release of kidnapped civilians than toward the country from which they had been taken. The hostages became a distraction. The massacre became an awkward preface. Hamas dissolved into an abstraction called “resistance,” stripped of its charter, methods, hostages, tunnels, and dead.

The question is why a designated terrorist organization responsible for the deliberate slaughter and abduction of civilians acquired a degree of moral ambiguity in institutions that would have treated comparable violence elsewhere as self-evidently fascistic; it reeks of bad faith.

Historical ignorance explains part of it. Social media explains another part. So does the seduction of the oppressor-and-oppressed template, under which one party is assigned permanent agency and the other permanent innocence.

Once Israel had been designated the oppressor, almost anything done against Israelis could be recategorized as resistance. The act's actual nature became secondary to the political identity of its victim.

That is not moral reasoning. It is the distribution of innocence and guilt according to tribe.

This may be the most extraordinary feature of all.

Israel was invaded on October 7. Its border was breached. Its civilians were massacred and abducted. The organization responsible pledged to repeat the attack. As has often been stated, what happened to Israel is the same as if 45,000 Americans in Michigan were suddenly massacred in an invasion from north of the border. One expects Trump's reaction to have been unrestrained violence.

Yet within days, the invaded country was increasingly portrayed as the principal aggressor. The massacre became background. The response became foreground. The invasion became context. The counterattack became history.

The chronology itself dissolved.

No one would have described the United States as the initiator of war with Imperial Japan because American bombs later fell upon Japanese cities. Britain did not become the invader when it expelled Argentina from the Falkland Islands. Kuwait did not become the aggressor because a coalition removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwaiti territory.

Israel alone seemed required to defend not only every military decision but the moral legitimacy of responding at all. Its right of self-defence was affirmed in principle and withdrawn in practice through the cumulative imposition of impossible conditions.

It could fight Hamas, but not where Hamas was located. It could destroy the tunnels, but not damage what Hamas had built them beneath. It could rescue hostages, but not take the military risks that rescue entailed. It could warn civilians, but the warnings themselves became incriminating. It could facilitate aid, but every deficiency in distribution remained its sole responsibility. It could establish corridors, but it could not guarantee either their exploitation by Hamas or the future safety of every destination. It could defeat its enemy, provided the enemy’s strategy imposed no human cost.

This is not a military standard. It is a demand for paralysis.

Perhaps future historians will discover that Franklin Roosevelt should have thanked Imperial Japan for exposing weaknesses in American naval preparedness. Perhaps Britain ought to have apologized to Argentina for resisting the occupation of the Falkland Islands. Perhaps Kuwait’s principal error was objecting too vigorously to Saddam Hussein’s innovative approach to border adjustment.

Until then, the disappearance of October 7 from the moral chronology deserves explanation.

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Taken individually, the features of this war have historical precedents.

Taken together, they form one of the most unusual military and political situations in modern history: a democracy invaded; approximately 1,200 people killed and 251 abducted; the enemy entrenched beneath a dense civilian environment in hundreds of miles of tunnels; combatants frequently indistinguishable by uniform; children drawn into the moral and military catastrophe; hostages hidden beneath the battlefield; civilians warned through multiple technologies; humanitarian corridors and evacuation zones created and revised during combat; aid facilitated into enemy-governed territory; strategically valuable land previously relinquished; terrorist propaganda treated as routine administrative reporting; and the invaded state transformed, with astonishing speed, into the sole defendant before the court of enlightened opinion.

This is not an argument for national sainthood. Nations are not saints, and war is not an arena in which sainthood is ordinarily available.

It is an argument about exception.

History does not require us to acquit Israel of every charge. It does require us to compare like with like.

They are instruments of condemnation. If every attempt to reduce civilian suffering becomes further evidence of guilt, the argument is no longer about conduct. If no territorial withdrawal counts, no warning mitigates, no corridor saves, no aid delivery matters, no hostage complicates, and no enemy tactic affects the judgment, then the verdict preceded the evidence.

One may condemn particular Israeli actions. One may oppose its government, its strategy, or the war itself. But one should at least possess the intellectual honesty to confront the war Israel was actually fighting.

It was not a surgical procedure conducted in a vacant operating theatre. It was an underground urban war against an irregular army embedded among civilians, governing the territory, holding hundreds of captives, and drawing political advantage from the death of the population beneath which it fought.

That war was going to be terrible for whoever fought it.

The exceptional demand was that Israel alone make it otherwise.

If this assessment is even substantially correct, another question follows. Why has the Middle East’s only liberal democracy become the bête noire of so much of the Western academy, so many international institutions, and so much activist culture? Why are actions that would be tragic necessities in one war presented as singular crimes in another?

No single answer can command certainty. Yet three explanations seem difficult to ignore.

The first is that anti-Semitism did not disappear. It adapted. Long before the State of Israel existed, Jews had been expelled, enslaved, segregated, persecuted, and massacred across successive civilizations. The language changes with the centuries. The habit of exceptionalizing Jews has proved remarkably resilient. That history does not explain every criticism of Israel, nor should it immunize Israel from criticism.

It does, however, make it intellectually reckless to assume that the world’s only Jewish state is judged in complete isolation from two thousand years of inherited prejudice.

The second is the great paradox of the information age. Never has humanity possessed greater access to knowledge, yet genuine understanding often appears to be receding. Information is not wisdom. Access is not comprehension.

Imagine being told that somewhere within a vast continent lie rare but immense deposits of gold, oil, and minerals. If you wander the landscape at random, occasionally striking the ground wherever your eye happens to fall, you are unlikely to discover much of value. The wealth is there, but without maps, geology, and disciplined method, abundance becomes confusion.

The digital world is much the same. The internet contains extraordinary scholarship alongside propaganda, fabrication, half-truths, emotional manipulation, and endless distraction. Those without historical foundations do not merely fail to find the truth; they often become convinced they have found it. The problem is no longer a shortage of information. It is an excess of informational noise.

That helps explain a remarkable paradox. Public discussion of Israel has never been more abundant, yet elementary historical knowledge often remains surprisingly thin.

Many who speak confidently about the conflict know little of Israel’s repeated territorial concessions, rejected peace proposals, the legal and historical claims of both peoples, the political divisions within Palestinian society, or the rights enjoyed by Arab citizens of Israel. Facts without context become raw material for narratives rather than instruments of understanding.

The third explanation is the power of narrative itself. Modern wars are fought not only with missiles and rifles but with stories. Hamas and the broader Islamist movements surrounding it have understood this for decades. The battle for international opinion is not incidental to the conflict; it is one of its principal theatres. In the age of social media, images outrun history, slogans outrun evidence, and moral archetypes outrun careful analysis.

The simple story almost always defeats the complicated truth. Hamas and its parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, have proven to be master propagandists.

Nor has this narrative spread through social media alone. It has found sympathetic audiences across parts of academia, segments of the media, activist organizations, labour unions, and international institutions. Over many years, it has claimed intellectual territory. Once a narrative becomes culturally dominant, people often recruit evidence to defend it rather than test it.

None of this proves that Israel is always right. Democracies deserve criticism, and Israel is no exception. But it does suggest that the extraordinary hostility directed toward Israel cannot be explained by military conduct alone.

If Israel is judged by standards that history has never required of any other democracy, then the question is no longer merely what Israel has done. It is why Israel alone is expected to do what no nation has ever been able to do.

The answer is unlikely to be found in a single cause. Instead, it lies at the intersection of an ancient prejudice, an information age drowning in noise, and the extraordinary power of modern political storytelling.

Only by recognizing all three can we begin to understand why one of the most historically exceptional wars of the modern era has so often been transformed into history’s simplest morality play.

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The Jason Arday affair is not primarily the story of Jason Arday. He has already been subjected to an immense and increasingly personal public examination. There is no particular valour in joining a mob after it has identified the safest available man upon whom to pile.

But to be safe, if it comes out that Arday claims to have been raised by racist wolves, please note that this did not happen.

But the more important story concerns the institutions surrounding him.

Arday did not award himself an undergraduate degree, two master’s degrees or a doctorate. He did not supervise and examine his own dissertation. He did not appoint himself at Roehampton, Durham, Glasgow or Cambridge. He did not peer-review his own articles, issue his own honorary degrees, compose every admiring university biography or declare himself an exceptional scholar. He did not force publishers and journalists to repeat his athletic, charitable and professional achievements until repetition acquired the appearance of proof.

Other people did all of that.

Professors did it. Supervisors did it. External examiners did it. Appointment panels did it. Journal editors, publishers, public-relations departments, honorary-degree committees and senior university administrators did it. These were not bewildered strangers approached at a bus stop. They were credentialled professionals whose authority rests upon their supposed ability to examine evidence, test claims and distinguish scholarship from assertion.

The villain of this story is therefore not Jason Arday. The villain is the academic culture that enabled him, elevated him and found his story so irresistibly flattering to its own moral vanity that truth became an administrative inconvenience.

Perhaps Arday is a fantasist. The accumulating pattern makes the question legitimate. But a fantasist can fantasize alone. It takes a university system to award the fantasy a doctorate, a professorship, a book contract, a ceremonial robe and a press release.

It takes a university system to create this Hogarthian picture of madness. The only thing we are missing is the abundant gin.

A Biography Too Magnificent to Examine

Arday’s original story was already remarkable. He has said that he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delay as a child, did not speak until 11 and learned to read and write at 18. He subsequently completed university degrees and rose to become Cambridge’s youngest black professor.

That story required no additional ornament. Yet the ornaments arrived in battalions.

He was reported to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, continuing after a seizure and an apparent leg fracture. He said he ran 300 miles in three days on a treadmill. He was credited with running 600 miles in six days, an achievement that would place him among the most formidable multiday endurance athletes in recorded history. He claimed to be a professional footballer and snooker player.

Arday reported charitable fundraising increased from £1 million to more than £3 million and eventually to approximately £5 million or £5.5 million.

Biographical accounts associated him with Seven Up!, the famous documentary series that began more than 20 years before he was born.

Then there are Arday’s accounts of racist persecution.

He described a masked intruder confronting him inside a Cambridge faculty building and later threatening him with a knife. After an earlier alleged intrusion, enhanced CCTV was reportedly installed and a panic alarm placed in his office. Yet the supposed armed intruder was not captured by the cameras, no one else appears to have seen him, and the alarm reportedly brought no security response. Arday nevertheless maintained that the encounter occurred.

He also described a severed pig’s head being delivered to his parents’ home and said police questioned local butchers. Reporters later found no photograph of the object, while police reportedly disputed the account of the investigation. Arday has stood by his broader description of racist threats and harassment.

Walter Mitty Finds an Appointments Committee

James Thurber’s Walter Mitty escapes an ordinary and rather disappointing life through heroic fantasies. In his imagination he is an ace pilot, a brilliant surgeon, a fearless military commander and the master of every emergency. Mitty is not evil. There is something almost tender about him. Fantasy supplies the courage and grandeur that reality has withheld.

The crucial point is that Mitty’s adventures remain inside his head.

No medical school appoints him professor of surgery because he imagined performing a miraculous operation. No defence ministry commissions him because he daydreamed about commanding a bomber. No university issues an announcement celebrating his distinguished service in several wars that occurred only while his wife was shopping.

The comedy in the Arday affair lies not in the possibility of fantasy but in its institutional certification.

Mitty may imagine himself a great man. The university supplies the title, the robes, the photographer, the office and the citation.

That changes the target of the satire. The central object of ridicule is no longer the dreamer. It is the solemn committee awarding academic credit for the dream.

Arday may have exaggerated achievements. Only universities could transform those achievements into credentials. He may have supplied questionable scholarship and plagiarized horrible material, committing a double sin. Only supervisors, examiners and editors could certify it as knowledge.

A man can embroider his biography. It takes an institution to upholster a professorial chair with it.

Liverpool John Moores and the Doctorate

Cambridge was the final and most prestigious stop, but it was not the beginning.

Arday completed his doctorate at Liverpool John Moores University. A doctorate is not a decorative certificate awarded in recognition of adversity overcome, nor should it ever become a DEI participation trophy. It is supposed to certify that its holder has demonstrated mastery of a field and the capacity to conduct rigorous, original scholarship.

The ironies here now overlap almost beyond parody. Arday rose to extraordinary prominence as a sociologist despite apparently never having taken a sociology course. Perhaps that would not have mattered anyway, since he has also claimed that, shortly before defending his doctoral dissertation, he suffered memory loss so severe that his knowledge had effectively been wiped clean.

Thus we arrive at the remarkable spectacle of a man obtaining a doctorate after claiming to have lost the knowledge required to defend it, subsequently becoming a professor in a discipline he apparently never formally studied, and eventually being celebrated by one of the world’s most prestigious universities as a leading authority in that very field. At some point, the interesting question ceases to be how Jason Arday managed this. The far more interesting question is what, precisely, the institutions examining, credentialling, hiring and promoting him thought they were doing.

A PhD is supposed to certify that the holder can conduct original research, handle evidence honestly, understand relevant scholarship and produce work capable of surviving expert scrutiny.

That process requires supervisors, internal oversight and external examination. The candidate presents the work, but the university certifies it.

Liverpool John Moore University investigated allegations concerning Arday’s doctorate and did not uphold findings of plagiarism or academic misconduct. It characterized the problems it identified as honest or reasonable errors.

Arday shows no evidence of competence; his students complained he was hopeless, frequently AWOL and, when students would press Arday for meaningful feedback, he would retreat to the safe harbour of DEI advocates - he would impugn the accusers’ motives; they were obviously racist.

But an institutional investigation does not answer every intellectual question merely by announcing that the institution has investigated itself. Who supervised the work? Who examined it? How were the extensive textual similarities evaluated? What standard distinguished an honest mistake from a failure of attribution? Were the alleged parallels examined individually or as a cumulative pattern?

How did a doctorate containing so many disputed passages, self-enforcing loops of Critical Race Theory (CRT) gibberish, not to mention spelling mistakes, become the foundation of an accelerated academic career?

The Academic Relay Race

After Liverpool John Moores came a succession of institutions.

Arday held academic positions at Roehampton and Durham before becoming a professor at Glasgow and then moving to Cambridge. Each institution inherited a record already authenticated by the institutions before it. Each new appointment gave the earlier ones additional credibility.

Roehampton could assume Liverpool John Moores had examined the doctorate. Durham could assume Roehampton had evaluated the scholar. Glasgow could assume Durham had performed due diligence.

Cambridge could look upon Glasgow’s professorship as evidence that somebody, somewhere, must have read the work.

This is how institutional reputation becomes a relay race in which nobody examines the baton. Each university simply passed along the same greasy lump of DEI gristle, congratulating itself on its moral refinement while never asking whether there was any intellectual meat attached to it.

Each university trusts the prestige conferred by the previous university. The candidate rises higher, and the increasing height becomes evidence that the ascent must have been deserved. By the time he reaches Cambridge, questioning the original foundation appears almost eccentric.

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The comparison is imperfect. The institutional reflex is strikingly familiar.

Nathan Cofnas is the Cambridge philosopher whose investigation brought the Jason Arday controversy into public view.

That sequence matters, because before Cofnas began scrutinizing a professor Cambridge had celebrated, Cambridge had scrutinized Cofnas.

Cofnas wrote a Substack essay with empirical claims about measurable admissions criteria for black students at Harvard; there was no racial insult.

Complaints followed. Cambridge subjected Cofnas to a lengthy disciplinary investigation, and Cambridge college Emmanuel College. Cambridge’s investigation eventually reached an awkward conclusion: his published views had violated neither the law nor the university’s free-speech regulations. But he was fired anyway.

Cofnas then began examining Professor Jason Arday, one of Britain’s most celebrated academic success stories. He published evidence alleging extensive plagiarism in Arday’s doctoral dissertation and raised other questions about his academic record. Major newspapers entered the story. Cambridge fought back and only opened further investigations under intense media scrutiny. Arday ultimately resigned without admitting any wrongdoing.

Watching this unfold, I was struck by an imperfect Canadian parallel: my own.

What the comparison is—and is not

The most important qualification should come first.

Jason Arday did not cause Nathan Cofnas to be investigated or removed from Emmanuel College. In my case, Professor Wael Ramadan helped initiate and advance the process that eventually cost me my academic employment.

That is a major difference. I do not want to conceal it.

Nor am I comparing the allegations against the two men. I am not accusing Ramadan of plagiarism, fabrication or academic incompetence. The conduct at issue is entirely different.

Cambridge and the University of Guelph are also not remotely comparable institutions. Cambridge sits at the summit of world academia. Guelph-Humber, where I taught as a sessional lecturer, occupies a much more modest place - and in the last two years it has slipped considerably, abandoning committment to teaching quality while focusing on revenue maximization and keeping students happy with soft grading.

Arday became an international story. Mine remains a relatively obscure Canadian academic dispute.

The parallel is not personal, institutional or academic equivalence. It is a parallel in institutional machinery.

In both stories, controversial expressions triggered an energetic university response. In both, the institution had formal commitments to lawful expression. In both, complaints framed the expression partly through its alleged effect on protected groups. And in both, the institution appeared far more willing to scrutinize the controversial speaker than to examine whether its own procedures, priorities and favoured narratives were being applied consistently.

The question connecting the cases is therefore not whether Ramadan “is” Arday or whether I “am” Cofnas.

It is this:

What happens to a university’s commitment to free speech when that commitment collides with DEI priorities, reputational self-protection and institutional ideology? Free speech becomes decorative.

My case began with a private social-media exchange.

I responded to a man in Pakistan and said, in substance, that if he stood with Hamas, he stood with Nazis. I based that comparison on Hamas’s origins in the Muslim Brotherhood and on the documented history of collaboration, shared antisemitism and ideological affinity linking important Brotherhood figures and allies to Nazi Germany.

The recipient was not my student. The comment was not delivered to a class. It was not university teaching, and no student received it from me.

Yet the exchange was transformed into an allegation that I had violated students’ human rights.

I also maintain that the university never possessed an authentic copy of the complete original exchange. The post to which I responded disappeared, and what circulated was an altered or incomplete screenshot of my comment.

Nevertheless, the institutional machinery came roaring to life.

I was suspended. Like Cofnas, an outside lawyer ‘investigator’ was retained. The process stretched across close to two years. During that time, I was interviewed once. The lawyer, Gita Anand of the gunslinging law firm Sherrard Kuzz, was hostile, rude, and hysterical. She made ludicrious accusations of me somehow - before I knew of the man’s existence - posting anti semitic images on his LinkedIN.

It was like being interviewed by a lunatic.

I was ultimately dismissed from my academic employment without a meaningful hearing or appeal. The university encouraged an ugly and cruel defamation campaign against me.

Throughout the process, I kept raising one inconvenient subject: free speech.

Both the University of Guelph and Humber College publish commitments to freedom of expression. I cited those commitments and repeatedly asked how my treatment could be reconciled with them. I received no reply. I am not sure that anyone in administration is aware that they have a free speech policy; perhaps it sits lonely in an unclicked corner of their website.

And then there was Wael Ramadan

This is where the institutional parallel becomes uncomfortable.

After Cambridge scrutinized Cofnas, Cofnas turned his attention to an academic whom Cambridge had celebrated. After the University of Guelph scrutinized me, I began documenting public material bearing the name of a professor whom I believed the institution had treated very differently.

The material I collected under Ramadan’s name includes depictions of Jews with Hitler moustaches; descriptions of Jews as subhuman or devil worshippers; claims assigning collective Jewish responsibility for the Holocaust; and posts or reposts that I interpret as supporting or praising Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Readers need not accept my characterization. The underlying posts should be examined directly.

Journalist John Ivison also reported that a concerned member of the Sheridan College community contacted him about Ramadan’s online statements concerning Israel. Other published reporting has described allegations from students concerning remarks about Jews and Israel in the classroom. Ramadan has a long track record; he is an exemplar for the antisemitic professor.

Jewish students and I submitted three human-rights complaints concerning Ramadan. They were dismissed without any apparent review. Ramadan remains employed.

My private political comment to a person in Pakistan allegedly violated the human rights of students who never received it. That justified suspension, organized institutional defamation, a rubber stamp of an external investigator and a process lasting nearly two years that ended in my termination.

Yet the complaints that Jewish students and I submitted concerning a colleague’s public material were dismissed without anything approaching the process imposed upon me.

The role of DEI

Both cases expose what happens when political fashion and diversity bureaucracy are permitted to outrank neutral rules. The scandal is not merely that Cofnas and I encountered severe standards. It is that the standards appeared only when required—and disappeared when they became inconvenient.

Cambridge eventually concluded that Cofnas’s published views violated neither the law nor its own free-speech regulations. This vindication arrived with exquisite academic timing: after his Emmanuel College affiliation was already gone. The verdict pronounced him innocent; the machinery had already administered the sentence.

My experience was cruder. I repeatedly cited the institutions’ published commitments to freedom of expression. The University of Guelph, Humber College and Guelph-Humber responded with the eloquence of a locked filing cabinet. Not one official offered a substantive explanation of how those protections applied to me. They did not rebut my argument. They shunned the person making it.

The institutions proceeded as though their own policies were decorative Latin mottos and their human-rights obligations optional reading. Process was not followed so much as driven over.

The complaint advanced by Vice-Provost Melanie Spence-Ariemma—the senior administrator who helped initiate the proceedings against me—was, in my view, an incoherent catalogue of assertions, emotion and conclusions unsupported by evidence. Yet it was treated not as an allegation requiring proof but as a verdict awaiting paperwork.

The Muslim Students’ Association was offended. Wael Ramadan was offended. The DEI machinery had acquired its victim, and from that moment innocence became a procedural inconvenience.

Bill Rosehart, then the University of Guelph’s provost, terminated my employment without ever speaking to me. My hearing was cancelled. My appeals, I maintain, were not meaningfully considered. He has since become president of the University of Waterloo—a promotion that invites an awkward question about how rigorously universities investigate the judgment of those they appoint to investigate everyone else.

The continued employment of Spence-Ariemma raises an equally serious question. My allegation is not merely that she pursued the dismissal of someone who had condemned a terrorist organization, nor merely that she ignored evidence concerning Ramadan’s public statements about Jews and Israel. It is that the process she helped set in motion was accompanied by what I believe became a cruel and professionally devastating campaign of falsehoods.

Within hours of my suspension, a grotesque alternative explanation was reportedly moving from staff and faculty to students: that I had been arrested and that some hidden offence explained my removal. I possess contemporaneous evidence that this story was circulating. No administrator warned me, sought my account or publicly corrected it. In one of the few times they responded, they outright refused to deal with outright lies.

Falsehood had achieved what due process could not: a conviction without the tedious expense of a charge.

Meanwhile, academics who embodied a diversity narrative valuable to the institution appeared to receive patience, indulgence and protection unavailable to their critics.

That is the parallel.

Not that Jason Arday arranged Nathan Cofnas’s removal. He did not.

Not that the allegations concerning Arday and Ramadan are identical. They are not.

The parallel is the institutional culture: free speech treated as conditional, complaint procedures converted into political instruments, and nominally neutral standards applied according to the identity of the accused and the ideological usefulness of the accuser.

The policies remained equal. Only the people ceased to be.

The enormous difference

The Canadian story diverges from Cambridge because Cofnas succeeded in forcing the Arday controversy into public view.

Once major media organizations began examining the allegations, Cambridge could no longer treat the matter as an obscure internal problem. The spotlight became enormous. Cambridge opened investigations. Arday resigned while disputing the campaign against him.

Nothing remotely comparable has happened in my case.

There is an obvious reason. This is not Cambridge. I am a bit of a nobody. Outside of the National Post, major Canadian media is decidedly prejudiced against Israel. The CBC waxes lyrical about the indignity of a paramedic being fired for the grotesque accusation of the IDF luring and shooting toddlers but will not touch a man fired for condeming a designated terrorist organisation.

But Arday’s prominence made him an international story in a way that Ramadan was never likely to become.

The different levels of scrutiny may help explain the different endings.

Cambridge eventually had to look.

Two different endings

Nathan Cofnas was investigated for controversial speech. He then investigated Jason Arday. The resulting evidence attracted international attention, and the institutionally celebrated professor eventually faced renewed scrutiny and resigned.

My story ends differently.

I was investigated. I was suspended. I lost my academic employment. My complaints concerning the professor on the other side of the controversy were dismissed.

I am gone. Wael Ramadan is still there.

The free-speech policies are still there too—undisturbed on institutional websites.

Perhaps that is the real lesson connecting these very different stories.

Universities love free speech in the abstract. They write magnificent policies defending it. They establish committees devoted to it. They celebrate intellectual diversity in speeches and strategic plans.

But none of that tells us whether an institution actually believes in free expression.

There is only one meaningful test:

What does a university do when someone says something it desperately does not want to hear?

Free speech that protects only approved opinions is not free speech. It is decoration.

Public scrutiny forced Cambridge to confront allegations it had previously failed to resolve. If not for the media they would still be calling Arday a world class academic and gushing over him at well catered photo ops.

Right now I am in the unfortunate situation where my only legal representation is my union OPSEU 562, and because of their well-documented animus toward Jews and pro-Jewish voices, they have refused to represent me.

This is the Canadian system: ownership of your case can be retained by an authority that has officially aligned itself with their previous managerial adversary.

Like Cofnas, I do not expect my former position or reputation to be restored by the institutions that removed me. But accountability—not merely personal vindication—is still worth pursuing if universities wish to call themselves places of reason, fairness and free inquiry.

Below are a few of the verified posts that the University of Guelph and Humber College had no problem with.

The irony is that while all his posts are verified (there are hundreds more), the one post from me that condemned Hamas has been lost; there is only a student-altered version. So the man was fired with no evidence, while the guilty with abundant evidence was set free. The investigator lied about having a forensic copy of my post condemning Hamas; when pressed, she refused comment.

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Note: This essay shares personal anecdotes and comments on my lived experience and perhaps qualifies as research at Cambridge.

Dear husbands: if your wife begins talking about renovating the house, my advice is to run away. Hide.

Lock yourself in the bathroom, turn on the fan and announce that you have developed the world’s worst case of projectile diarrhea. Mentioning diarrhea is rarely a conversation starter. It has probably ended more domestic disputes than counselling ever could.

I do not think you need to go immediately to DEFCON 2 and begin talking about divorce. That would be an overreaction. But keep it in your toolkit. You may end up there anyway if you proceed with the full renovation.

And when someone gives you a proposed budget and timetable, take both numbers and multiply them by four. Do not engage in any of this pissant doubling. Doubling is for optimists and fools.

Multiply by four.

Our renovation began as a twentieth-anniversary gift for my wife.

A new kitchen. That was all.

Well, a new kitchen—and perhaps the upstairs bathroom. A manageable project. A loving gesture. Two months, I was told.

This was seven months ago.

The first mistake was that, rather than beginning the renovation properly, I hired someone - a friend of a friend - from Facebook who claimed to be a project manager and designer.

It turned out that he appeared to be a man who had taught himself Computer-Aided Design (CAD) the previous weekend, owned some sort of restaurant-supply company and possessed no discernible ability to design or manage a residential renovation.

I became suspicious when he began asking me for more money almost every three days. But he had me.

It was the perfect combination of people-pleasing, apathy and my general distaste for discussing renovations. I would rather pay someone another thousand dollars than engage in a forty-five-minute conversation about cupboard depth.

So I let it continue.

Eventually, however, I discovered that his kitchen plan was an abomination.

Under his design, unloading the dishwasher would make the oven inaccessible. Opening one appliance would render another appliance unusable. The entire room had been designed as though the laws of physics were merely suggestions that could be addressed later by the trades.

He also spoke about tearing down walls with the breezy confidence of a man describing the removal of a Post-it note.

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Finally, a realtor friend saved me by steering me toward a woman with an architectural background who actually understood design and construction.

By that point, I had already spent almost $10,000 on project management and plans that would ultimately be placed in the garbage.

At the time, losing $10,000 at the starting gate seemed catastrophic. I had no idea that it would soon become one of the more trivial expenses.

Once we began planning the kitchen properly, another problem became obvious.

If we were installing a modern kitchen, we could not leave the adjoining living room looking as though it had escaped from 1987.

So the living room had to be renovated too. Then someone looked casually toward the staircase.

“What about the stairs?”

Yes, of course. The stairs. Why leave any part of the house unmolested?

And so the kitchen renovation expanded to include the upstairs bathroom, the living room and the stairs. But it was still, in my mind, a three-month project.

After about three weeks, the kitchen had been demolished, and we were becoming acquainted on a first-name basis with the DoorDash drivers.

Yes, I know. Unhealthy processed food. At least it didn’t contain black mould. Foreshadowing.

We could have used the barbecue more frequently. We could have prepared meals with a hot plate and microwave. We could have behaved like disciplined, resourceful adults.

But DoorDash was easier.

My eighty-year-old mother-in-law, who normally cooks, wanted no part of improvising in the basement. I offered to move the oven downstairs and have it connected.

“Nyet, nyet.”

Instead, she would call me and ask me to order a pizza.

Then, while I was standing in the ruins of my kitchen—which now resembled photographs of London after the bombing—the contractor pointed toward the ceiling.

There was a drip.

A drip coming out of a ceiling is never good. No contractor has ever pointed at one and said, “That will save you money.”

They put a camera into the ceiling and discovered that the floor joists were beginning to rot.

The source was the master-bathroom shower drain, which had either exploded, committed hara-kiri or simply abandoned its responsibility to keep water inside the plumbing system.

Water had been leaking between the floors.

The camera was persuasive. The joist was genuinely rotting. It was black, ugly and surrounded by mould.

I recommended Lysol.

A few cans of disinfectant seemed, to me, like a proportionate and admirably economical response to the problem.

Spray the black areas. Open a window. Perhaps light a scented candle. Crisis resolved.

The renovator talked me out of it.

There was some explanation involving spores, containment, respiratory danger and the fact that spraying household cleaner onto mould buried between two floors does not constitute professional remediation.

Apparently, black mould is a health hazard.

So, regrettably, was my proposed solution.

And, naturally, the water was coming from the master bathroom—the only room in the house that had already been renovated.

At this point, our home renovation ceased to be a design project and became an archaeological expedition into the incompetence of previous builders and tradespeople. Today, it seems like if you know which end of a hammer to hold, you are now qualified as a renovator.

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Every wall we opened revealed another crime scene.

The man who renovated the bathroom five years earlier had come highly recommended. Apparently, however, he had decided not to install a vapour barrier behind the shower wall.

This would have required perhaps two dollars’ worth of plastic sheets and twenty staples.

By saving himself that expense and effort, he may ultimately have cost me close to $100,000.

This is the economics of home renovation.

Save two dollars today. Destroy the floor of the house tomorrow.

Once mould is growing between the second floor and the main floor, you cannot simply spray it with Lysol and hope for the best.

I had already suggested that.

The professionals were strangely resistant. Drywall must come down. Tile must come up. And once the tile comes up, the shower must come out.

The cost difference between restoring a bathroom after chasing mould through it and simply building an entirely new bathroom was not especially significant.

So, presto, our kitchen renovation now included a complete master-bathroom renovation.

Then we discovered that the mould had travelled into the bedroom. And the attic.

It had apparently purchased an all-access pass to the house.

Nearby, we found a joist into which the previous renovator had drilled a hole for a water pipe. The pipe was approximately four inches in diameter. The hole diameter was approximately eight inches. Even I could see that this was a problem.

I am a man with no construction skills, limited spatial perception and occasional difficulty replacing a roll of toilet paper. Yet even I understood that cutting away most of a structural joist and leaving the hole near its edge was not an ideal engineering practice.

It looked as though a sufficiently heavy cat could have brought down the floor.

The renovator who had done the work was no longer answering his telephone.

I left a message threatening small-claims court, which he probably deleted before I had completed the first sentence.

I knew I would never pursue him. Chasing a tradesman through a small-claims court is itself a renovation project. It consumes time, energy and money, and at the end you may receive a judgment against a man who has no assets, no fixed address and seventeen corporations with nearly identical names.

So I swallowed the expense.

We paid approximately $1,300 for an engineer to inspect the joist and tell me what I already knew: the joist needed to be reinforced. For such a judgement, the only qualification was vision.

Then we paid thousands more for men in masks to arrive and paint mysterious substances over the mould.

For a while, they suggested that we might have to leave the house and stay in an Airbnb.

I decided I would rather inhale a limited amount of black mould. I would put it on a cracker and eat it to save a few grand.

The Airbnb was a bridge too far.

Then came the attic.

The man who had charged me thousands of dollars to insulate it had apparently cheated me. What he had installed, he had installed badly.

The new contractors explained the technical errors.

There was talk of airflow, baffles, moisture, thermal bridging and several other phrases that immediately caused my mind to leave my body.

Perhaps it is ADHD. Perhaps it is fatigue.

Perhaps there is simply a limit to how much information about attic insulation a human being can absorb before surrendering.

I reduced the conversation to its only important question:

“What is this going to cost?”

The easiest way to reach the attic properly, I was told, was through the roof.

Reaching the attic through the roof meant removing shingles.

The shingles, I then discovered, had only a few years of life remaining.

The previous owner had installed shingles that he may have purchased on TEMU. They were of such astonishing cheapness that he had dispensed with the tedious formality of putting proper underlayment beneath them. They were already curling, as though embarrassed by their own existence.

This was, incidentally, the same previous house owner who proudly advertised a “built-in surround sound system.” It turned out that the speakers were decorative and the electronics entirely fictional. The system performed flawlessly, provided your ambition was to recreate the silence of a Trappist monastery.

There is apparently no adequately completed construction work anywhere in Canada. Every house is merely a temporary structure being held together until the next expert arrives and condemns it.

Since the shingles would need replacing soon anyway, we decided to replace the roof.

Then someone noticed the gutters were leaking water against the brick. The gutters would need to be replaced too. Then they began discussing fascia.

I do not know what fascia is.

I know only that I apparently needed new fascia and that fascia costs money.

Then someone asked whether I had noticed that the windows had never been replaced. They also had white trim, which is apparently a major design faux pas.

I had once thought the previous owner was merely cheap because he had never replaced the appliances.

It turned out that he had never replaced anything.

Every major component of the house was reaching the end of its natural life at exactly the same time. So we added windows.

Meanwhile, my wife and mother-in-law, both raised in the Soviet Union, became convinced that the entire renovation was one gigantic confidence scheme.

I reviewed the invoices carefully and became reasonably certain that it was not a con.

It was merely the combined effect of old materials, previous incompetent work, expanding mould and the irreversible domino logic of renovation.

My mother-in-law would curse at the contractor in Russian and tell him that the house had become a disaster.

She was not entirely wrong.

But I also remembered her old apartment in Russia, where a patch of black mould in the shower appeared to have been granted permanent residency.

In those old Stalin-era, post-war apartment buildings, routine maintenance did not seem to occupy a central position in domestic life. You repaired something after it exploded, collapsed or burst into flames.

Preventive maintenance was regarded as bourgeois anxiety.

My wife and mother-in-law therefore viewed the removal of walls, ceilings and mould as further evidence that Canadian contractors were manufacturing problems for profit.

There is something uniquely exhausting about living inside a construction zone.

I retreated to the basement with the dogs, shut the door and ran an air cleaner continuously.

Despite this, everything acquired a thin layer of dust.

The basement filled with enormous blue plastic containers holding the contents of our kitchen, along with boxes of papers from the labour litigation that has provided another ongoing nightmare in my life.

The result was less a man cave than a bunker assembled by a mentally unravelling archivist.

I mostly hid there.

My daughter would enter, look around in exasperation, clean the basement and ask how I could live without mopping the floors every day.

I thought I was doing fairly well simply keeping myself and the dogs alive.

Then came the fruit flies.

My mother-in-law insists on keeping fruit on the counter. Apparently, fruit flies are admirably literal creatures and do, in fact, congregate around fruit.

The odd thing is that, judging by the DoorDash charges flying onto my credit card, we are not ordering a great deal of fruit.

Nevertheless, the buggers have established a thriving colony somewhere in the renovation zone. Perhaps it is an abandoned pizza box. Perhaps it is one of my houseplants, which is still being watered but is slowly dying from lack of sunlight upstairs. Perhaps the fruit flies have simply recognized that normal household authority has collapsed and moved in.

I cannot be bothered to locate the source.

At this stage of the renovation, I am not conducting forensic investigations into insect breeding grounds. I simply know that unless an electronic fly killer is operating or I begin spraying, the fruit-fly population expands with the confidence of a species facing no natural predators.

Spraying creates its own problem.

The dogs regard a can of insect spray as an exciting interactive toy. The moment I begin spraying at the flies, they chase me around the basement, snapping at the air as though I am dispensing treats.

Apparently, they believe they require a refreshing blast of fly-killing Raid directly into the mouth, perhaps as a form of breath spray. Maybe inhaling Raid will give me cancer, and I will die a painful death, but I am living for the now.

My daughter, being somewhat more ecologically sensitive, prefers the electronic fly zapper. The fruit flies drift stupidly toward it and are electrocuted with a crack so loud and theatrical that the machine makes the death of a single insect sound like the destruction of a small electrical substation.

Unfortunately, Toby, our boy Westie, is terrified of the noise.

If the zapper is operating, he refuses to come downstairs. Since he also sleeps in the basement, this has created an ongoing nightly negotiation in which I must choose between eliminating the fruit flies and persuading my dog to enter his own bedroom.

So every evening, I unplug the machine, allow Toby to descend and wait until he settles. Then I look up at the surviving fruit flies circling triumphantly overhead.

My last-ditch attempt was a dish of apple cider vinegar and soap. It killed a few. When my daughter left a goblet of white wine after hosting a small party in our construction zone, it killed even more.

I told her the leftover wine was now high in protein.

At least the flies died happy—drunk and full of hope. Especially Tony, one of the gang living in the stem of a forgotten banana, who perhaps died convinced that all the girl flies were totally into him.

Then I was forced to begin sleeping in the basement.

The master bedroom had first been declared unsafe because of the black mould. Later, it became effectively impassable because it was filled with construction materials, tools and various objects capable of causing serious injury during a two-in-the-morning bathroom run.

At my age, with an enlarged prostate, the route between bed and toilet must be clear, direct and free of exposed lumber.

So I moved downstairs.

The dogs immediately concluded that this was excellent news.

The basement couch had always been their couch. My decision to sleep on it did not alter their understanding of the property rights involved. I was merely another object that had been placed on their furniture.

The couch also seemed to be approximately two inches shorter than I was, so I slept with my feet hanging over one end while Toby and Malibu arranged themselves tightly along either side of me.

This was apparently not enough.

They soon began competing for the premium couch position—the spot closest to my body, preferably pressed directly against my ribs or occupying the area where my legs were supposed to go.

These territorial disputes occasionally involved growling, snapping and sudden attempts to dislodge the other dog.

I must admit that I did not respond with a particularly Christian commitment to reconciliation. There was no careful effort to identify the root causes of the conflict, encourage mutual understanding or create an equitable couch-sharing framework.

I simply identified whichever dog appeared to be the instigator and ordered that dog off the couch. Then I fell asleep.

Sometime later, I would wake up and discover that the expelled offender had quietly returned and was once again sleeping beside me, usually in the exact position over which the original conflict had begun.

Apparently, my disciplinary rulings had no lasting authority.

In renovation times, even exile is temporary.

The dogs had always been trained to scratch at the sliding door upstairs when they needed to go into the backyard.

At least, that was the theory.

I had even paid to send them to training school.

Well, I paid to send one of them all the way through training school. The other was essentially expelled about halfway through. Even so, he had been toilet trained.

Or so I believed.

Once the renovation began, however, they appear to have reconsidered the entire concept.

We had taped sheets of cardboard to parts of the basement floor to protect it from construction dust and damage. Toby apparently examined this arrangement and concluded that the cardboard had been installed for his personal convenience.

Why fight through a barricade, search for a human being, wait for a door to open and maintain some basic toilet discipline when there was perfectly good cardboard lying ten feet away?

Renovation had introduced a new moral order.

In ordinary times, one goes outside. In renovation times, everywhere is a toilet.

Unless I timed the dogs’ release from their morning sleep exquisitely—synchronizing doors, leashes, barriers and the workings of their bowels and blatter with the precision of a military operation—I would occasionally open the door for the renovator and discover that one of the dogs had left him a gift.

The renovator is a good man. A nice man. He also spoke Russian and could explain what was actually happening to my mother-in-law far more effectively than I ever could.

He would come into the basement, stop and point with embarrassed politeness toward a pile of dog feces on the cardboard. There is no dignified response to this.

You cannot blame the dog convincingly. It is plainly the dog’s fault, but it is your house, your cardboard and your animal.

So I would apologize, collect the offending material and act as though this were simply another routine part of project management.

Electrical inspection.

Drywall delivery.

Dog feces removal.

We moved on.

The dogs were confined to the basement because I feared that one of them would enthusiastically greet a tradesman and be crushed by a falling piece of quartzite.

Their alternative response to tradespeople was to enter a barking paroxysm.

Two eighteen-pound West Highland terriers are unlikely to intimidate a six-foot-four plumber, but this has never reduced their confidence.

Then we discovered that the upstairs toilet was leaking.

Of course it was.

At some point, perhaps six months into what had been presented as a two-month project, I stopped caring about design.

Early in the process, our designer and project manager dragged us through kitchen stores, plumbing stores, lighting stores and vast showrooms filled with marble, quartzite, countertops and taps that apparently had personalities.

Everything had a name.

Every tap, handle, slab and light fixture came with a story, a design philosophy and a price that would have purchased a used automobile.

At first, I tried to participate.

Did I want warm gold or brushed gold?

Did I prefer this bevel?

What did I think of that sconce?

I still do not know precisely what a sconce is. I believe it is a light that costs more when attached to a wall.

Eventually, my answer to every question became:

“What do you think?”

Our designer is a lovely woman, but she must have recognized that I had lost the will to make independent decisions.

I did not want to choose between two subtle shades of white. I wanted walls. I wanted doors. I wanted a kitchen in which the oven and dishwasher could be used during the same calendar month.

My wife eventually stopped making decisions and began saying that she had not been consulted, although every significant design choice had ultimately been hers.

But never mind. We continued.

The fireplace remains unfinished.

There is apparently a slab of stone, marble, quartzite or compressed material quarried from a sacred mountain in Peru that would look excellent around it.

All I know is that it costs a bloody fortune.

That portion of the project will wait until I have saved more money and emotionally recovered.

Then my daughter announced another problem.

Her bedroom shares a wall with the bathroom used by her eighty-year-old grandmother. The new high-tech toilet sits directly against that wall, and there is apparently little or no sound insulation.

Consequently, every bowel movement and urination echoes with impressive clarity through the wall and into my daughter’s bedroom.

This is not how any person wishes to begin the morning. I tried to discuss the matter delicately.

There is, however, no truly elegant way to say, “We need to renovate this wall because some person’s bathroom activities are acoustically magnificent.”

So we removed the door, opened the wall and added sound insulation.

Another small job. Another bill.

Another part of the house entered the renovation. By this point, we were no longer renovating one bathroom. We were renovating three.

There was the master bathroom, the guest bathroom and the powder room.

The powder room is the tiny bathroom on the main floor. I had never heard the term before this renovation. I do not know what it means to “take a powder,” and I have never personally applied powder in a bathroom—or anywhere else—but apparently that is what the room is called.

The bathroom upstairs that I almost never use is called the guest bathroom.

I did not know that either.

Renovation has an entire language that I apparently avoided learning for the first sixty years of my life. There are powder rooms, guest bathrooms, sconces, fascia, quartzite, bevels and dozens of other words that seem designed to prevent ordinary people from understanding how much money they are about to spend.

Then came the toilets.

This part was entirely my fault.

We went to a toilet showroom, and somehow I became fascinated by these extraordinarily respectful toilets that open their lids as soon as you enter the room. I do not know why this impressed me.

Perhaps, after six months of being ignored by contractors, designers, appliances and structural joists, I was simply moved by an object that acknowledged my presence.

Then someone mentioned that my mother-in-law might appreciate a bidet.

I had never used one.

The idea of directing a stream of water toward what I will delicately call the anal porthole had never especially attracted me. It had never appeared on my list of unmet personal needs.

But on that particular afternoon, I became strangely materialistic about toilets.

It was not a matter of keeping up with the Joneses. Nobody on our street discusses toilets. No neighbour has ever invited me inside and said, “You really must see what our toilet does.”

Nevertheless, we bought a toilet with a remote control.

A remote control. Why does a toilet require a remote control?

It already flushes automatically. The lid raises itself. The seat warms. It has settings, preferences and, as far as I know, perhaps its own Wi-Fi password.

I am sure it has an app. Everything must have an app.

Soon toilets will require software updates.

I did eventually try the bidet function. This was a mistake.

I pressed one of the buttons, experienced the promised stream of water and then stood up before the machine had finished its cycle.

The toilet continued spraying into the room.

There I was, desperately attempting to cover the stream with my butt before it soaked the new and extravagantly overpriced wallpaper beside the toilet.

It was an undignified contest between a half-naked man and an intelligent plumbing fixture.

The toilet was winning.

I began pressing buttons on the remote, but every symbol looked as though it might activate a different form of aquatic assault. I had no idea which button stopped the water and which one might increase the pressure.

For several frantic seconds, I attempted to use my own body as a human splash guard.

Eventually, the spraying stopped. I have not pressed the bidet button since.

In fact, I have developed a new appreciation for the perfectly ordinary toilet in the basement.

It has no remote control. It does not recognize me when I enter. It does not lift its lid as a gesture of respect. It does not heat, spray, dry, illuminate or attempt to establish a wireless connection.

You press the handle. The contents disappear.

After this renovation, that strikes me as the height of luxury.

Through all of this, I have found myself thinking about my father.

He died almost four years ago, though sometimes it feels much more recent.

He paid about $23,000 for the house in Winnipeg where I grew up. I believe he bought it in the late 1950s.

When my mother was alive, there had been talk of renovating it and building an extension. But she developed cancer when I was about fifteen and died not long afterward.

The renovation never happened. My father never remarried. He stayed in the same house.

He saw no reason to renovate it.

It was structurally sound. The roof kept the weather out. The rooms remained where they had always been.

That was sufficient.

He bought his shoes at Walmart. He had no taste for luxury, display, fashion or pretension. He did not care whether a kitchen looked modern or whether a light fixture made a statement.

My friends used to visit and say that entering his house was like travelling back to the 1970s.

They did not say it with contempt. It was affectionate amusement.

Nothing changed.

The furniture remained. The walls remained. The kitchen remained. The entire house seemed immune to the passage of time.

And it suited my father perfectly.

I am beginning to think he possessed more wisdom than I gave him credit for.

Of course, I am not sure what he would have done with rotting joists and black mould. Even my father might eventually have conceded that a shower should not be dissolving the structure of the house.

Although, knowing him, he might first have tried Lysol. But he understood something I did not.

After the renovation is completed, the newness lasts perhaps two weeks.

You walk into the kitchen and say, “Oh, look at this. Isn’t this beautiful?”

You admire the new counters, the lighting, the fireplace and the furniture. Then, very quickly, it becomes the kitchen. The new car becomes the car. The beautiful room becomes the room in which you leave your socks.

You can occupy only one room at a time. You can sit in only one chair. The extraordinary becomes ordinary with remarkable speed.

We are not even finished, and I think I have already reached that stage.

The house is brighter. It is undoubtedly more attractive. The kitchen functions. The mould has been removed. The floors are less likely to collapse beneath a heavy cat.

But it is once again simply the place where I live.

We are now six months into the project and pushing toward seven. There is still more to do.

One day, theoretically, it will end. The contractors will leave. The dust will settle. The blue containers will disappear.

The dogs will be released from the basement.

The DoorDash driver will wonder whether we have died.

And perhaps, after the final invoice has been paid, I will stand in the completed kitchen and feel some mixture of pride, relief and financial trauma.

So, gentlemen, heed my warning.

When your wife says, “I’ve been thinking about renovating,” do not attempt to reason with her. Do not explain the danger of opening walls. Do not warn her about builders’ mistakes, leaking drains, black mould or structural joists. None of that will frighten her away.

Head directly for the bathroom. Lock the door. Turn on the fan. Flush the toilet repeatedly and make whatever noises are necessary.

Perhaps she will become distracted. Perhaps the idea will pass. Because that is how it begins.

“Oh, just one small renovation,” they said.

“Just the bathroom and the kitchen.”

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Within contemporary post-hegemonic analyses of heteronormative, decolonial, and late-capitalist representational ecologies, the symbolic circulation of companion-canid nutrient vectors has increasingly been understood as constituting a discursive site through which coloniality, epistemic privilege, and aesthetic normativity are recursively reproduced.

The visual assemblages accompanying these alimentary distribution modalities cannot therefore be regarded as politically neutral artefacts but rather as loci of intersectional power whose semiotic architecture has been rendered invisible through historically sedimented practices of representational normalization.

To explore these dynamics, this study employed randomized visual-signification panels depicting three phenotypic cohorts of Canis lupus familiaris: (i) eumelanin-dominant exemplars; (ii) heterogeneous-pigmentation exemplars exhibiting distributed melanin expression; and (iii) melanin-deprived terrier- and poodle-derived phenotypes.

Participants subsequently completed a post-exposure attitudinal inventory concerning colour-neutral civic organization, distributive justice, and institutional preference architectures.

Although the differences were minor, they were nevertheless subjected to extensive theoretical interpretation because, within sufficiently sophisticated epistemological frameworks, explanatory restraint itself may be understood as reproducing hegemonic silence.

Indeed, the apparent absence of a plausible causal mechanism should not be permitted to foreclose the possibility that one exists but remains discursively occluded by dominant paradigms of knowledge production.

Consequently, the representational ecology surrounding companion-canid nutrient vectors may be provisionally reconceptualized as an intersectional site in which subconscious aesthetic governance is recursively reproduced beneath the appearance of consumer neutrality.

The resulting visual economy therefore constitutes a paradigmatic illustration of how postmodern, heteronormative, colonial, and neoliberal systems of symbolic circulation continue to reproduce exclusion through precisely those mechanisms that remain least visible to participants embedded within.

Fig 1.

This article advances the proposition that manufacturers of raw dog food who disproportionately employ eumelanin-dominant Canis lupus familiaris within their representational ecology may be participating in the subconscious reproduction of racialized aesthetic hierarchies.

While no direct causal mechanism has been identified, contemporary postmodern and Foucauldian approaches remind us that the absence of a causal mechanism should not be mistaken for the absence of a discursive one.

In the present analysis, participants were randomly assigned to view promotional imagery for companion-canid nutrient vectors featuring either eumelanin-dominant, heterogeneous-pigmentation, or melanin-deprived companion canids.

Participants subsequently responded to a battery of attitudinal statements unrelated to companion animals, including whether hiring at prestigious British universities should proceed without affirmative-action preferences.

The fictional results indicated that 51% of respondents exposed to the eumelanin-dominant imagery endorsed a colour-blind hiring framework, compared with 48% among participants exposed to the other visual conditions.

The smoke that rose from Nöam, the Jewish-owned restaurant in Montreal, its façade charred by firebombing, is material witness to a reality that our public discourse works overtime to obscure.

To say, “This isn’t Canada,” is no longer true. That is precisely the problem. This is Canada.

What was once extraordinary has become routine. Jewish schools have been shot at. Synagogues have been firebombed. Jewish businesses have been attacked. Children now pass armed security guards on their way into classrooms.

Some Jewish organizations and commentators have described Montreal as the antisemitism capital of North America.

This is not the Canada many Canadians imagine themselves to inhabit. It is the Canada they have permitted to emerge.

A nation does not become what it tolerates overnight. It becomes what it repeatedly excuses, repeatedly minimizes, and repeatedly refuses to confront.

It is joined in evidence by torched school doors, security guards posted outside synagogues, and polls showing a Jewish population increasingly afraid to wear the emblems of its identity in public.

For the moment, we are apparently to regard it as an extraordinary coincidence. Jewish schools are vandalized. Jewish synagogues are attacked. Jewish community centres are targeted. Jewish businesses are damaged. Now a kosher restaurant is set on fire. Yet we are invited to assume that each incident exists in splendid isolation, unrelated to the others, and that no broader pattern should even be contemplated.

If that explanation strains credulity, it is because it should.

We do not yet know who set fire to this particular restaurant, nor what motive drove the act. No innocent person should ever be judged guilty because of his religion, ethnicity, or membership in a statistical category. One unresolved criminal investigation, though, cannot erase the established rise in antisemitic incidents or the broader body of evidence concerning antisemitic attitudes.

The broader evidence is not obscure. Survey after survey records markedly higher levels of antisemitic belief in most Muslim-majority societies, and the countries and territories at the top of the ADL’s antisemitism index are overwhelmingly Muslim-majority.

The West Bank and Gaza—the sentimental darling of so much of the Western Left—records an antisemitism rate of 97 percent. Yet this infantile evasion has become compulsory. Unless every member of a group shares an attitude, we are told that no pattern may be discussed at all.

Correlation must be denied, evidence must be blurred, and anyone who notices what the surveys plainly reveal must be accused of Islamophobia. The accusation functions not as an argument but as a fire alarm: discussion stops, everyone evacuates, and the underlying facts are left comfortably untouched.

Which Islamic values, precisely? Those held by peaceful, law-abiding Muslims who accept pluralism, equality, and freedom of conscience? Certainly. But those values are not uniquely Islamic; they are the liberal democratic principles to which every Canadian should be expected to conform.

The more difficult question is whether Canada and the West in general should also be expected to avert its eyes from the documented currents of antisemitism, religious supremacism, and hostility to liberal society that exist within parts of the Muslim world and among some of its ideological movements.

But apparently, even raising the question is indecent.

The principal accelerants feeding contemporary antisemitism are to be discussed without naming them. We may speak endlessly of “hate,” “division,” and “intolerance,” provided we never inquire too closely into who is propagating them or what doctrines are being invoked. We are permitted to condemn the smoke, but forbidden to identify the fire.

And so a convenient vocabulary has been devised. The offenders are not Muslims but “Islamists,” a supposedly self-contained species with no meaningful relationship to Islam, Islamic texts, Islamic history, Islamic institutions, or political movements that openly describe themselves as Islamic. The distinction can be useful when it separates peaceful believers from ideological extremists. It becomes absurd when it is used to declare that an avowedly Islamic political ideology has no connection whatsoever to Islam.

This is not tolerance. It is enforced incuriosity. It is also a lie.

It is the kind of comfortable, self-serving falsehood that polite society tells itself as the foundations of its own civilization begin to tremble.

The Polling Data: An Inconvenient Empirical Reality

The evidence for this assertion is not anecdotal, nor is it drawn from the fevered imaginations of bigots. It is the product of rigorous, repeated, and eminently verifiable polling. The data force us to confront an uncomfortable reality: significant minorities, and sometimes majorities, of Muslim populations in the West hold views profoundly at odds with the foundational principles of liberal democracy.

And do we think that those who come from countries where Jew hatred dominates somehow have a road to Damascus moment as they move through airport immigration? Does the mere vibe of our Western liberal values move them to repentance and a new acceptance of the Jews, Christians and non-Muslims in general?

In the United Kingdom, polling has consistently found that substantial minorities of British Muslims support the introduction of Sharia law in some areas of Britain. Surveys have shown that roughly one-third regard the implementation of Sharia within twenty years as desirable, compared with only a fraction of the general public. Support for criminalizing depictions of the Prophet Muhammad has reached majority levels in some polls, while roughly one-quarter of British Muslims have viewed violence as a legitimate response to such acts.

“But it is not a majority of Muslims,” comes the familiar reply. That may be true.

But the assumption that a movement must command majority support before it can dominate institutions, intimidate opponents, or transform a culture is historically false. Organized minorities have repeatedly prevailed over larger populations that were divided, complacent, frightened, or unwilling to resist.

The Chinese Communist Party offers a striking example. At its founding congress in 1921, it had only about 57 members. Even by 1949, as it was taking control of a country of more than 500 million people, the party had roughly 3.3 million members—well under one percent of the population.

These figures do not describe a fringe. They describe a substantial ideological bloc—and history shows that such movements do not require majority support to dominate a society.

Hitler’s Nazi Party never won a majority in a free national election; at its electoral peak in July 1932, it received 37.3 percent of the vote, yet exploited institutional weakness, intimidation, and the passivity of its opponents to seize power.

The central lesson of history is clear: a disciplined, vocal, and institutionally protected minority can reshape the conduct of a much larger but hesitant majority. Numbers matter, but organization, confidence, ideological commitment, and control of institutions often matter more.

Ruud Koopmans’ multicountry survey of Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Sweden found religious fundamentalism far more prevalent among Sunni Muslims. Roughly forty-four percent consistently endorsed returning to the roots of the faith, the existence of one correct interpretation of the Quran, and the supremacy of religious rules over national law—compared with fewer than four percent of Christians.

In France, data indicate a rising tendency among younger Muslims to prioritize Sharia over republican law, with a majority of fifteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds in one study taking this position.

In Canada, polls show markedly lower acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex marriage among Muslims than among the general population.

These are not merely the opinions of “extremists.” They are mainstream views among a significant portion of the global Muslim population.

Since September 11, 2001, the overwhelming majority of people killed by terrorist organizations around the world have been killed by groups acting in the name of Islam. Depending on the database and methodology used, estimates generally place the figure well above 80 percent and, in many analyses, close to 90 percent.

Doctrine and History: The Problem Is in the Texts

The claim that all of this is a modern political invention, cynically labelled “Islamism,” is a convenient fiction—a distinction without a meaningful difference. Classical Islamic sources and the four major Sunni schools, along with major Shia traditions, treat apostasy by an adult male as a capital offence, grounded primarily in hadith—for example, the saying recorded in Bukhari: “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.”

Homosexual acts, particularly male penetrative acts, are condemned through the Quranic narrative of Lot and through hadith prescribing severe penalties—death in some schools and lesser corporal punishment in others.

Early Islamic expansion involved military conquest, the imposition of the jizya poll tax upon non-Muslims living under dhimmi status—protected but subordinated and subject to restrictions—and incentives and pressures toward conversion. Forced conversion of pagans occurred. People of the Book were generally permitted to remain, but under inferior status. Apostasy was often treated as political betrayal of the community.

The document “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America” was written in Arabic in May 1991 by Mohamed Akram (also known as Mohamed Adlouni), a senior Muslim Brotherhood official in North America.

The memorandum became public after it was discovered in the Muslim Brotherhood’s North American archives and was later introduced as evidence in the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

The document listed organizations established in North America to advance this plan, including the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Student Association, the North American Islamic Trust, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented strategy, translated from Arabic and entered into evidence in a federal terrorism trial. The plan calls for “settlement,” “establishment,” “stability,” “empowerment,” and “rooting”—a program intended to make Islam “part of the nation,” “stable in its land,” “rooted in the souls and minds of its people,” and “empowered over the life of its society.”

To ignore this is not intellectual sophistication. It is wilful blindness.

The “Few Bad Apples” Lie

This brings us to a central lie of our age: the “few bad apples” argument. It allows us to dismiss Bondi Beach, the beheading in France, the many murders in Britain, or the synagogue attack in Manchester as the work of deranged individuals who have somehow “perverted” a religion of peace.

Even if the attack on the Montreal restaurant were not an act of antisemitism—even if it were merely vandalism—must we really rehearse the entire catalogue?

The seniors’ home surrounded by pro-Palestinian thugs. The Montreal CF soccer match where the presence of a professional Israeli soccer player on the New England side brought about chants from the fans of “Death to Israel!” The schools struck by gunfire. The chaos in the streets.

In Montreal, a kosher restaurant and surrounding businesses were vandalized with swastikas only days after gunfire targeted a synagogue in Toronto. These are not isolated incidents. They reflect a dangerous reality: antisemitism is escalating, and Jewish communities are being targeted simply for living openly as Jews.

Appeasement and Its Fruits

The response of our political and cultural elites has been a chorus of grovelling and accommodation. The charge of “Islamophobia” has been weaponized to silence criticism of the religion itself, collapsing the distinction between bigotry toward individuals and legitimate criticism of a coercive ideology.

British government guidance treats the possibility of offending Muslims as a constraint upon school activities. Anti-Muslim hate crimes are twice as likely to be prosecuted as antisemitic ones. Discussion of the grooming gangs—the Rotherham inquiry documented the exploitation and sexual assault of approximately 1,400 children between 1997 and 2013—has repeatedly been hampered by fear of accusations of racism and Islamophobia.

We are not supposed to say how, in many areas, most of the rapes were committed by ethnic Muslim Pakistani offenders, with many times the offenders saying explicitly that their religion gave them the right to violate young white “kaafir slags.”

British police, though, often avoid recording data about ethnicity and religion.

This is the real-world cost of appeasement. When fear of being labelled “Islamophobic” prevents authorities from investigating crimes committed in the name of Islam, the victims are not Islamophobes. They are women, young girls, and Jewish citizens.

Weak politicians are so afraid of losing the Muslim vote, and so addicted to the dopamine rush of moral superiority they gain as they apply selective - and thus anti-Semitic- standards against Israel, that they refuse to confront a society visibly coming apart.

Over 60% of Reform voters in the United Kingdom, and others surveyed, believe that civil war is coming, driven by violence, the social fracture produced by waves of Muslim immigration, the grooming gangs, and the refusal of many newcomers to accept and observe British values.

The people, thankfully, are often wiser than their politicians. They see the changing demographics of their neighbourhoods. They see the effect of intimidation at pro-Palestinian marches, the creeping restrictions on what they are permitted to say, and the double standards in law enforcement.

They also see public spaces - including Westminster Abbey grounds - increasingly commandeered for large Islamic demonstrations—roads blocked, civic squares occupied, turned into stages for mass prayer.

Video of Westminster Muslim Prayers

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The transition should not claim that religious commitment automatically equals civic disloyalty. The stronger argument is that liberal democracy faces a genuine problem when a substantial minority seeks to give religious commands legal authority over speech, conscience or civil law.

Whatever the private sincerity of individual worshippers, prayer conducted on this scale, in politically charged settings, is no longer merely a private act of devotion. It becomes a public assertion of presence and power—one that many surrounding citizens understandably perceive as carrying the message: we are here, and you will make way.

A pluralist society cannot survive if one group’s public display is treated as sacred while everyone else’s discomfort, history and equal claim to the public square are dismissed.

The question, however, is larger than the use of one street or the obstruction of one public space. It concerns the terms upon which a liberal democracy receives people formed by religious and political traditions that do not always share liberal democracy’s assumptions.

Theocracy asks what God has commanded; democracy asks what equal citizens may legitimately impose upon one another. Where religious law is treated as supreme, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, equality between believers and unbelievers, and the right to leave or criticize a faith cannot remain secure.

It is therefore not bigotry to ask whether newcomers accept the constitutional order of the country they have entered. It is one of the elementary questions any self-respecting civilization must ask.

The polling does not permit the comforting claim that this tension is imaginary.

A major 2016 survey of more than 3,000 British Muslims found that 41 percent supported introducing “particular aspects” of sharia in place of British law. An older British survey found that 28 percent preferred living under sharia law, compared with 59 percent who preferred British law; among respondents aged 16 to 24, support for sharia rose to 37 percent.

More recent polling in selected British areas suggests that the conflict is not confined to abstract constitutional theory. In that survey, 52 per cent of Muslim respondents supported criminalizing public depictions of Muhammad, compared with 17 per cent of the general population; 63 per cent supported criminalizing the burning of holy books, compared with 37 per cent of the public; and 24 per cent regarded violence as potentially legitimate in response to burning the Qur’an or depicting Muhammad, compared with 10 percent of the wider sample.

The same recent British research found that 63 percent of its Muslim respondents ranked religious identity first, compared with 12 percent of the general population.

That is precisely why the usual incantation—“not all Muslims”—is so intellectually useless.

Of course not all Muslims hold the same views. No individual should be condemned for the opinions of a co-religionist, and religious identity is not evidence of individual guilt.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s current index does not classify any Muslim-majority country as a full democracy. Some possess competitive elections and meaningful political pluralism; others are hybrid regimes or dictatorships.

The point is not that Muslims are biologically or permanently incapable of democratic government—an absurd and indefensible proposition. It is that liberal democracy is historically unusual, culturally demanding and institutionally fragile. It cannot safely assume that everyone arriving beneath its protection already understands, accepts or values the principles that made that protection possible.

And here the Western frog sits serenely in the warming water. We do not merely tolerate mounting antisemitism while refusing to identify its ideological sources.

We increasingly permit the principles that would enable us to resist it—free speech, equal citizenship, secular law and freedom from religious coercion—to be chipped away in the name of avoiding offence.

The accusation of Islamophobia is then deployed not merely against hatred of Muslims, which deserves condemnation, but against scrutiny of Islamic ideas, organizations and political demands. The worst actors are thereby granted the most useful immunity imaginable: a frightened society that refuses to describe them.

This helps neither Muslims nor the West. It abandons liberal and reformist Muslims to the very clerics, activists and communal enforcers most determined to speak in their name. It tells those who accept democracy that their courage is unnecessary, while teaching those who oppose it that intimidation works. A society unwilling to distinguish between protecting Muslim citizens and protecting Islamic doctrine will eventually fail at both.

That is the necessary prelude to any defence of the West—not because the West is racially superior, morally immaculate or incapable of barbarism, but because its central political inheritance is worth defending.

Common people know that Western culture is a thing. It is chiefly our so-called elites who appear embarrassed by the admission. It is a glorious, messy, imperfect and relentlessly self-critical inheritance stretching from Athens and Rome, through Jerusalem, the Magna Carta, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the common law, and the hard-won conviction that every individual stands equal before the law. It is not a blank slate, and it did not materialize out of nothing.

Nor did these principles emerge naturally. For most of human history, they were astonishing exceptions. The normal condition of mankind has not been liberty but servitude; not democracy but autocracy; not freedom of conscience but enforced orthodoxy; not equality before the law but privilege, caste, tribe and arbitrary power.

Liberal institutions are difficult to build, easier to imitate than to practise, and remarkably easy to destroy. Their scarcity should make the West more protective of its inheritance, not less.

Those liberties were not bestowed by fate. They were argued for by philosophers, defended by reformers, codified by jurists, expanded by abolitionists and suffragists, and preserved at immense cost by generations willing to fight—and, when necessary, to die. The cemeteries of Europe, North Africa and Asia bear silent witness to the price paid to defeat fascism, militarism and totalitarianism. Millions shed their blood so that free societies governed by law rather than arbitrary power might endure.

We should not apologize for this inheritance. We should preserve it. History’s overwhelming lesson is that liberty is not the natural state of civilization. It is an achievement—rare, fragile and purchased at extraordinary cost.

The Fables That Warn Us

Appeasement has never worked. Winston Churchill, who understood the nature of the totalitarian threat before it became fashionable to do so, warned that “an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile—hoping it will eat him last.” He knew that one cannot stroke a tiger into becoming a kitten. He knew that the choice was between war and dishonour, and that to choose dishonour was merely to choose war later.

The other fitting story is that of the Scorpion and the Frog, an old fable that has appeared in various forms over the centuries.

A scorpion asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog hesitates, reasonably enough, because the scorpion may sting him during the crossing, in which case the frog will die. The scorpion reassures him that he would never do such a thing, since it would cause them both to drown. Persuaded by this logic, the frog agrees. Yet midway across the river, the scorpion stings him anyway. As they begin to sink, the dying frog asks why. The scorpion replies that it is in his nature.

The lesson is not merely about the inherent evil of man. It is about hope placed in defiance of evidence. Trusting a predator to overcome its own nature is an optimism doomed from the beginning.

Islam is as much a program of imperial expansion and political strategy as it is a handbook by which the individual seeks a relationship with the divine. What we are witnessing in the growth of antisemitism, and in the war and slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, is not the work of a few bad apples. It is the nature of the holy writ being permitted to take root and flourish.

So it is with the ideology confronting us. The Muslim Brotherhood’s documents tell us exactly what its adherents intend. Their speeches and manifestos call for the elimination of Jews and other non-Islamic faiths, and for a world dominated by Islam. They tell us that they intend to prevail.

And we, like the frog, persuade ourselves that if we are only kind enough, accommodating enough, and willing enough to carry them across the river, they will not sting us.

We are wrong.

The Central Failure

The long-term answer cannot be collective blame. Nor can it be endless reassurance that every violent Muslim is an inexplicable aberration with no meaningful relationship to any doctrine, preacher, or institution.

The people most urgently needed in this debate are Muslims willing to say clearly:

The silence is deafening.

Yet when a Muslim family was deliberately run down and murdered in London, Ontario, Canadians responded as they should have. Christians, Jews, people of other faiths, and people of no faith gathered by the thousands in solidarity with Muslims. The Prime Minister came. The Premier came. Senior political leaders came.

Canadians proclaimed, clearly and publicly, that hatred of Muslims was an attack upon the entire country.

That solidarity was right. It represented Canada at its best.

But when Jews are murdered, assaulted, threatened, or terrorized, when it is shown to have been driven in the name of Islam, where are the comparable crowds?

Where are the thousands of Canadian Muslims filling the streets and declaring, loudly and without qualification, “Not in my name”?

There have been individual Muslim voices of courage and decency, and they deserve recognition. But they have remained individual voices—isolated exceptions rather than the visible expression of a broad communal movement.

And when people challenge this response—when they ask, “Where is your humanity? Why is there so little visible grief for murdered Jews?”—the answer is often not engagement, explanation, or self-examination. It is the immediate accusation of Islamophobia.

The term ‘Islamophobia’ seems to function primarily as a rhetorical shield: one places one’s fingers in one’s own ears while placing a muzzle over someone else’s mouth.

Instead of answering criticism, the critic is pathologized. The question itself is declared hateful. Concern for Jewish victims is transformed into evidence of bigotry against Muslims.

That is not a good-faith response to persecution. It is a method of censorship. It says, in effect: the Muslim political and religious claims may be expressed as forcefully as they choose, including claims that vilify Israel or rationalize violence against Jews, but criticism of those claims will be treated as a moral defect in the speaker.

One side is permitted anger, accusation, and sweeping condemnation; the other is told that even asking for reciprocity, sympathy, or accountability is evidence of prejudice.

The tragedy is that much of the mainstream media, rather than challenging this imbalance, has reinforced it. Journalism is supposed to correct distortions, test claims, and represent events with accuracy and proportion.

Instead, too many journalists now appear to regard their trade as narrative construction: selecting language, images, sources, and omissions that consistently advance an anti-Israel—and too often implicitly anti-Jewish—interpretation of events.

As Warren Kinsella argues in The Hidden Hand, language is central to this manipulation. Euphemisms soften perpetrators, obscure ideology, and sentimentalize extremists. Hamas operatives and Islamist radicals convicted of murdering or plotting to murder Jewish civilians are described as militants, activists, political leaders, prisoners, or resistance figures.

Men responsible for campaigns of terror are portrayed as kindly elders, spiritual leaders, or grandfatherly community figures, while their victims are reduced to abstractions or treated as inconvenient obstacles to the preferred narrative.

This is not merely a disagreement over emphasis. Language determines how the public understands moral responsibility. A murderer becomes a militant. A terrorist organization becomes a resistance movement. Hostages become detainees. A massacre becomes an escalation.

Jewish self-defence becomes aggression, while the aggression that made it necessary is compressed into a subordinate clause—or omitted altogether.

This pattern has appeared repeatedly across mainstream coverage. Atrocity is contextualized until it nearly disappears; terrorism is explained until it begins to resemble justification; and Israeli actions are described in emotionally charged language while the conduct of Hamas is filtered through euphemism, uncertainty, and passive construction.

Hamas understands this battlefield extremely well. It has developed a sophisticated and world-class propaganda and social media operation designed to provide journalists and Gen Z with emotionally powerful images, unverifiable casualty claims, carefully selected spokespeople, and a ready-made moral vocabulary. Yet rather than maintaining professional distance from that machinery, large parts of the media have adopted its premises, terminology, and framing.

Jewish people and pro-Israel voices should not have to wage a second battle merely to obtain fair representation after surviving the first. They should not have to prove that murdered children were innocent, that kidnapped civilians are hostages, that terrorists are terrorists, or that a democratic country has the same right of self-defence routinely granted to every other nation.

With honourable exceptions, much of the mainstream press has abandoned impartiality precisely where impartiality is most urgently required.

It has ceased merely reporting the propaganda war and has become one of its principal theatres.

Nor does that theatre end with the media. Our universities have become incubators in which hostility toward Israel—and increasingly toward Jews—is taught, rewarded, and disguised as moral enlightenment.

Consider a university like the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto where a proud Muslim professor can boast to students about his campaign to have a colleague fired because that colleague said he stood with Israel; consider a case where that same Muslim faculty member can publicly call for Israel’s elimination, compare Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis to Ukrainian resistance fighters, or celebrate October 7; where the same Muslim professor can call Jews “subhuman devil worshippers” while depicting the IDF as baby killers - and after all this the Muslim professor while leading a ‘polite pogrom’ and raising up an ignorant, defamatory and anti Semitic mob against the pro Israel professor he is embraced by the department ironically sporting the title “Human Rights” on their office door.

Consider a union vested by law with the extraordinary privilege of extracting mandatory dues from more than 200,000 workers, including Jews and those who stand with them. One might imagine that such an institution would regard even a public expression of admiration for Hitler’s genocidal ambitions as a bright moral line.

One would imagine wrongly.

When journalists exposed a senior OPSEU executive publicly celebrating Hitler’s genocidal mission and disseminating a catalogue of antisemitic libels—material that anyone may verify for themselves through Canary Mission—one might have expected at least the faintest flicker of institutional shame. Instead, the union announced that no disciplinary action would follow.

Consider the sequence. Twenty-seven Jewish members concluded that their own union had become so persistently and systemically hostile that they sought the assistance of national Jewish organizations to bring a complaint before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. Reflect for a moment on the absurdity of that sentence. A union that exists to protect its members had driven some of those very members to seek protection from the union itself.

Meanwhile, OPSEU’s president, JP Hornick, publicly advocates the boycott, divestment, and sanctioning of the Middle East’s only full democracy while proclaiming that the union will violently defend those who unlawfully occupy public property, even when such encampments have become environments in which Jewish students, faculty, and staff report explicit and implicit intimidation against them for supporting the world’s only Jewish state.

This is not an institution that has merely lost its way. It is an institution that has lost its moral compass. That is not institutional neutrality. It is institutional moral collapse.

Consider a publicly funded university that posts “From the river to the sea” on its own social-media account, and calls for the eradication of Israel yet dismisses a professor for condemning Hamas because his words offended a Muslim complainant.

The deeper problem is the assumption that only for Muslims the declaration “I am offended” ends the inquiry rather than begins it.

It is institutional submission dressed up as compassion. The narrative of Islamophobia has become so deeply embedded in university management and human-rights departments that reflexive acquiescence to any Muslim claim of injury is mistaken for virtue, while the speech, reputation, and rights of the accused become expendable.

This does not protect Muslims or strengthen social harmony but teaches that accusations need not be tested and that the loudest and most easily offended person acquires the greatest power. It rewards grievance, encourages ideological intimidation, and abandons the basic democratic obligation to distinguish genuine discrimination from disagreement, criticism, or inconvenient truth.

That is not sensitivity toward Muslims. It is the toleration of antisemitic propaganda and the elevation of ideological grievance above truth.

When universities protect those who vilify Jews while punishing those who condemn terrorism, they cease educating students. They begin training them in moral inversion—and turning the next generation of Canadian leaders into its most confident messengers.

This is profoundly anti-democratic. Democratic life requires that beliefs, institutions, movements, and public conduct remain open to criticism. No religion and no community can claim a unilateral right to speak while declaring scrutiny of its ideas psychologically diseased or morally forbidden.

Calling every uncomfortable question “Islamophobia” does not answer the question. It merely attempts to disqualify the person asking it.

The result is a particularly effective form of moral coercion: anti-Jewish rhetoric is defended as political expression, while criticism of that rhetoric is recast as hatred. The aggressor claims the status of victim, the actual victims disappear, and anyone who objects is placed in the dock.

That is how moral inversion protects itself. It does not merely deny the suffering of Jews; it tries to punish those who insist that the suffering be acknowledged.

We can defend Muslims against hatred while also confronting antisemitism where it is disproportionately present. We can acknowledge that many Muslims may not hate Jews while still recognizing that a very large minority can shape the atmosphere of an entire community—especially when the majority does not visibly and collectively resist it.

Conclusion: The Fire This Time

The flames consuming a Jewish-owned restaurant in Montreal signify more than the destruction of a building. They, and a myriad of other attacks on innocent Jews, are a warning that something has changed in our society.

Whatever our political allegiances, pretending that this trend is insignificant is no longer credible.

We must look at the Pew data and the like and accept that the attitudes it reveals are not aberrations. We must admit that the problem lies not merely with “Islamists,” but with an interpretation of Islam that is mainstream and has been codified in its foundational texts for more than a millennium.

This is not a call for discrimination. It is a call for intellectual honesty. It is a demand that we stop lying, stop grovelling, stop calling appeasement tolerance, and begin defending the principles that make a free life possible.

Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who believed that supplicating before Adolf Hitler—through concessions, accommodation, and repeated demonstrations of goodwill—could preserve peace, became history’s enduring warning about appeasement.

Hitler had openly declared his expansionist ambitions, yet Chamberlain persuaded himself that each concession might finally satisfy them. History remembers him not as a statesman who secured peace, but as a leader who mistook wishful thinking for statesmanship and discovered, catastrophically, that an expansionist ideology interprets appeasement not as generosity, but as weakness.

Winston Churchill understood what Chamberlain did not: ideologies that proclaim their intention to dominate are not pacified by concession. They are encouraged by it. Every retreat is read not as generosity, but as weakness. Every concession becomes an invitation to demand the next.

The scorpian will not be appeased.

With few exceptions, the political class across the West has become the heir to Chamberlain’s fatal instinct.

Our elites mistake moral posturing for moral courage, and in doing so leave the very civilization entrusted to their care increasingly undefended.

We must stand against the misuse of the accusation of Islamophobia, because surrendering this argument means surrendering the intellectual defences of our civilization.

The conclusion should make the historical progression unmistakable: tolerated hatred becomes normalized hatred; normalized hatred becomes organized exclusion; exclusion becomes violence.

The time for pleasant fiction is over. The smoke rising from Nöam in Montreal is not merely the smoke of a single crime. It is a signal flare warning of a deeper fire already spreading beneath the foundations of our society. We may continue to avert our eyes, repeat comforting slogans, and hope that reality will accommodate our illusions.

Or we may do what free people have always been required to do: look the truth squarely in the face, defend our civilization without apology, and refuse to appease those who would gladly see it diminished or destroyed.

For appeasement does not merely tolerate antisemitism. It permits antisemitism to become endemic. And endemic antisemitism does not remain forever a matter of slogans, placards, classroom theories, vandalized windows, or frightened Jewish children.

History must be our teacher. Hatred that is excused becomes hatred that is normalized; hatred that is normalized becomes hatred that is organized; and hatred that is organized eventually acquires fists, fire, weapons, and laws.

There can be no legitimate discussion of anti-Semitism without stating that. We can continue to be the foolish frog crossing the river, but our empty assertions that there is no danger and all is well do not change material fact.

Germany did not pass in a single night from social prejudice to Auschwitz. The descent was gradual. Antisemitism already existed, but first it was tolerated by respectable society. Then politicians exploited it. Universities dignified it, amplified it, and eventually expelled Jewish scholars. Jewish professionals were excluded. Jewish businesses were marked and attacked. Then came Kristallnacht. Then deportation. Then the ghettos, the mass shootings, the camps, and genocide.

At every stage, those who refused to see the direction of travel reassured themselves that the next stage was unthinkable.

It was thinkable. It happened. Nor did Nazi antisemitism remain confined within Germany.

And it can happen again. Not necessarily in the same uniforms, under the same banners, or by the same machinery. History rarely repeats itself with such theatrical neatness. It does not repeat; it rhymes.

But the sequence is familiar: contempt, indulgence, normalization, exclusion, violence. We are already far beyond the first step.

Churchill’s generation learned, at terrible cost, that appeasement does not purchase peace. It postpones confrontation while strengthening those who seek it.

This requires no persecution and no comforting euphemism. It requires honesty, moral confidence, enforcement of the law, and an unambiguous refusal to allow religious or political intimidation to dictate what may be said.

Michel Houellebecq’s satirical dystopian novel Submission, in which France democratically moves to become Islamized, to where its ruling party has joined forces with a Muslim Brotherhood party, should not be read as a prophecy to be fulfilled, but as a warning to be heeded.

Civilizations rarely collapse because they are conquered overnight. More often, they drift. They grow accustomed to each small concession, each avoided argument, each comforting fiction, until one day they discover that what once seemed unthinkable has quietly become ordinary.

We are all too capable of drifting across the river while assuring ourselves that nothing is amiss. History counsels otherwise. It asks us to look carefully at what we are carrying upon our backs, to judge it honestly rather than sentimentally, and not to mistake deliberate self-deception for tolerance or wisdom.

A free civilization survives only so long as it possesses the confidence to see reality as it is, to speak truth without fear, and to defend the principles that made it free in the first place.

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Many ‘Christians’ speak about Jews with the peculiar confidence of tourists explaining Paris after changing planes at Charles de Gaulle.

They “know Judaism.”

After all, they have read Isaiah. They know Moses. They know David, Solomon, Jeremiah and the Psalms. They know Abraham, Joseph, Pharaoh, Sinai and the Exodus. They know the Ten Commandments. They know the stories.

And above all, they believe they know how the story ends.

Jesus arrives.
The veil tears.
The old covenant is fulfilled.
Christianity emerges like a butterfly from the cocoon of Judaism.

Case closed.

Except it isn’t.

It is not a beta release awaiting a software update from Galilee.

It is not “Christianity without the final chapter.”

And one of the strangest realities in modern religious life is that millions of Christians devote enormous amounts of time to studying the Hebrew Bible while understanding almost nothing about the civilization that preserved it, argued over it, suffered for it, and built an entire world around it.

Many Christians know the Old Testament. Far fewer know the Jews.

Those are not remotely the same thing.

Christianity and Judaism emerge from the same ancient soil, but they are now two radically different interpretive civilizations.

That distinction changes almost everything.

Christianity became intensely focused on salvation, eternity, grace, redemption, heaven, hell, sin, and the cosmic rescue of humanity through Christ.

Judaism remained focused far more on covenant, law, ritual, discipline, memory, justice, obedience, survival, community, and the sanctification of ordinary life.

That difference is not cosmetic.
It is civilizational.

And it explains why Jews often find Christian theology bewildering.

Christians frequently imagine Judaism as incomplete Christianity — a story awaiting its final chapter.

Jews generally do not see themselves as unfinished Christians.

They see Christianity as a dramatic theological departure from Judaism.

To many Jews, the Trinity appears incompatible with strict monotheism. The incarnation of God into human flesh appears impossible. The worship of Jesus appears not as fulfillment, but as a break from the uncompromising unity of God proclaimed in the Shema:

“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”

And here we arrive at the central fracture point that polite interfaith dialogue perpetually tiptoes around.

The Jews did not accept Jesus as the Messiah.

Or more precisely: some Jews did — the first Christians were themselves Jews — but the Jewish religious mainstream ultimately did not.

Christianity emerged from Judaism and then separated from it in one of the most consequential civilizational schisms in human history.

And for Christians, this creates a permanent theological tension because Christianity simultaneously proclaims two things.

That tension runs directly through Romans 11, one of the most emotionally complicated and morally sobering chapters in the New Testament.

Paul — himself a Jew and former Pharisee — warns Gentile Christians not to become arrogant toward the Jewish people.

He uses the image of an olive tree.

The Jewish covenant is the original cultivated tree.
Gentile Christians are “wild branches” grafted into it.

And then comes the warning:
Do not boast against the natural branches.

In other words, Christianity does not emerge from nowhere. It emerges from Jewish scripture, Jewish prophecy, Jewish ethics, Jewish apostles, Jewish monotheism, and a Jewish Messiah.

Historically, many Christians ignored this warning with consequences ranging from disgraceful to monstrous.

For centuries, Europe produced one of history’s great moral absurdities: civilizations worshipping a Jewish Messiah while frequently despising the Jewish people from whom that Messiah came.

Periodic massacres sanctified with enough theological jargon to soothe the consciences of cowards. One need not indict Christianity itself to acknowledge the historical record of Christian societies.

And yet the Jews survived all of it with a level of civilizational continuity that is frankly astonishing.

Empires vanished.
Languages disappeared.
Borders dissolved.
Dynasties collapsed into dust.

The Jews remained.

There are only about fifteen or sixteen million Jews on Earth today — fewer people than many metropolitan regions — and yet they have exerted an influence on philosophy, economics, ethics, literature, science, law, psychology, music, medicine, and intellectual life wildly disproportionate to their numbers.

And perhaps this contributes to another misunderstanding.

Many Christians imagine Judaism as frozen in biblical amber — ancient Hebrews wandering deserts in sepia tones.

But Judaism evolved.

Modern Judaism is not simply “Old Testament religion.”

Rabbinic Judaism — the Judaism most Jews recognize today — emerged largely after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. It became a civilization of scholarship, legal reasoning, commentary, adaptation, textual analysis, debate, and memory.

To study Judaism seriously is not merely to encounter a religion.

It is to encounter a four-thousand-year-old argument.

And then there is the question many Christians quietly wonder but often hesitate to ask directly:

What do Jews think about Christian salvation?

The answer surprises many Christians.

Traditional Judaism is usually far less exclusivist regarding salvation than Christianity or Islam.

Judaism historically does not teach that all non-Jews are damned.

Indeed, Judaism has generally not sought converts aggressively. In many periods, rabbis actively discouraged conversion unless sincerity was demonstrated over time.

A righteous non-Jew could still stand rightly before God.

Again: different assumptions.

Judaism focuses less on extracting precise doctrinal assent and more on righteous conduct, repentance, justice, obedience, and covenantal faithfulness.

Christianity, however, makes universal truth claims.

It does not say:
“Jesus is one spiritual option among many.”

It says:
Christ is Lord.

Which means Christians cannot entirely avoid the uncomfortable theological issue:

What happens to Jews who reject Jesus?

Christian traditions differ sharply here.

Some Christians — particularly exclusivist evangelical traditions — believe explicit faith in Christ is necessary for salvation. Under that framework, Jews stand spiritually in the same position as any other non-Christian.

Other Christians take a softer or more mysterious approach. They point to Romans 11 itself, where Paul insists that “the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable,” and speaks of a future reconciliation involving Israel.

Some Catholics and theologians argue that the Jewish covenant retains a unique place within salvation history.

But no serious Christian theology can simply pretend the disagreement is minor.

Christianity says the Messiah came.
Judaism says He did not.

That is not a footnote.
That is the divide.

And then comes another profound difference many Christians instinctively sense but rarely articulate clearly.

Judaism can survive partial unbelief in ways Christianity fundamentally cannot.

A secular Jew who has not entered a synagogue in twenty years may still remain deeply Jewish in identity, humour, memory, family structure, cuisine, tribal attachment, historical consciousness, and emotional connection to Jewish history.

Because Judaism is not merely a set of propositions.
It is also a people.

Christianity was radically universal from the beginning.

There is neither Jew nor Greek.
Neither slave nor free.
Neither Roman nor barbarian.

The faith explodes outward from tribe, bloodline, ethnicity, geography, and nation.

One does not become Christian by ancestry.
One becomes Christian through belief, repentance, baptism, discipleship, worship, and faith in Christ.

At least in theory.

And yet modern Christianity often functions as a kind of pseudo-ethnicity anyway.

The cross becomes jewelry.
Christianity becomes the atmosphere.
Aesthetic.
Inheritance.
Sentiment.
A family brand name retained from grandparents who actually believed.

One hears phrases like:
“I’m Catholic.”
“I’m Anglican.”
“I’m Christian.”

But often this means something closer to:
“My grandparents were.”

And this creates an odd irony.

Modern secular Christians increasingly resemble secular Jews sociologically, while differing from Judaism theologically.

The secular Jew may remain Jewish because Jewishness itself includes ancestry, peoplehood, covenantal identity, historical continuity, and tribal memory.

But Christianity, doctrinally speaking, does not really permit an equivalent category of “ethnic Christian.”

Christianity is not supposed to be inherited tribal affiliation alone.
It is supposed to be a living conviction.

The New Testament is relentlessly existential in its demands.

Pick up your cross.
Repent.
Follow me.
Be transformed.
Be born again.

Not:
“Wear a cross necklace twice a year and vaguely admire the Sermon on the Mount.”

And this perhaps explains why secular Jews often remain intelligibly Jewish, while secular Christianity frequently dissolves into little more than cultural residue.

Judaism was built to survive exile, dispersion, catastrophe, statelessness, and minority existence across millennia.

Christianity was built to evangelize the world.

Different architectures.
Different purposes.
Different understandings of the covenant itself.

And modern Judaism itself contains worlds within worlds.

Orthodox Judaism is the most traditional and law-centred form, regarding Jewish law — halakha — as binding and divinely rooted.

Within Orthodoxy itself exist multiple traditions:
Modern Orthodox,
ultra-Orthodox,
Hasidic traditions,
Lithuanian traditions,
Sephardic traditions,
and others.

Then comes Conservative Judaism, which attempts to preserve tradition while adapting to modernity.

Then, Reform Judaism, which emerged largely in Germany, treats many traditional practices more symbolically or ethically than literally.

Then Reconstructionist Judaism and entirely secular Jewish identities beyond religion altogether.

So yes: one can absolutely be religiously Jewish without being Orthodox.

And then there are Israeli Jews, Russian Jews, Persian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, secular Tel Aviv Jews, Brooklyn Hasidim, French Jews, Argentine Jews, and Jews who have not entered a synagogue in twenty years but still feel bound to Jewish history with fierce emotional intensity.

Judaism survived because it became more than a belief.

It became a memory.

And perhaps this is where Christians — especially those who fancy themselves defenders of Christianity — ought to pause and perform a small but painful act of self-examination.

Because one of the most disgraceful habits in Christian history has been the use of Jewish rejection of Jesus as a license for contempt.

As though the proper response to a people from whom came the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, the scriptures, and Christ Himself was sneering resentment.

As though Christians, of all people, were appointed celestial immigration officers for heaven.

The irony is almost unbearable.

Christians claim to worship a Jewish carpenter from Judea, read Jewish scriptures, quote Jewish prophets, revere Jewish apostles, and await the return of a Jewish Messiah — while some somehow still manage to cultivate hostility toward Jews themselves.

One suspects this would come as news to Jesus.

And if Romans 11 means anything at all, it means Christians are forbidden from arrogance toward the Jewish people.

Forbidden from contempt.
Forbidden from triumphal sneering.
Forbidden from the nauseating historical habit of treating Jews as spiritually defective supporting characters in somebody else’s story.

A Christian may believe Jesus is the Messiah.
Christianity itself requires that belief.

But if that belief produces hatred, mockery, arrogance, cruelty, or tribal contempt toward Jews, then something has gone catastrophically wrong in the soul of the believer.

Because before Christianity was a cathedral, an empire, a denomination, a televangelist franchise, or a suburban cultural aesthetic, it emerged from Jewish soil.

And Christians who wish to understand Jews must first understand this:

Judaism is not Christianity without Jesus.

It is Judaism.

An ancient civilization.
A wounded civilization.
A stubborn civilization.
A civilization that survived Babylon, Rome, exile, dispersion, pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions, and history’s repeated attempts to erase it.

And before one attempts to fulfill, supersede, theologize, or explain another civilization, one should first attempt the far more difficult task:

Understanding it.

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“You are the best community produced for mankind…”
— Qur’an 3:110

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Really?

That is not a timid claim. It is a claim of superiority. Not merely that Islam is true, but that the community shaped by it is the finest community produced for humanity.

So let us compare.

Take every country in which Christianity is the largest religious affiliation and every country in which Islam is the largest religious affiliation. Compare them using the ordinary measures by which modern societies evaluate themselves: purchasing-power-adjusted income, healthcare, freedom of expression, and human development.

These are not Christian measures. They are not Islamic measures. They are the same international benchmarks used by governments, economists, and development agencies throughout the world.

The pattern is remarkably consistent.

Christian-plurality countries produce substantially higher average incomes. And that one little Jewish state built on a postage stamp desert plot seems to be doing quite well.

The Christian and Jewish nations rank higher in healthcare. They rank higher in freedom of expression. They rank higher in human development. The comparison is not between a handful of exceptional nations, nor between the richest countries on earth. It is an average across all countries in which each religion is the largest religious affiliation.

Then narrow the comparison to the birthplace of Islam itself.

Compare Israel with the surrounding Middle East using the same measures. Again, Israel scores markedly higher in income, healthcare, freedom of expression, and human development than the regional average..

If a civilization, a community, or a way of life claims to be the finest produced for mankind, it is entirely reasonable to ask whether that excellence is reflected in the ordinary conditions of human life.

The data presented here do not appear to support that claim. The evidence is what it is. It does not appear to show the world’s highest-performing societies clustering where the claim of superiority is made. It appears to show the opposite.

A civilization may still believe itself exceptional. But belief and demonstration are not the same thing. If one insists on the former, one should at least be willing to look honestly at the latter.

As a bit of a kicker, let’s compare the numbers on emigration from Muslim-majority to Christian-majority nations and then take a look at the reverse.

You know what they say about people voting with their feet?

So with all due respect to their noble prophet, it looks like something has gone wrong.

It reminds me of some students I’ve had that, in spite of their C-, nevertheless can’t be persuaded that they are not the smartest kid in the class.

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For most of my life, I misunderstood where institutional power comes from.

I assumed it came from legislation, budgets, regulations, prestige, or political influence. I believed that the greatest danger posed by bureaucracies was that they might occasionally reach the wrong decision—that prejudice, incompetence, or ideology might produce an unjust outcom…

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The scientific evidence does not permit us to declare that canine love is identical to human love. It does, however, strongly support the conclusion that dogs form genuine, owner-specific attachments and value human affection as something more than a way to fill their stomachs.

There is a sentence one hears with increasing regularity, usually delivered with a laugh that does not entirely conceal its seriousness:

It sounds like a joke about human disappointment. People are treacherous; dogs greet us at the door. People remember grievances, withdraw affection, cancel plans, betray confidences and sometimes vanish without explanation. Dogs wait.

But perhaps the sentence deserves more attention than we give it. Is it merely the complaint of the jaded? Is it misanthropy disguised as animal affection? Does it express a desire for companionship without the work of communication, compromise and forgiveness? Or does it reveal something sadder about a society in which people have become increasingly connected by technology and increasingly isolated from one another?

The comparison itself is unfair. Dogs and humans do not occupy interchangeable positions in our lives. Preferring one to the other is, in some respects, like preferring music to architecture, apples and oranges. Each provides something the other cannot.

Yet the declaration persists because it expresses an emotional truth. For a growing number of people, the dog has become the most reliable source of affection in the house.

This is not difficult to understand.

It does not decide that loyalty has become embarrassing.

Dogs watch the door. They recognize the sound of a familiar car and the rhythm of familiar footsteps. They follow us from room to room, not because the destination matters, but because we are going there. They sleep beside the chair, wait outside the bathroom and greet a return from the mailbox as though their master had recently escaped from a gulag in the deepest tundra.

To a dog, an ordinary person may become the organizing centre of the universe: the source of safety, touch, play, food, routine and belonging. To be loved with that degree of uncomplicated attention is no small gift, particularly in an age when human attention is fragmented, conditional and easily withdrawn.

It is tempting to dismiss all this as sentimentality—to say that owners merely project human emotions onto animals that have learned where dinner comes from. Dogs are certainly motivated by food, and anyone who has opened a package of cheese crackers within their hearing knows it. But the evidence suggests that the relationship cannot be explained by appetite alone.

In one experiment, researchers placed awake, unrestrained dogs in an MRI scanner and compared their neural responses to signals predicting food with signals predicting praise from their primary human handler. Most of the dogs showed reward-system activation for praise that was equal to or greater than their response to food. Their neural preferences also predicted whether they would later choose interaction with their owner or approach a bowl of food.

This does not prove that a dog contemplates love as a human being does. It does show that affection from a familiar person has intrinsic reward value. The owner is not merely a mobile tin opener.

Other brain-imaging work found that the scent of a familiar human produced the strongest activation in a reward-associated region of the canine brain when compared with the scents of unfamiliar humans and familiar or unfamiliar dogs. The familiar person was absent during the experiment, making it difficult to reduce the response to an immediate expectation of feeding.

Behavioural research points in the same direction. Dogs use their owners as a secure base from which to explore and solve problems. The owner’s presence can reduce stress, encourage exploration and provide a “safe haven” during threatening situations. Researchers have adapted methods originally developed to study attachment between human children and caregivers and found recognizably similar patterns in dogs.

There is even a biological feedback loop between the species. Sustained mutual gazing between dogs and owners has been associated with increased oxytocin in humans, which in turn encourages further affectionate interaction; the researchers described it as an oxytocin-mediated positive loop resembling mechanisms involved in human attachment.

One should be cautious with the word love. Science can observe behaviour, hormones and neural activity; it cannot climb inside the private experience of another species and translate it into a human sentence.

But if love includes attachment, preference, trust, proximity-seeking, distress at separation, reassurance through reunion and delight in the presence of a particular individual, then it becomes unnecessarily stubborn to insist that dogs feel nothing worthy of the name.

Their love is genuine, even if it is not human.

Lord Byron understood this long before the MRI scanner. When his Newfoundland, Boatswain, died in 1808, Byron commemorated him in an epitaph contrasting canine virtue with human vanity and betrayal. The poem ends with the bleak confession:

“I never knew but one—and here he lies.”

The “one” was his dog.

Byron’s grief sounds strikingly modern. The dog is praised not merely because it was affectionate, but because its affection exposed something shabby in human beings. The animal possessed loyalty without calculation, courage without vanity and companionship without intrigue. The dog’s goodness became an indictment.

Perhaps the modern refrain—“I prefer dogs to people”—contains the same judgment.

Human relationships are difficult because another person possesses a will equal to our own. Other people misunderstand us, contradict us, need things from us, judge us and sometimes leave. They require explanation, patience, apology, boundaries, forgiveness and repeated negotiation. We cannot simply summon them when lonely and dismiss them when tired.

A dog requires care, but it does not require the same moral labour of mutuality. It does not ask whether we have listened closely enough. It does not challenge our politics, remember an insult from six years ago or tell us that our version of events is self-serving.

It offers a relationship that is demanding in practice but comparatively safe emotionally.

This may make dogs especially attractive to people who have been hurt.

Someone betrayed by a spouse, abandoned by friends, rejected by family or quietly discarded by colleagues may discover that human intimacy feels less like comfort than exposure. The dog becomes the creature who cannot humiliate him deliberately, disclose his secrets or decide that he has become socially inconvenient.

The preference for dogs may therefore be misanthropic, but it is often wounded misanthropy. It is not always hatred of humanity. Sometimes it is the exhaustion of continuing to trust it.

Yet something larger is occurring. The modern person lives amid unprecedented communication and diminishing presence. We can reach almost anyone instantly, but increasingly do so without sharing a room. We send messages instead of visiting, react instead of answering, watch instead of participating and maintain awareness of hundreds of people while being deeply known by very few.

Digital communication can sustain real relationships, especially across distance. It is not intrinsically isolating. But the World Health Organization now identifies excessive or harmful digital-media use as one factor contributing to social disconnection, particularly among younger people, while warning that loneliness and social isolation have serious consequences for physical and mental health.

The modern person may therefore be surrounded by evidence of human existence while deprived of human presence.

There are messages, photographs, videos, voices and notifications everywhere. But there may be no one sitting in the chair across the room.

A dog is stubbornly physical and, without intention, retro. It cannot be maintained entirely through an app. It must be fed, walked, touched, cleaned, noticed and allowed into the rhythms of daily life. It creates routine in a culture of fragmentation. It needs its owner to inhabit the same space.

The dog restores something digitization steadily erodes: uncomplicated embodied companionship.

It also pulls the owner into the world. A dog must be walked. It provides a reason to leave the house, enter a park and speak to strangers. Recent research suggests that people often experience their relationships with dogs as highly satisfying and particularly strong in companionship, care and dependable support. Yet those relationships do not appear simply to replace weak human relationships; rather, they provide a distinctive and complementary form of connection.

This is important because the evidence on pets and loneliness is mixed. Pet ownership has sometimes been associated with lower social isolation and, particularly during the pandemic, lower loneliness.

But systematic reviews have not found that owning an animal consistently eliminates loneliness across populations. A dog may help profoundly without supplying every kind of connection a human being needs.

A dog can sit beside grief, but it cannot interpret grief with us.

It cannot remember our father, or a mother lost in childhood that one can now barely pull up in their mind’s eye, nor can it help us understand why a marriage failed or tell us that we have become unfair. It cannot share responsibility for a moral decision, exchange memories of a childhood or argue with us until a deeper understanding emerges. It can provide affection, but not the full reciprocity of human friendship.

That limitation does not diminish the dog. It defines the tragedy.

The dog may bridge the gap created by human loneliness. It may soften the gap, interrupt it and make it survivable. It may even lead its owner back toward other people. But it can also make withdrawal easier. After enough disappointment, the safer creature may become preferable to the riskier one.

They do not drift away in search of a more successful social circle. They do not become embarrassed by age, illness or diminished usefulness. They do not regard a person as disposable because his career has failed or his conversation has slowed. Their world contracts around those they love rather than continually expanding in search of replacements.

It feels good to be needed that completely.

It feels even better to be welcomed.

This is why “I prefer dogs to people” sounds both humorous and sad. It celebrates one of the most remarkable relationships human beings have been given. Yet it may also confess that ordinary human connection has become too fickle, exhausting or dangerous to trust.

Dogs are not substitutes for people. They are not miniature humans, unpaid therapists or emotional appliances. They are another kind of creature offering another kind of relationship—one with genuine attachment, distinctive limits, extraordinary beauty and a love that seems pure.

They do.

Nor is the question whether their love is real. The evidence, both scientific and ordinary, strongly suggests that it is.

The harder question is what has happened to human society that the steadfastness of a dog increasingly feels less like a wonderful addition to human companionship and more like the last dependable refuge from its failure.

Postscript

I have written this without making myself the subject, but perhaps one personal admission belongs at the end.

I love my dogs.

Years ago, I lost my beloved Westie, Nika. I can still barely speak about that morning I found her on the cusp of death under my daughter’s bed without feeling the old pain return. Grief of that kind is sometimes treated as excessive because the creature lost was “only a dog.”

Nika was not interchangeable. She was not merely a pet occupying a category that could be refilled. She was a particular presence, a particular personality, a particular source of companionship and joy. She had woven herself into the ordinary structure of life so completely that her absence altered the shape of the house.

Perhaps this is why the question matters to me.

The love between a person and a dog is not imaginary, childish or second-rate. It is one of the real consolations of human life. The grief that follows its loss is real because the love was real.

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