CUPE vice-president Hahn doth protest too much

When someone finds it necessary to repeatedly declare that he’s not an antisemite, he’s probably an antisemite.

- ROSIE DIMANNO

When someone finds it necessary to repeatedly declare that his endless loathing for the state of Israel isn’t antisemitic, he’s probably an antisemite.

When someone writes rapturously on X about the Hamas slaughter of some 1,200 Israeli civilians — men, women and children, from Holocaust survivors to babies, nearly all of them Jews — within a day of the Oct. 7 atrocity, celebrating the massacre as “the power of resistance” — that is unequivocally antisemitic. “Resistance is fruitful and no matter what some might say, resistance brings progress.”

When someone shares on Facebook a digitally manipulated video depicting a Jewish athlete — Star of David tattooed on his arm — jumping off a springboard at the Olympics and turning into an exploding human bomb raining destruction on innocents — that is indisputably antisemitic.

When that person offers limp and only belated apologies, only when called out for his appalling lapses of judgment, a qualified mea culpa which extends only to causing pain for “some” who viewed it, that’s duck and bob antisemitism.

And when groups of people represented by that trade union executive — Air Canada flight attendants, paramedics, an agency working with the homeless — slam that individual for his “reckless” social media, calling for the perpetrator’s resignation, that’s evidence of objection to antisemitism.