Last Friday, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky visited the Canadian parliament. For the occasion, the speaker of the house invited a ninety-eight-year-old Ukrainian World War II veteran to attend, and introduced him as a “hero”—prompting a standing ovation. It was soon discovered that this guest of honor had served in a Ukrainian-manned SS division that fought the Soviets under Nazi command. Terry Glavin observes that the incident has only given “new life” to official Russian propaganda about Kyiv’s supposed domination by Nazis, which has also been directed against Ottawa. Nor is it unique:

[This] happened on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, of all days. And in the presence of the gallant Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, himself a Jew, during what should have been a triumphant visit to the House of Commons. We are all suitably chastened, of course. The consensus is that parliament should now turn to sensibly banal questions like this one: how can we ensure that something like this never happens again?

There were also apologies all round last year because of the horrible optics of the Liberal MP Salma Zahid and the cabinet minister Omar Alghabra along with MPs from all the parties gathering for a Palestine Day event on Parliament Hill with characters known for regurgitating praise of terrorists and publishing outright Holocaust denial. Sorry, won’t happen again. Unacceptable.

Last year there was also the case of Laith Marouf, a grossly anti-Semitic apologist for the Syrian mass murderer Bashar al-Assad whose proposal to hector federally regulated broadcasters about how not to be racist was championed by cabinet heavyweight Ahmed Hussen and funded lavishly. Marouf’s various projects were eventually found to have hoovered up hundreds of thousands of dollars in [government] consultation funds.

The remedy? A promise that nothing like it would happen again. There would be workshops for senior federal officials in how to spot Jew hatred when it’s shouted in their faces.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.