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On March 6, 1927, Bertrand Russell stood up in Battersea Town Hall and told a roomful of Londoners why he was not a Christian. He called hell cruel, found Christ morally defective in places, and said religion depends mainly on fear. Then he went home. Nobody stabbed him. The lecture has never been out of print. Christians were offended and said so in print, which is what free people do with offence.

I am a Christian, and I disagree with nearly every line Russell spoke that night. I would never have wished him harm, or imagined the Gospel needed a policeman to protect it from him. My sky daddy doesn’t need human speech or enforcers.

So I start with Russell to ask a question he never had to ask. Why can a man still explain why he is not a Christian and expect to get home safely, while the same lecture about Islam is treated across the West as recklessness, provocation or a hate crime? Why does the act of condemning Mohammed by a non-believer risk life and limb?

The bully religion? - I mean a body of doctrine, the men who enforce it, and the Western institutions that defer to them. I do not mean my Muslim neighbours and former students, most of whom want what I want: to raise their families, do their work and be left alone.

The bully religion and its dangers do not require a military confrontation with the West. They don’t have the power to take us on.

The problem deepens when institutions respond to intimidation by accommodating demands for religious deference, treating accusations of offence as grounds for censorship, or allowing public spaces to be dominated through threats and harassment. Peaceful protest and complaints of discrimination are legitimate; neither confers a right to silence others. The governing principle should be unequivocal: religious conviction and feelings of grievance give no one permission to threaten, intimidate, or commit violence.

A free society can tell a man from his creed. A frightened one cannot, or pretends it cannot.

Section one.

Four scenes. On July 25, 2021, Hatun Tash, an ex-Muslim Christian evangelist, was stabbed at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park while wearing a Charlie Hebdo T-shirt. Her attacker has never been caught. The next year, a man was arrested on his way to buy a gun to shoot her there. Tash herself was also arrested in the park, and the Metropolitan Police have paid her damages. Her summary is better than mine: I am Christian, and by default I believe that Muhammad is a false prophet. I should be allowed to say that in the UK or Canada without being stabbed or repeatedly arrested.

On Feb. 13, 2025, Hamit Coskun burned a Qur’an outside the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge. A passer-by came at him with a knife. Coskun was later convicted of a religiously aggravated public order offence, though no English law forbids burning your own book. The man who burned the book and was stabbed became the criminal, not the man who assaulted him. Mr Justice Bennathan quashed the conviction, holding that free expression must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb. English justice got there in the end, but it took two appeals to establish what the law had been all along.

On Jan. 7, 2015, the Kouachi brothers murdered twelve people at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, among them the police officer Ahmed Merabet, himself a Muslim. Two days later, Amedy Coulibaly murdered four Jewish hostages at the Hypercacher supermarket. In October 2020, a Paris teacher, Samuel Paty, showed two of the Mohammed cartoons in a class on free expression. A pupil who was not even in the lesson told her father a false story about it; a campaign followed, and on Oct. 16 an eighteen-year-old Muslim beheaded Paty near his school.

Four scenes, one lesson. Islam is shielded in the West on two levels. The first is raw fear of violence, which is at least honest about itself. The second is a strand of the progressive left that has decided criticism of Islam is racism or a pathology, a phobia, which gives fear a moral alibi. Together they produce a posture I call supplication: an anxious bowing that calls itself respect.

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Section two.

The bully thesis. A bully is defined not by what he believes but by what he does when contradicted. I judge Islam by that test, at the level of doctrine, institutions and pattern, and leave aside the private piety of people who have hurt no one.

Doctrine first. Sahih al-Bukhari, the most authoritative hadith collection in Sunni Islam, records the Prophet saying, “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.” It records him asking, “Who is willing to kill Ka’b bin Al-Ashraf who has hurt Allah and His Apostle?” Ka’b was a poet. His offence was words. These are the founding precedents for treating mockery and desertion as capital matters.

Then the pattern. In 1989 Iran’s head of state pronounced a death sentence on a novelist, and in 2022 a young man stabbed Salman Rushdie on a lecture stage in New York. Add Hyde Park, Knightsbridge, Paris and Conflans. These crimes share a grievance, a vocabulary and a list of targets: the cartoonist, the novelist, the teacher, the apostate, the woman in the T-shirt. I do not say every believer is a bully. I say the creed contains a licence for bullying, its zealots use it, and the rest of us have learned to flinch.

Section three.

Tolerance means putting up with what you dislike. Appeasement means changing your conduct to buy off a threat. What the West practises towards Islam is mostly the second, dressed up as the first.

The argument I reject goes: “It’s just a few bad apples, so your criticism unfairly condemns every Muslim.” That is a deflection. First, I dispute that the problem is confined to a handful of individuals; I argue that most of its teachings are rot in the barrel itself. Second, my criticism concerns those teachings, not every person who professes the religion. You may dispute my reading or defend the ideas. But turning an argument about doctrine into an accusation against every believer misrepresents the argument rather than answering it.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who opposed Adolf Hitler, even when opposition was dangerous, isolating and eventually fatal. He had opportunities to remain abroad.

In the mid and late 1930s, with the danger of Nazism no longer a distant shape on the horizon but an approaching catastrophe, Bonhoeffer travelled to the United States and London. He could have stayed there. Instead, he returned to Germany, knowing perfectly well what sort of country Germany was becoming and what returning might eventually cost him. He refused the luxury of condemning evil from a safe distance while leaving others to endure it.

From the beginning, one of the central reasons for Bonhoeffer’s opposition to Hitler was the Nazi persecution of the Jews. He rejected the German churches’ capitulation to antisemitism. He defended Jews when the regime sought to exclude them. He opposed the removal of Jews from German public life. Most importantly, he insisted that the church’s obligation was not merely to bind the wounds of those crushed beneath the machinery of injustice, but, when necessary, to thrust a spoke into the wheel itself.

Bonhoeffer helped build the Confessing Church, became involved in the German resistance and was executed by the Nazis in April 1945, only weeks before the war in Europe ended.

Bonhoeffer matters because his life destroys one of the easiest excuses available to anyone living inside a corrupted political culture: Everyone around me believed it, so what was I supposed to do?

Not everyone believed it.

Not everyone submitted.

Some refused. Some spoke. Some resisted. Some paid for that refusal with their lives.

All of which leads to a question about Palestinian society that is treated in much of polite Western conversation as somehow indecent even to ask:

I do not mean the Palestinian who privately dislikes Hamas. I do not mean someone who mutters his misgivings to his wife or friend, but fears the men with guns, or whispers anonymously to a Western journalist that things have gone too far. Those people unquestionably exist, and some have shown considerable courage.

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I mean the religious leader, intellectual, professor, political figure or popular movement willing to stand before Palestinian society and say plainly that hatred of Jews was corrupting it; that murdering Jewish civilians was evil; that kidnapping children was evil; that teaching children to romanticize martyrdom was evil; that Israelis had a right to live beside them; that Jews were not intruders upon Arab soil; that peace required accepting the permanent existence of a Jewish state; and that, if their own people refused to hear these things, then their own people were wrong.

Such Palestinians do exist individually. Some have paid heavily for dissent. Hamas is brutal toward opponents. Accusations of collaboration can be lethal. Palestinian political culture is authoritarian. It is infinitely easier to demand courage from a comfortable room in Toronto or London than from a street in Gaza City.

Fear does not make the moral question meaningless. It makes those who resist the fear more important.

The same confusion infects the use of the word civilian. A strange phenomenon surrounds that word whenever Gaza is discussed. It begins with an entirely correct proposition and ends with an absurd one.

Civilians are not combatants. They may not lawfully be attacked merely because of their political opinions, because they voted badly or because they live under a terrorist government. A civilian does not lose protection because he believes something stupid, hateful or monstrous.

But from that legal truth another proposition has somehow been manufactured: that Palestinian civilians can be politically unrelated to Hamas, untouched by its ideology and irrelevant to any discussion of the society from which Hamas emerged.

That does not follow.

A civilian may be innocent of any crime and still believe terrible things. A society may contain children, dissidents, terrified opponents and genuine peacemakers while also sustaining a political culture in which violence has acquired enormous legitimacy.

We should have the courage to hold both ideas in our heads at once.

We understand this distinction perfectly well almost everywhere else. Only a minority (about 10%) of Germans formally belonged to the Nazi Party, although membership eventually numbered in the millions. Nobody serious concludes from that fact that National Socialism was merely an eccentric club that happened somehow to seize control of uninformed society. Nor does any serious historian say that every German was equally guilty. There were fanatics, conformists, opportunists, beneficiaries, frightened bystanders, opponents and rescuers.

There were Bonhoeffers.

Gaza is not Nazi Germany, and Hamas is not the Third Reich. Historical analogies become foolish when they are stretched until everything resembles Hitler. But Hamas did not descend upon Gaza from another planet.

Hamas grew directly from the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and other Brotherhood figures founded Hamas during the First Intifada in 1987, and Hamas’s original charter explicitly identified the movement with the Brotherhood.

There was contact. There was ideological traffic. There was virulent antisemitism. European conspiracy theories about Jews migrated into parts of Middle Eastern political culture and interacted with older religious prejudices, colonial resentment, nationalism and the conflict over Palestine. Hamas inherited elements of that ideological world and fused them with Palestinian nationalism, Islamist theology, historical grievance and a commitment to armed struggle.

And the alternatives do not rescue the comforting storyline.

The political party Fatah itself emerged from a tradition of armed struggle. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has a long history of terrorism and hijacking. Palestinian Islamic Jihad explicitly rejects accommodation with Israel. Together, movements with long records of violence or rejectionism accounted for much of Palestinian political life.

Mahmoud Abbas, routinely presented in Western diplomacy as the moderate president of the Palestinian Authority, wrote a doctoral dissertation that was based on holocaust denial and has repeatedly made remarks condemned internationally as antisemitic.

So one may say that “only” 45 percent voted for Hamas, but then one must examine what substantial numbers of the remaining voters supported.

Rejectionism and armed struggle are not angry fringe doctrines imported into an otherwise peaceful Palestinian political culture. To pretend otherwise is simply to misrepresent reality.

Pre-October 7 polling makes the point hard to evade. In September 2023, before the present war, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research asked Palestinians what was the most effective means of ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state, and armed struggle enjoyed support far greater than Hamas’ vote count

Then came October 7.

Civilians from Gaza also crossed through the breached border after the attack proceeded. The exact number, and the degree to which every person crossing participated in violence, remain disputed, but estimates of violent non-Hamas terrorists joining in were over 500.

Then came the crowds.

A crowd is not a census. Several hundred or several thousand people cannot pronounce a moral verdict on two million.

But the fashionable response goes much further. It requires us to pretend that the crowds signify nothing whatsoever.

Of course they signify something.

The Bibas family became perhaps the most unbearable example. Kfir Bibas was nine months old when kidnapped. His brother Ariel was four. Their mother, Shiri, was taken with them. Hamas falsely claimed they had died in an Israeli airstrike; Israeli forensic authorities later disputed that account and said the children had been strangled to death by their captors. What is beyond dispute is that the bodies of kidnapped children became props inside Hamas’s political theatre.

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‘It does not describe every Palestinian.

It does describe something.

Or is Palestinian society the one society on earth for which commentators demand 100 percent participation before permitting anyone to observe a social phenomenon?

Of course not.

The identity of some of the victims makes the point even more painful.

Some of the kibbutzim devastated on October 7 contained precisely the kind of Israelis Hamas propaganda — and a great deal of Western rhetoric — pretends scarcely exist: left-leaning peace activists, advocates of coexistence, supporters of a two-state settlement and Israelis who had personally helped Palestinians from Gaza obtain medical treatment inside Israel.

Vivian Silver of Kibbutz Be’eri spent years advocating coexistence and assisting Palestinians. She was murdered on October 7.

These were not caricatures of Jewish conquest.

They were not settlers advancing with rifles into a Palestinian village.

They were Israelis who had built part of their moral lives around the conviction that Palestinians should be treated as neighbours rather than enemies.

In the end, this meant nothing.

The attackers did not stop to ask whether an Israeli had marched for peace, supported two states or driven a Palestinian child to a hospital. The ideological category was sufficient:

Israeli.

Jew.

Zionist.

Enemy.

Gazans also worked in Israeli communities before October 7, where they had developed deep personal relationships. After the massacres, survivors described the terrible suspicion that information about kibbutz layouts, security arrangements and access points had been supplied to Hamas through people familiar with the communities. The very possibility of such betrayal was devastating precisely because Israelis in those communities had often supported employment, medical assistance and coexistence.

The schools matter as well.

One need not rely on Israeli advocacy organizations to find troubling evidence. European-funded and independent examinations of Palestinian educational material have repeatedly identified examples of antisemitic imagery or narratives, glorification of violence, celebration of martyrdom and maps or historical presentations that erase or delegitimize Israel. There is argument over the extent, interpretation and prevalence of this material. Palestinian textbooks are not one uninterrupted antisemitic screed.

But troubling material exists, and pretending otherwise insults the intelligence.

Children do not invent political cultures. Adults transmit them.

Adults inculcate the youth through textbooks, television, mosques, songs, posters, martyr commemorations, maps, heroes, family stories and the language used around the dinner table.

Of course not every Palestinian parent consciously requests such material. But societies are revealed not only by what everyone believes. They are also revealed by what becomes ordinary and by what fails to produce sustained internal resistance.

The hostage question presses the same nerve.

Hundreds of captives were brought into one of the most densely populated territories on earth.

They had to be transported. Hidden.Guarded. Fed. Moved.

Some remained in captivity for many months.

Israel publicly appealed for information and offered rewards.

How could such an enormous hostage enterprise function for so long inside a civilian environment without implicit civilian consent?

Fear must explain some silence. Ignorance must explain some. Ideological sympathy must explain some. Coercion undoubtedly explains some.

But simply uttering the word civilian and closing the file explains nothing.

A society in which hostages can be concealed, transported and publicly displayed over long periods deserves analysis of the social environment in which that could occur, even while the legal and moral distinction between fighters and civilians remains absolute.

None of this erases Palestinian suffering.

A Palestinian child killed in war does not become guilty because of a poll taken among adults.

A Palestinian mother remains a civilian regardless of what her neighbour believes.

Palestinians are human beings.

We infantilize them when we pretend they possess no agency.

They can be victims.

They can be perpetrators.

They can be peacemakers.

They can be propagandists.

They can be dissidents.

They can be enthusiasts.

They can be courageous.

They can be cowardly.

To deny them this moral complexity is not compassion.

Hamas is not every Palestinian.

The proper question, therefore, is not whether every Palestinian supported Hamas.

Of course they did not.

The question is why a movement committed to permanent struggle could become so deeply rooted without producing an equally powerful indigenous movement committed to coexistence.

Germany had Bonhoeffer. It had the White Rose. It had Germans who hid Jews. It had clergy who resisted. It had conspirators who tried to kill Hitler.

They were minorities — often tiny minorities — but history remembers their names precisely because they stood against the moral current of their own society.

The Palestinian people deserve such figures too.

Where are they?

Perhaps some exist now, hidden by fear and drowned out by gunfire. If so, they, rather than Hamas, should become the heroes of Palestinian national life.

Their names should be taught in schools.

Their faces should appear on posters.

Their courage should be celebrated in mosques, universities and homes.

A future Palestinian national story capable of coexistence will require heroes whose greatness comes not from killing Israelis but from refusing to hate them.

Bonhoeffer understood something more important than opposition politics.

He understood that the first obligation of a moral person living inside a corrupted political culture is not merely to explain how his own people became corrupted.

It is to refuse the corruption.

No peace worth having can be constructed on the fiction that only one side possesses moral agency while the other exists permanently as a victim, acted upon by history but never responsible for shaping it.

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The candy was sweet. The warning came later.

As a small boy in Khan Yunis, Gaza, Dor Shachar accepted candy from an Israeli soldier. He remembers taking the wrapper home and asking his father, who worked in Israel, to buy him more.

Instead, his father warned him never to accept candy from a Jew. It could be “poisoned.”

Yet his father also brought home sweets from Israel. Even as a child, Shachar noticed the contradiction between the Jews he was taught to hate and the people he actually met.

Decades later, that gap—between the Jew of the hateful imagination and the human being standing in front of you—is at the heart of what makes his story worth hearing.

For Canadians, that is not an abstract discussion. What do young minds see and hear in Canada? Campuses that fester and foster anti-Zionism. Social media that demonizes Israel and Jews. Elected officials that wear keffiyehs and get selfies with radicals. Public schools that allowed pro-Palestinian chanting at a field trip, and hired anti-Israel “educators” to give “development seminars.” Together, incidents like these could fill a thick volume from the past three years alone. Where, and how far, will it go next? Shachar’s early years give us a glimpse.

That makes Jew-hatred a local problem, not merely a foreign conflict’s distant echo. Antisemitism isn’t something Jews must manage; it is something their neighbours have a responsibility to confront.

Shachar’s account offers a disturbing window into how that hatred can be cultivated.

Born into a Palestinian Muslim family in Khan Yunis, he recalls receiving anti-Jewish messages at home, at school and in religious instruction. In our interview, he described teachers instructing children to throw stones at Israeli soldiers, and relatives presenting the killing of Jews as a duty.

In his telling, hatred was not an isolated lesson, but a message reinforced across childhood. Questioning it meant challenging not just an idea, but the authority of teachers and relatives—and risking punishment.

He recalls his grandfather inviting Israeli soldiers to share food and coffee, then speaking of killing them after they left. To the boy, the contradiction was bewildering: how could someone welcome a person to his table and then demand his death?

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Shachar describes a refusal that cost him dearly.

He left Gaza for Israel as a young teenager. His subsequent journey involved arrest, deportation, a return to Gaza and, he says, seven months of imprisonment and torture after his desire to become Jewish became known. In the interview, he described electric shocks, being suspended upside down and being cut with a blade. He also recounted rejection and violence within his family.

He eventually studied Judaism, completed his conversion and became an Israeli citizen.

Along the way, he says, a Jewish family helped him with food, clothing and money. Their help gave practical expression to the humanity he first saw as a child. It is one thing to praise someone for rejecting the hatreds of his surroundings. It is another to pro-actively help support him.

His message to Western audiences is urgent and uncompromising. He warns that the danger he associates with Islamist ideology does not stop at Israel’s borders, and argues that Western societies underestimate it at their peril. He repeatedly returned to the fear that people would recognize the threat only after suffering its consequences themselves.

Hatred should not be overlooked as an inconvenience; ignoring it gives it permission to grow. Shachar knew this early, and even at great risk, continued to speak out.

For non-Jewish Canadians, that asks more than sympathy after another incident. It asks whether they will challenge antisemitism when it comes from someone in their own political, professional or social circle.

Shachar’s story shows the courage it takes to refuse inherited hatred—and the difference people make when they're willing to help.

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I came to the subject in the way one often comes to subjects that matter: badly and late.

I am reading a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who broke with the Nazified German church, helped build the underground Confessing Church, joined the resistance, and was hanged in 1945 for his involvement in the conspiracy against Hitler. I had reached the point at which Hitler had just become chancellor—not by storming the Reichstag at the head of a mob, but by being handed the office by respectable men who were certain they could contain him.

That is worth remembering. Hitler did not steal the chancellorship. Germany’s political establishment made an appointment.

What startled me, though, was something more embarrassing. I listened to translations of Hitler’s early speeches from 1933. He did not always sound like a lunatic. He could sound, to the ear he was courting, like he respected Christian values - though not to anyone paying serious attention to doctrine.

But Hitler was not auditioning for a theology faculty. His target market was the German Protestant ear, already softened by humiliation, inflation, national grievance and the mythology of betrayal after Versailles. He knew the vocabulary. Providence. Moral renewal. National redemption. Duty. Sacrifice. The restoration of a people humiliated by decadent forces.

The Deutsche Christen—the “German Christians”—did not have to be dragged kicking and screaming into Nazism. Many arrived early, enthusiastically, and carrying hymnals.

I had lazily assumed, as we often do with historical monsters, that the machinery of extermination must have announced itself as such. It did not. It introduced itself as moral restoration and allowed the churches, universities, newspapers, professions and drawing rooms to do much of the fitting.

This is the part of the story we skip because it is less satisfying than the ending. We prefer Hitler screaming.

Screaming is legible. It activates the alarm system.

What is harder to notice is the long period before the screaming, when respectable groundwork makes the eventual scream sound like the logical conclusion of things sensible people have already half accepted.

The state did not invent all of this hatred. It inherited, organized and weaponized it.

I am not comparing Canada in 2026 to Weimar Germany. That comparison collapses under the weight of its own melodrama. We do not have Weimar conditions, Nazi paramilitaries (just violent pro-Palestinian mobs), anti-Jewish legislation or a dictatorship. What we have is something less cinematic and therefore harder to discuss: the slow accretion of permission.

And here, I think, we often have the arithmetic backwards.

We ask what percentage of the population holds antisemitic beliefs, as if that were the only number that matters. It matters, of course. If nearly half the world can endorse one or more familiar antisemitic propositions, that is not a statistic to be waved away. But ugly beliefs have existed at troubling levels for centuries without automatically producing pogroms.

At the dinner table. In a faculty meeting. On the sidewalk. In the newsroom. At church.

History does not turn only on the presence of committed haters. It also turns on the absence of interruption.

To stand up when the room would rather remain seated. To refuse the current when everyone around us is swimming comfortably with it. A principle that governs our conduct only when it costs us nothing is scarcely governing our conduct at all.

I have recent, unpleasant and thoroughly unglamorous evidence of this from my own life, which I mention not because I wish to make myself the subject, but because one should be suspicious of arguments that become vague precisely where personal knowledge begins.

After October 7, I said publicly that I stood with Israel. What followed at my university was not some theatrical declaration that antisemitism had become official policy.

Nothing so vulgar was necessary. I encountered a fellow professor whom I had never met using language about Jews and Zionists that struck me as eerily familiar: “Jewish Bolsheviks,” Jews as devil worshippers, Jewish responsibility for mass death and historical calamity—the old Nazi accusation in slightly refurbished packaging.

I objected.

The institutions involved found ample energy to investigate my objection and, remarkably, no enthusiasm for confronting the rhetoric I objected to. The eventual institutional conflict became far larger and more complicated than that single episode, and I do not propose to relitigate it here. The relevant point is narrower.

Nobody announced that antisemitism was acceptable.

They merely failed, at repeated junctions, to treat it as so unacceptable that it required action. In my own case, the institutional inversion became almost absurdly complete: after I formally complained about a professor’s use of language such as “Jewish Bolsheviks,” the complaint itself became part of what the university later characterized as reprisal and relied on to terminate me.

That is how permission is often created. Not by endorsement, but by exemption.

Nobody needs to declare Jews unwelcome if Jewish life can simply be made tiresome, socially expensive, professionally awkward and perpetually subject to a different evidentiary standard. A culture can alter its moral weather without passing a single law.

Nobody wakes one morning and announces, “Today is Kristallnacht.”

First come a thousand smaller refusals to intervene, a few nights of the long knives in which ideological opponents are purged, with each teaching everyone what will be tolerated next time.

Our information environment accelerates this process in ways Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels could only have dreamed of. Modern propaganda seldom needs to invent.

It can simply crop.

Real suffering. Real corpses. Real grief. Real terror.

Remove the history that produced the image, compress causation into twelve seconds, attach an accusation, and let an engagement algorithm distribute it. A three-second image of a grieving child will always travel faster than twenty minutes of tedious chronology, footnotes, competing claims and moral complication.

Goebbels did not have TikTok. He would have understood it instantly and admired the efficiency. It performs, for free and at planetary scale, one of propaganda’s oldest tasks: not necessarily persuading people of a complete ideology, but making explanation itself appear indecent.

None of this requires a conspiracy. Scapegoating is simply one of politics’ most durable technologies. Governments of every stripe discover that a foreign villain is more useful than a domestic spreadsheet. When productivity stalls, investment weakens, taxes bite or public services deteriorate, there is always a temptation to point somewhere else.

Donald Trump has become an extraordinarily convenient explanation for Canadian difficulties, including some that plainly predate him or arise from Canadian choices: taxation, productivity, internal trade barriers, regulation and chronic underinvestment. That does not mean Mark Carney is preparing to blame Jews for the economy. It means only that scapegoating works, and successful mechanisms get reused.

Which is why the casual revival of old language matters. “Jewish Bolsheviks” is not an eccentric phrase dropped harmlessly into the present. It comes with luggage.

It is tempting to answer all of this with the comfort of law — surely nothing serious can happen here, since Jewish equality is written into the Charter and the Criminal Code. But law is not upstream of culture; it is downstream. In a democracy, Parliament tends over time to legislate what the electorate has already decided it will tolerate, not the other way around.

A right that exists on paper while the surrounding culture has quietly decided the people it protects are more trouble than they’re worth is a right whose expiry date simply hasn’t been scheduled

But the mechanism that eventually makes a country unlivable does not begin with camps.

It begins with accommodation.

It begins with people who privately agree that something is ugly and publicly decide that saying so would be inconvenient. It begins in churches that prefer harmony, universities that prefer procedure, workplaces that prefer silence and dinner parties where objecting would spoil dessert.

A friend recently told me about one such dinner. Nice people. Respectable people. One guest remarked that if Hitler had killed one more Jew, it would not have been one too many.

My friend remembered it because, of course, one remembers a sentence like that.

I asked the obvious question.

“What did everyone say?”

Nothing, he told me. They changed the subject.

There it is.

No torchlight procession. No smashed glass. No uniform. No screaming man.

Just a table of civilized people, an obscenity placed among the plates, and the collective decision that challenging it would be socially awkward.

Someone else will object. Someone else will complain. Someone else will take the social risk. And because everyone assumes someone else will, no one often does.

That is the part we misunderstand when we repeat the comforting line about good men doing nothing. Of course good men do nothing. That is precisely why the mechanism works.

But even that is not the end of it, because silence is psychologically unstable. It is difficult to live indefinitely with the thought: “This is wrong, I know it is wrong, and I am doing nothing about it.” The mind dislikes that contradiction. It produces cognitive dissonance, and human beings are remarkably efficient at resolving it.

So the thought begins to move.

“This is wrong, but I don’t want to get involved” becomes “Well, perhaps there are two sides.” Then: “They do have a point.” Then: “The reaction is probably exaggerated.” Then, in some cases, remarkably quickly: “Actually, they are right.”

The easiest way to stop feeling like a coward is to persuade yourself that courage was never required.

A comforting objection is available here, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved off.

Someone might say, “I would never do that.” I might dislike Israel, or dislike a policy, but I would never tell a Jewish family they had to leave Canada, and I would never stand by while someone was beaten in the street.

That is probably true, and it is also beside the point. Nobody crosses a wide pond in one leap — you’d be right to say you can’t, and right to refuse the jump.

But a pond crossed by stepping stones is a different problem. Each stone changes where you’re standing relative to the next one, and changes what stepping onto it costs you.

The psychologist Ervin Staub, studying how ordinary people come to participate in genocide, described this as a continuum of destruction: a sequence of small, individually forgivable steps, each of which alters the person taking it and normalizes the next.

On this reading, the first stone in my friend’s story wasn’t agreement with the sentiment about Hitler and one more Jew. It was just silence — the sentence allowed to stand, the subject changed.

That step doesn’t guarantee the next one. Most people get off the stones and swim back. But the ones who don’t rarely get there by a sudden conversion to hatred. They get there by taking one more step from a position slightly further out than the one before.

And once people begin doing that, a vocal minority no longer needs merely to intimidate the majority into silence. It can recruit the majority into rationalizing the silence. Acquiescence becomes sympathy. Sympathy becomes conviction. Conviction becomes enthusiasm.

This is how movements that begin with relatively small numbers can acquire the appearance of inevitability. They do not need to persuade everyone at the beginning. They need only to persuade enough people to speak loudly, and enough others to keep quiet long enough that the new language starts to sound normal.

The important question, therefore, is not whether we can recognize Hitler once he is screaming.

Of course we can.

The question is whether we can recognize the moment before that—when nobody is screaming, everyone is respectable, the loudest people are still a minority, and changing the subject still feels like the polite thing to do.

We cannot know in advance everything that courage will cost. We can know that our principles require more than private agreement.

At my friend’s dinner table, nobody needed to deliver a speech. Somebody needed to say: “You cannot say that and expect the rest of us to carry on as though nothing happened.”

That is where standing up begins.

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Images from Ukraine

In the first week of March 2022, hundreds of Ukrainians crowded beneath the wreckage of a bridge on the edge of Kyiv. An Associated Press photograph of that scene became emblematic of the invasion, showing families with children and their belongings trying to cross the Irpin River. The photographer later said the picture could not capture the sound of the shelling behind them, from the town they were leaving.

Look at the family in that crowd. Parents hold a child and hurry, because they know the next shell may land on them.

Some did not make it. Tatiana Perebeinis, 43, and her children Alise, 9, and Nikita, 18, were killed by a Russian mortar just after crossing that bridge. That image shocked the world because it showed what the invaders were doing. Ordinary people running for their lives were not collateral damage. They were the target.

Ukrainians call the soldiers who did this “orcs,” and after Bucha and Irpin it is easy to see why. Yet many of the men Putin sends are themselves victims: the poor, the desperate, the imprisoned, used as cannon fodder for one man’s vanity.

The cost

As of October 2026, the numbers are almost too large to appreciate, and all of them are estimates.

Among Ukrainian civilians, the United Nations had verified at least 15,000 killed and more than 57,000 killed or injured by early this year. The UN stresses these are only the cases it could document, so the true toll is higher. Another 5.9 million Ukrainians are refugees abroad, and 3.7 million are displaced inside their own country.

Among soldiers, Ukraine has lost roughly 125,000 to 150,000 killed, with perhaps 500,000 or more killed, wounded or missing in all.

Russia’s losses are far greater. Independent journalists have confirmed the names of nearly 250,000 dead Russian soldiers, and the true toll is estimated at somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 killed. Counting the wounded, Russian casualties are well over a million, which would mean something like 700,000 or more injured.

One friend

I think of a Ukrainian friend of ours, exiled from her country. She works in Canada in a job she is hugely overqualified for, simply to put food on the table. Her father, in his late fifties, lies wounded in a hospital bed in Ukraine. He does not want to leave, because leaving means going back to the front. I have seen the pain in her eyes.

I lost my own father some years ago. He died with dignity, and I scattered his ashes in a beautiful barley crop, on land his father broke in 1928. My friend has been given no such mercy. Her suffering has one cause, and it is Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s mistake

I am no enemy of Donald Trump. I believe he loves his country, and I think many of his positions are right. He is a flawed man, driven by ambition and appetite, with a moral compass that works only some of the time. But I have never believed that everything he does is done in bad faith. He is still better than the socialists of the Democratic Party like Mamdani and Omar, and all those like-minded who want to see everything burn.

Volodymyr Zelensky does not have to be perfect. No wartime leader is. A country does not have to be flawless to deserve not to be invaded, and the mothers on that bridge are not asking for a saint to defend them.

The strongman problem

What explains it? We see here the inexplicable weakness in Trump’s character: his bizarre affection for dictators. He once joked that he and Kim Jong Un had “fallen in love.” He praises Xi. He coddles Erdogan. And Putin is the grandest of them all. Is it because they flatter his vanity? Does he envy their power, the way they rule without courts, critics or elections to trouble them? Why does he love the strongman? Who knows.

But a man who admires the tyrant over the people he tramples has lost his way.

What Canada must do

This is not a left-wing cause or a right-wing cause. I am no fan of the Liberal Party, yet I stand with Mark Carney when he stands with Ukraine, and with Pierre Poilievre when he does the same. On this question, Canada should speak with one voice.

America, our closest friend and ally, once stood for the principle that borders cannot be redrawn by tanks and that small nations may defend themselves. To bargain with the aggressor over the heads of the invaded is to betray a noble people, and America’s own better self.

We must support Ukraine, because it is right and because it is in our interest. We should do it for the mothers on that bridge, and for my friend’s father in his hospital bed, dreading the day he is sent back.

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Note to readers: Please consider a paid subscription. I won’t patronize you with the usual “it costs the same as two cups of overpriced coffee a month” routine. Keep the coffee. Enjoy the coffee. For the love of all that is holy, however, please don’t put Coffee-Mate in it. Life is difficult enough without voluntarily introducing that substance into your bloodstream.

If a paid subscription isn’t possible, please repost this. You’re unlikely to read much like it in the CBC, Toronto Star or Globe and Mail. Between federal support and Google money, much of Canadian media has become remarkably domesticated. I prefer to remain housebroken only in the most technical sense.

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Everyone has heard of Kafka’s The Trial. Almost no one has read it, which is a pity, because it is not really about a courtroom. It is about Josef K., a man arrested one morning for a crime nobody will properly name and drawn into a legal machinery that never quite produces a charge, a trial, an appeal or an ending. Officials, procedures, doors and clerks fill the space. Everyone assures him that the process exists. What never quite appears is justice. K.’s great mistake is assuming that a system surrounded by all the vocabulary of justice must eventually behave justly.

For roughly fifteen years, I paid union dues. In all, about $30,000. Think of that money differently. Imagine putting money aside every payday as insurance against the possibility that one day your employer might fire you unfairly. The bargain seems straightforward: if that day comes, there will be a collective agreement protecting you and an organization with lawyers ready to enforce it. You pay now so that you will not stand alone later.

Then later arrives. You are fired. You reach for the representation you have been paying for and discover that the organization holding the exclusive right to provide it does not want to defend you. Fine, you think. I will hire somebody else. Except you cannot simply replace the union within the collective-bargaining machinery. It remains your exclusive representative even when it stopped representing you. You are not allowed to sue for wrongful dismissal. You now face two enemies: your employer and your union.

This is where collective protection begins to resemble institutional captivity. I was denied salary, benefits, pension rights, severance and basic remedies while devastating defamatory allegations were permitted to circulate and evidence concerning institutional misconduct and failures of due process remained protected from meaningful scrutiny. The organization I had spent years financing did not shield me from that machinery. It became another part of it.

My objection is not to collective bargaining. Collective bargaining makes perfectly good sense. Workers combine their leverage because an individual employee confronting a large institution possesses very little. The problem begins when collective representation becomes exclusive representation, and the exclusive representative decides it does not care much for the person it represents. Collective power can then perform a remarkable inversion: what was supposed to protect the individual becomes one more source of his helplessness.

My own story began with political speech supporting Israel and condemning Hamas. Long before anything resembling a proper adjudication was even hinted at, my union local had declared me ‘guilty ‘.

Guilty of what, exactly, was considerably less clear. Only in the squirrelly, hate-filled echo chamber of a union could condemning a terrorist organization be considered a crime.

What was clear was that my political position on Israel collided almost perfectly with the politics being advanced by senior figures within the university and the union movement. The further absurdity was that one of my accusers was also my judge, the VP, Melanie Spence Ariemma, while the other was her friend and co-accuser Wael Ramadan, a perfect central-casting stereotype of the anti-Semitic professor. He had been repeatedly accused of running Jews down in the class for years, while leaving a verified trail of anti-Semitic sewage through his personal and professional social media.

Unfortunately, Ramadan’s hate-infested soul was a perfect match for my union, OPSEU.

It never arrived.

My union local’s president characterized insulting Hamas to a stranger in Pakistan as a “hate crime.” That set the intellectual altitude early on. From day one, OPSEU Local 562 refused meetings and calls and eventually told me in writing not to expect representation.

These were not merely ideological zealots. They were radicalized left-wing hillbillies: all the tribal certainty and suspicion of outsiders, but without the redeeming overalls, pickup trucks or ZZ Top beards. They had exchanged the shotgun rack for a stack of protest signs, and the family Bible for the approved list of oppressors, but the epistemology remained largely undisturbed.

I do not think the principle involved is particularly complicated. If the law grants an organization enormous and effectively exclusive power over another person’s livelihood, competence and impartiality should not be optional extras.

Nor was I imagining the political conflict. This was not a union whose institutional culture had remained studiously neutral about the very political issue underlying my employment dispute. The union movement around my case had embraced extraordinarily severe accusations against Israel: apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. Their president, JP Hornick, was a mannish, short-haired furnace of hatred and anger. She had publicly threatened violence against the police if law enforcement moved against university encampments of pro-Palestinian militants.

These are not mild disagreements over the composition of an Israeli cabinet or the wisdom of a military operation.

I did not form that conviction during my employment dispute. As a young man, I stood at Dachau and Auschwitz. I stood beneath Arbeit macht frei and contemplated what had happened beyond those gates. Some places make history stop being an academic subject and feel almost physical. You stand where human beings were degraded, starved, tortured and murdered because they were Jews, and Never Again ceases to be a commemorative slogan. It becomes an obligation.

I am a Christian, and the survival of the Jewish people and continued existence of Israel have long carried a particular moral weight for me.

Yet I found myself compelled to finance an organization whose political leadership advanced positions concerning Israel that I profoundly oppose and which employed a person whose publicly reported historical social-media material included admiration for Hitler and a wish that she had been alive during his era so that she might have participated in the Holocaust.

That is what makes the arrangement so extraordinary. If a political organization accuses Israel of genocide, I can reject its argument and refuse to donate. If an activist expresses admiration for Hitler, I can regard the opinion as repulsive and walk away. If a lawyer attacks me, I am not ordinarily required to help pay his bill.

My experience of unionization combined all three. I was compelled to finance an institution advancing politics I regarded as morally abhorrent; I could not simply substitute another representative when that institution abandoned me; and when I challenged the abandonment, the institution could use its accumulated resources to fight me.

The political problem therefore cannot be brushed aside as incidental. What happens when an institution possessing exclusive authority over your employment rights becomes an energetic political actor, and you find yourself on precisely the wrong side of its political commitments? You cease to be merely a member requiring representation. You become an ideological inconvenience.

And then, extraordinarily, you arrive at the institution supposedly created to protect you from precisely this kind of arbitrary union conduct.

The Ontario Labour Relations Board.

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“Fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails.”

— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 17

Machiavelli was writing about rulers and their subjects, but advertisers understand the principle. Before offering relief, make the audience imagine what could go wrong. Show them the cavity before you show them the toothpaste.

I have taught consumer behaviour for many years. I wrote a small, unpopular textbook—a digital-only text that I sold online directly to my students.

One chapter goes off on a bit of a tangent and deals with the merits of promotional fear appeals—what happens to a consumer’s brain when you show them the cavity before you show them the toothpaste.

This chapter on the power of fear - used with restraint - was a foundational unit because fear remains one of the most reliable levers in the entire promotional toolkit — more reliable, frankly, than most of what passes for “brand storytelling.”

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The title is a provocation, not a policy proposal, and anyone who cannot tell the difference should now stop reading and spare us both the trouble.

I am not recommending that anyone be denied a job, a lease, or a smile on the street because he believes the angel Gabriel dictated a book to an illiterate merchant in seventh-century Arabia.

I don’t care if you worship turtles, ancestors, or the stock market; you may rest on whatever bed you put in your own head. What I will not do is pretend that a word invented by the Muslim Brotherhood’s own operatives, for the specific purpose of criminalizing criticism of a set of ideas, is itself a neutral piece of vocabulary.

“Islamophobia” was manufactured to do one job: to convert the critic into the aggressor and the theocrat into the victim, and it has done that job with striking efficiency across every faculty lounge and newsroom in the Western world.

There is a deeper asymmetry worth stating before we go further, because it is the one people most reliably flinch from. Christianity underwent a Reformation — a convulsive, often murderous process in which Protestants and Catholics slaughtered one another for the better part of two centuries in the name of the same God — and out of that carnage eventually emerged an accommodation with dissent, vernacular scripture, and the principle that doctrine could be argued over rather than merely obeyed.

Jews, meanwhile, have had their share of doctrinal knife-fights — Pharisees versus Sadducees, Rabbanites versus Karaites, Hasidim versus their furious Mitnagdim critics — but these stayed arguments rather than wars. Probably, out of some special gift for tolerance; more that nobody in the diaspora had a state to hand the sword to.

Rabbis could excommunicate you, not burn you. And it likely helped that the outside world kept everyone too busy defending against being blamed for poisoned wells and blighted crops one century, then reappearing a few decades later as the same people somehow running both the Bolshevik revolution and the banks — a genuinely impressive range for a persecuted minority to be accused of. Hard to organize a proper inquisition against your rivals when you’re already fully booked fending off pogroms.

Islam has produced reformers and an enormous internal diversity of interpretation, but it has never produced anything resembling that convulsion, for a simple structural reason: the Quran does not present itself as a historically situated document available for that kind of argument.

It presents itself as the literal, uncreated speech of God, transmitted without error and preserved without loss, a considerably stronger claim than mainstream Christianity ever made of its own scriptures, which were understood as divinely inspired testimony written by human hands, open in principle to translation, revision, and historical criticism.

That claim of perfect, untouched preservation is worth examining rather than simply accepting, because the textual history is messier than the theology admits.

There is a further problem, and it lies in the word “reformation” itself. Reformation, by definition, means going back to your roots, and the question is always which roots. Classical Islamic jurisprudence has a doctrine of abrogation (naskh): where verses conflict, the later revelation prevails over the earlier.

On the traditional reading, the later, more militant passages, Surah 9 above all, supersede the earlier, more conciliatory ones.

Christian and Jewish textual criticism is a discipline centuries old, working from thousands of manuscripts and fragments dating within decades of the events they describe. Serious critical scholarship on the Quran’s own textual strata is barely a generation deep, working from a far thinner and later manuscript base, arriving at the party several hundred years after Erasmus1.

None of this proves the book inauthentic; it proves that “perfectly preserved and never altered” is a theological assertion made well after the fact, not a historical description that survives contact with the historical record. A tradition that quietly standardized, edited, and reinterpreted its own scripture now insists, with a perfectly straight face, that it has never been touched at all.

So let us be precise. This essay is about Islam—its texts, laws, founder and political claims—not Muslims, who are individuals entitled to the same civil rights as everyone else.

But bad ideas do not become good ideas because criticism makes people uncomfortable. Ideas shape cultures, and cultures shape conduct. A doctrine that exalts religious supremacy, punishes apostasy, restricts blasphemy and places divine law above individual liberty deserves scrutiny, not diplomatic immunity.

The problems — diagnose them as a pathology if that makes the facts easier to bear — with Islam include:

1. Islam Was Never Only a Religion

Call it religion if you like; the label is accurate as far as it goes, which is not very far. Classical Islamic jurisprudence did not restrict itself to prayer and the state of one’s soul — it produced detailed law governing marriage, divorce, inheritance, taxation, criminal punishment, apostasy, blasphemy, and the treatment of conquered peoples.

That is not a creed; it is a constitution with a deity attached, and the distinction matters enormously once you start asking who gets to amend it.

2. The Prophet Who Governed

Muhammad was not a dissident sage muttering beatitudes while Roman prefects handled the unpleasant administrative business, as Jesus did. After the migration to Medina, he became, on the traditional Islamic account, a political ruler, military commander, treaty negotiator, and judge — and every one of those roles was subsequently absorbed into sunna, into precedent, into law. A biography became a legal code. That is the hinge on which the entire subsequent history turns.

3. No Separation of Mosque and State

Liberal civilization rests on one revolutionary discovery, purchased at ruinous cost: that a man may believe God has commanded something without thereby acquiring the right to make his neighbour obey it. Classical Islam did not begin from that premise. Religious law was public law, and the community of believers was simultaneously the political community.

Modern Muslims have found many ways to live inside constitutional democracies regardless — millions do so happily — but the founding architecture never contained the separation clause, and pretending otherwise does no one any favours.

4. Divine Law Cannot Be Amended

Democracies possess one saving grace: the capacity to admit error. Bad laws are repealed, constitutions amended, verdicts reversed. Legislation stamped as the literal word of God enjoys no such mechanism. If Parliament may overrule it, it was never sovereign to begin with; if Parliament may not, then Parliament is a decoration. This is not bigotry. It is a problem in constitutional theory that no amount of good manners will dissolve.

5. Jihad Had a Battlefield, Not Just a Conscience

Reducing jihad to an inward struggle against one’s own bad habits is a comforting modern gloss, and a partial one. Classical Sunni jurisprudence developed an extensive doctrine of military jihad, including territorial expansion of the lands governed by Islam, formalized in the distinction between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb.

The scale of that expansion is hard to overstate: when Muhammad died in 632, Muslim rule extended over most of the Arabian Peninsula. Within roughly two generations — by the 730s, under the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates — Muslim armies had conquered a territory stretching from Iberia and North Africa in the west to the Indus Valley and the borders of China in the east, one of the fastest territorial expansions in history. He conquered one third of the known world.

A second wave came six to seven hundred years later: the Ottoman Empire, founded around 1299, expanded dramatically from the mid-15th through the 16th century, taking Constantinople in 1453 and eventually controlling territory across the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa.

The crusades were an exasperated reaction to centuries of Islamic imperialism.

6. The Slaughter of Banu Qurayza Will Not Be Airbrushed

Traditional Islamic biography records that after the siege of Medina, the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza surrendered, that Sa’d ibn Mu’adh was appointed to render judgment, and that the judgment resulted in the execution of the tribe’s men and the enslavement of its women and children. Modern historians dispute the numbers and the sourcing; let them. Hostile outsiders did not invent the episode—it comes from within the Islamic historical tradition itself, and the question it raises is theological, not merely archival: why does the biography of the final and perfect prophet include this chapter at all?

7. The Precedent That Never Expired

Muhammad’s traditional biography links him to the deaths of several political opponents, among them the poet Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf. But later blasphemy jurisprudence, built in part on this precedent, gave that violent biography a legal afterlife long after the tribal warfare that produced it, and that afterlife has earned more rigorous scrutiny than the phrase “religion of peace” allows.

That phrase deserves its own moment of scrutiny, because it is doing an enormous amount of work for something that appears nowhere in the text it claims to describe.

The phrase surfaces in print for the first time as late as 1930, in the title of a book by the Indian historian Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, and it did not become a fixture of Western vocabulary until the final quarter of the twentieth century, gaining real currency only after 2001, when a head of state standing in a mosque found it a more useful thing to say than the alternative.

Sura Nine was the last major portion of the Qur’an revealed, and under the classical doctrine of abrogation, later verses outrank earlier ones where the two conflict — which is precisely why the modern argument about Islam and violence keeps circling back to it.

The men who came for Salman Rushdie, and those who would still, can point to scripture for support. They are not deviants. They are not required to distort a single verse to make their case; on the textual evidence, they stand closer to the letter of the ninth sura than the imam telling a Western newsroom that this has nothing to do with Islam.

Most Muslims may be peaceful. Islam, on its own texts, is not — and has never once, in fourteen centuries of scripture, called itself a religion of peace. That title was printed in 1930. The book itself is older, and it says something else.

8. Aisha, and the Exemplarity Trap

The most authoritative Sunni hadith collection, Sahih al-Bukhari, reports that Muhammad married Aisha at six and consummated the marriage at nine. This is not an internet rumour; it is the dominant classical account, and revisionist arguments for an older Aisha, however sincerely argued, remain revisionist. Consummating a relationship with a nine-year-old is pedophilia.

The deeper problem is not chronological but theological: if Muhammad were merely a seventh-century Arabian chieftain, historical context would settle the matter easily. But Islam does not ask us to contextualize him — it asks us to imitate him. Ask yourself honestly whether you would permit that arrangement today, and you will have discovered, without meaning to, that context matters more than mimicry. That is already a considerable concession.

9. The Ledger Runs in One Direction

The Qur’an permits a man as many as four wives; it grants women no equivalent privilege. It assigns a female heir, in the relevant circumstances, half the inheritance of her male counterpart. It calls, in matters of financial testimony, for two women to stand in the place of one man, “so that if one of them errs, the other may remind her.” Explain the seventh-century economics behind each of these rules if you wish — the explanations are often genuinely interesting — but notice that the claim being defended is not municipal custom. It is eternal justice. Eternal justice ought not require quite so many asterisks.

10. The Verse on Wife-Beating Is Sitting Right There

Qur’an 4:34 has undergone more emergency renovation than any passage in modern apologetics, and the renovators deserve credit for trying. But centuries of Arabic-speaking jurists, immersed in the language from birth, overwhelmingly read the verse as sanctioning a husband’s physical correction of a disobedient wife, subject to various limits — not on the face, not causing injury, and so on.

Imagine proposing that compromise to a modern legislature: “We are not legalizing wife-beating, Mr. Speaker, merely moderate wife-beating.” The liberal achievement was not a better-regulated slap. It was abolishing the husband’s legal entitlement to administer one at all.

11. Regulated, Not Abolished

Islam did not invent slavery, and neither did Judaism or Christianity; on this score every ancient religion may take its seat in the dock together. The interesting question is why an omniscient, perfectly moral deity, addressing humanity in the seventh century, chose to regulate the institution — limiting it, encouraging manumission — rather than simply prohibiting it outright, as later moral reasoning eventually concluded it must be.

12. Historical Normality Is Not Divine Endorsement

Everyone kept slaves, married young, and fought brutal wars; congratulations to the entire ancient world. That seventh-century Arabia produced a seventh-century moral code is exactly what one would expect if seventh-century human beings, and no one else, had written it. The claim of supernatural authorship needs to clear a considerably higher bar than “this was normal for the period,” because that observation is equally compatible with purely human origin — indeed it is the whole of the skeptic’s case, offered back as a defence.

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13. Apostasy Is the Only Real Test

Religious liberty is not the freedom to join a faith. Any tyranny will let you join. Religious liberty is the freedom to leave one, and classical Islamic jurisprudence developed severe penalties, commonly capital, for apostasy.

A system that welcomes entry while criminalizing exit has not established religious freedom. It has established a subscription with no cancellation option.

Today, by Pew Research’s count, roughly twenty-two countries still have apostasy laws on the books, concentrated mostly in the Middle East and North Africa, with a smaller number in the Asia-Pacific region and a handful in Sub-Saharan Africa. About thirteen of those impose the death penalty as a possible punishment.

14. Blasphemy Law Is Theological Insecurity With a Police Budget

Compare how a genuinely secular society absorbs blasphemy. Andres Serrano photographed a crucifix in urine, called it art, and it toured museums under the title Piss Christ; Christians who loathed it wrote furious letters and went home.

Parker and Stone wrote a hit Broadway musical portraying the founder of Mormonism as a fraud and his scripture as a punchline; the Mormon church responded by buying advertisements in the programme.

Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of provoking believers, the standard reaction from every other major faith operating in a free society is outrage on paper, not the assassin’s veto. Only one religion has, in living memory, left editors dead, a translator stabbed, and cartoonists living the rest of their lives behind armed guards — and only one has trained an entire Western press corps to censor itself in advance rather than ever find out.

The creator of several hundred billion galaxies apparently requires the assistance of a magistrate whenever someone draws an unflattering cartoon. He does not. If God is insulted, God is, by every definition on offer, entirely capable of handling it Himself.

The state exists to protect human beings from violence, not propositions from ridicule, and the moment those two functions are confused, the state has ceased to be liberal.

15. Rushdie Was the Test, and We Nearly Failed It

Salman Rushdie wrote a novel; the Ayatollah Khomeini responded with a death sentence delivered by fatwa rather than by any court a free person would recognize. The correct answer required exactly one word — no — not “we understand the offence caused,” not “perhaps greater sensitivity was warranted.”

You do not murder novelists for writing novels, and the number of Western institutions that hedged on that sentence for fear of appearing insensitive remains one of the more shameful chapters in the recent history of free expression.

16. The Censorship That Requires No Law

The most effective censor is rarely the policeman; it is the editor who quietly decides a subject isn’t worth the risk, the museum that removes the drawing, the publisher who lets the manuscript die on a desk, the teacher who skips the chapter. No further threats are required once the first one has done its work and become common knowledge. That is how intimidation graduates into culture, and it does so without a single statute being passed.

17. Toleration Was Not Equality

Islamic civilization often permitted Jews and Christians to practice their faiths under Muslim rule, and by the standards of many contemporaneous civilizations that was genuine, even admirable, toleration. It was not, however, equal citizenship. The dhimmi system created a distinct legal category for non-Muslims, financed in part by the jizya tax, and whatever its merits in the ninth century, I decline to hold my own citizenship hostage to a religious census. My legal standing with the Canadian state should not depend on my opinion of Muhammad’s prophethood, and equal citizenship means, at minimum, that the state does not ask.

18. The Finality Problem

Muhammad is the final prophet; the Qur’an is the final revelation; there will be no update, no errata, no Qur’an 2.0 to note that certain seventh-century family arrangements might benefit from reconsideration. Civilizations change, knowledge changes, moral intuitions change — but a perfect and final text cannot, by its own definition, be corrected. This is not a debating trick. It is a structural feature of the claim itself, and it is worth naming plainly.

19. “Nothing to Do With Islam” Is Not an Argument

Imagine answering every instance of Christian antisemitism with the sentence “this has nothing to do with Christianity.” Which Christianity? Which century? Which theologian? The question would rightly be considered evasive, and the same standard applies here. When a jihadist cites the Qur’an, the honest response is not incantation but engagement: contextualize the verse, interrogate the hadith, explain why seventh-century rules of war do not govern twenty-first-century relations between states. That is reform. Announcing that the atrocity has nothing to do with the religion the killer just finished quoting is public relations, and rather transparent public relations at that.

20. A Heresy Still Belongs to the Family

ISIS did not invent the words caliphate, jihad, martyrdom, or jizya; it reached into genuine Islamic history and scripture and assembled from that material an extraordinarily brutal system, one that the overwhelming majority of Muslim scholars, soldiers, and governments opposed at considerable cost, and one whose victims were overwhelmingly Muslim themselves. All of that is true, and none of it licenses the conclusion that the ideology fell from Mars. A heresy remains part of the intellectual history of the tradition it distorts. You defeat it by demonstrating why it is a distortion, not by declaring the family tree fictitious.

21. Immigration Is Not a Weather Event, and Neither Is Integration

For decades, Western governments discussed immigration as though human beings were interchangeable units of GDP: we need workers, therefore we import workers.

But people arrive with more than labour — they arrive with convictions about women, apostates, blasphemy, and the proper relationship between religious and civil law, and pretending that culture travels everywhere except into these particular questions is not tolerance; it is a refusal to do arithmetic.

None of this licenses sloppy statistics in either direction — broad claims that immigration straightforwardly drives crime tend to collapse once age, sex, and socioeconomic conditions are accounted for, and equally broad claims that demographic composition never matters collapse under the same scrutiny.

The serious question was never whether one may notice demographic reality; it is which policies of admission and integration actually work, honestly measured.

22. Reciprocity, Not Assimilation

A liberal state has no legitimate interest in whether a citizen privately believes angel Gabriel dictated the Qur’an to an illiterate in Mecca.

Believe it. Build the mosque, fast the month, raise your children in the faith, and tell me sincerely that I am bound for hell — that is what freedom of conscience means, and it is not up for negotiation. What the state may rightly ask in return is reciprocity: that the apostate be free, the woman equal before the law, the cartoonist unmolested, the novelist unmurdered, and civil law supreme over religious law in our shared public life. That is not a demand that anyone abandon Islam.

It is the entry price of a free society, and it is charged to everyone — the Islamist, the Christian theocrat, the Marxist, the white nationalist — without exception. Western society has been letting Muslims jump the turnstile without paying that price.

Read the life of Muhammad not as devotional literature but as political history: warfare, conquest, assassination of enemies, the subordination of rival communities, and the fusion of religious authority with temporal power.

One is then entitled to ask an extremely uncomfortable question. When Islamists murder critics, slaughter civilians, threaten apostates and dream aloud of a universal caliphate, are they betraying that political inheritance—or imitating its darkest precedents?

The West today possesses incomparably greater military power than any Islamist movement, so the old method of conquest by armies is largely fantasy. But political projects no longer require cavalry.

They can advance through intimidation, propaganda, demographic confidence, institutional pressure, censorship by accusation and the relentless exploitation of a liberal society’s unwillingness to defend its own principles.

Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission imagines exactly this trajectory, depicting a France that drifts into rule by a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned party not through violent conquest but through exactly this kind of institutional capitulation.

None of this means that Muslims as individuals constitute an enemy. It means that an imperial political theology does not cease to be imperial merely because its present circumstances have deprived it of an empire.

The Creed, Stated Plainly

Until a majority of Muslims can state the following, we in the West will have a problem:

I am a Muslim, and no one should be punished for leaving Islam. I am a Muslim, and civil law outranks religious law in our common civic life. I am a Muslim, and women hold the same rights before the law that men do. I am a Muslim, and gay citizens hold the rights I hold. I am a Muslim, and criticism of my faith is not violence against my person; I am owed protection from harm, not protection from disagreement. I am a Muslim, and I defend without qualification the right of any free person to mock, reject, or draw Muhammad.

I may answer with an argument, a protest, or four thousand furious words explaining why my critic is a fool — what I may not do is threaten him, and what I certainly may not do is kill him.

Read that creed again and ask, honestly, which clause in it is the outrageous one.

If the answer is none of them, then the argument is already conceded, and all that remains is the courage to say so aloud.

That should strike anyone as strange. It is not strange for a spiritual tradition oriented toward the sublime, the ineffable, the next world glimpsed only in shadow?

It is entirely unsurprising for a political project wearing religious vestments — one that, for all its talk of the hereafter, describes paradise in the currency of this one: gardens, wine, and virgins, rewards an acquisitive man in the Hejaz would have recognized on sight.

Read plainly, the text reads like the work of a gifted political operator who fused monotheism to tribal conquest, and who backed the revelation with the sword when persuasion ran short — not the record of a mystic reaching for transcendence.

I will not couch this in the usual evasion: I have a Muslim friend, and they’re lovely, therefore the religion is lovely too. No. One decent friend does not launder a doctrine. As Hitchens understood, and said plainly, the case stands on the ideas themselves, not on the character of those unlucky enough to be born into them.

But as we get close to any criticism of Islam, often the pin is pulled - the word ‘Islamophobia’ is thrown into the conversation.

Examine how the word actually functions in practice, and you find it is not a description of bigotry so much as a reflex against scrutiny — a way of relocating the argument from the merits of a claim to the alleged pathology of the person making it.

The aggressor becomes, by a neat rhetorical inversion, the victim, and the room falls quiet, because who wants to be thought phobic? The accuser thinks that by paying with bad faith they have purchased silence.

If a person accused of Islamophobia is one who refuses to be cowed — refusing to filter every thought through fear of giving irrational offence — then I plead guilty.

Sam Harris put it bluntly: “Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas.”

Churchill, writing decades earlier, was no more inclined to perfume the argument:

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries!”

But notice the distinction, because it is precisely the distinction our present moral custodians so often pretend cannot be made: “Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities.”

Quite. People are not doctrines. Muslims are not Islam, but they certainly are connected to Islam. One may admire the former while submitting the latter to the same pitiless examination we apply to Christianity, communism, nationalism, or any other system of ideas that makes claims upon human beings.

Churchill, having made that distinction perfectly clear, did not then ruin it with the customary modern ritual of apology. His judgment remained severe: “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”

Nor did he console himself with the thought that the problem would obligingly expire of old age. “Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith,” he wrote, adding that “the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance.”

So there we have it. Sam Harris and Winston Churchill, separated by a century, temperament, nationality, and almost everything else, arriving at an inconveniently similar proposition: ideas are entitled to criticism in proportion to the claims they make upon human life, not immunity in proportion to the outrage their criticism produces.

Which, by the increasingly elastic standards of our age, presumably means the three of us are Islamophobes.

I can think of worse company.

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Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536) was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, scholar, and one of the most influential intellectuals of the early sixteenth century. He produced the first published Greek New Testament (1516), accompanied by a revised Latin translation, which became an important resource for later biblical scholarship and influenced subsequent translations, including the tradition that produced the King James Version. Although Erasmus criticized corruption and abuses within the medieval Church and advocated reform, he remained within the Catholic Church and famously opposed Martin Luther over the question of free will.

What would happen if they applied the standard that, to live in a country, you need an absolute genetic claim (because written history doesn't go back far enough) to the land? The funny thing is that Israel is one of the few countries that would stay the same.

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Beneath the Negev Desert, there is a lot of water. Unfortunately, nature never consulted the Israelis about what they wanted in that water's composition. Much of the underground water is brackish and mineral-heavy, not immediately useful for agriculture. Actually not useful at all.

You think water, plants, and it’s a proven match.

It reminds me of my Aunt Eileen, who thought the same about fresh chicken shit and houseplants. My aunt was staying with my uncle, and she thought that she’d juice up the houseplants with chicken shit.

She killed them all.

Sort of like what would happen if you dump this brackish water on your crops.

Many people would stop there.

I would have stopped. But I’m the type who, even with fertilizer, sprinklers and expensive grass seed, can’t get my lawn to fill in.

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University developed ways to use the warm brackish groundwater for aquaculture and now reuse the nutrient…

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Former University of Guelph-Humber instructor Paul Finlayson is calling on Humber College and the University of Guelph to publicly correct damaging accusations about him, saying continuing restrictions prevent him from contacting the students who need to hear the correction.

Humber confirmed privately that an assault allegation against Finlayson had been investigated and found unsubstantiated. Its written acknowledgment reached him more than two years after his November 27, 2023 suspension. Finlayson says no public correction has followed.

“The institutions have communication channels I do not have, and I remain prohibited from contacting students myself,” Finlayson said. “They cannot leave the accusation uncorrected publicly, restrict my ability to answer it, and then leave me responsible for repairing the damage they intentionally caused.”

The University of Guelph and Humber are the partner institutions behind the University of Guelph-Humber, where Finlayson taught.

He says he retains written communications documenting three claims repeated by staff following his suspension:

1. That he assaulted a student, ripped the student’s shirt, was handcuffed and led away.

2. That he had a five-year criminal history and the institution had been trying to remove him for five years.

3. That senior management had decided he would be terminated “no matter what,” and that the vice-provost had described his comments condemning Hamas as “disgusting.”

Finlayson unequivocally denies the assault, arrest and criminal-history accusations. No evidence was ever brought forward. He was the top-rated professor in the Business Department.

He says the third statement raises a separate concern: that his dismissal was presented as predetermined before the so-called investigation had run its course.

“These accusations were false, and the damage was devastating,” Finlayson said.

“I watched my reputation being destroyed and repeatedly asked management to intervene. The management of the U of Guelph and Humber College are, in my opinion, deeply institutionally anti-Semitic, and the defamation was designed to poison the work environment. They wanted it to run.

I was never allowed a defence, the appeals went unread, the adjudication hearing was cancelled, and my union, which took $15,000 from me in dues and was legally mandated to represent me, refused to represent me.

Finlayson said that OPSEU has publicly attacked Israel and that his pro-Israel position was incompatible with their prejudices. He said they strangely had no problem with a union executive who wished she was alive when Hitler was committing genocide so that she might have participated in the genocide.

Finlayson alleges that the accusations originated from senior management. He points to screenshots and accounts from five students identifying Humber employee Vashti Bagot as the source of repeated accusations, with her attributing her source to senior management.

A student whom Finlayson has known for approximately ten years supplied screenshots of staff members trying to convince students of Finlayson’s apparent criminality via text. (See below).

“My student friend described the lies as becoming accepted wisdom,” Finlayson said. “I have had ex-colleagues and students cross the street when they see me. It’s no surprise they think the worst - students heard these statements from staff, with information attributed to senior management. That gave them apparent institutional authority.”

Finlayson says he sought intervention at least twice within the first month following his suspension. In correspondence about statements by faculty, interim business program head Jerry Chomyn refused to address the defamation.

Finlayson says no public correction followed. After he asked Bagot to stop repeating the accusations, he says Humber Public Safety Manager Nancy Deason threatened him in writing that further contact of that kind could result in criminal harassment charges.

Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board reviewed correspondence and interviewed students. Its June 13, 2024 decision records their accounts of hearing that Finlayson had assaulted a student and been removed from campus. They also reported that an internal management source told them he might be terminated because of this.

The decision stated:

Finlayson says he received threatening messages at home, that his family was affected, and that he had to install additional security equipment. His February 2025 correspondence documented concerns that accusations had expanded to include sexual allegations.

“Leaving the story uncorrected allowed further insinuations to attach themselves to it,” he said. “The consequences extended far beyond my workplace. I have become unemployable in academia.”

Humber’s later letter stated:

Finlayson disputes the description of the source as unknown. He says he can prove it came out of the executive suite. He finds it ironic that the letter's writer may have been the same person who invented the defamatory lies.

He notes that, separately, a formal internal complaint named Vice-Provost and Chief Academic Officer Melanie Spence-Ariemma as the complainant. Signed and dated December 12, 2023, it repeats the previous defamatory allegations attributed to Bagot and portrays Finlayson as a threat to students and faculty.

Spence Ariemma and fellow accuser, Guelph Humber/Sheridan College instructor Wael Ramadan, have refused to retract their statements.

Humber dismissed Finlayson for cause on July 11, 2025, relying on Gita Anand (sister of Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand) and Reilly Cunningham of Sherrard Kuzz LLP’s investigative findings that included “reprisal.” The investigator’s report stated: “I find PF filed the complaint against WR as an act of reprisal for the complaint filed against him.”

That complaint concerned fellow instructor Wael Ramadan. Finlayson says his evidence included material posted or shared by Ramadan calling Jews Bolsheviks who murdered four million in the Holodomor and who he considered subhuman.

“I filed a human rights complaint about material posted by Ramadan that said that Jews skinned people alive and made clothing from their skin,” Finlayson said.

“My complaint was itself treated as reprisal, and that finding became part of the grounds for firing me.

Finlayson disputes the investigation’s findings. He says he received no severance from Humber, was not paid properly during his suspension, did not receive benefits and said that Humber College attempted to take back his pension.

Service Canada did not accept the employer’s misconduct position when assessing his Employment Insurance claim.

Finlayson is requesting a correction through institutional channels, with the intention that it reaches affected former and current students, faculty and staff.

He is pursuing a claim against OPSEU at the OLRB. The University of Guelph, Humber College, OPSEU and CUPE have eight lawyers fighting Finlayson and have spent over one million dollars on legal expenses and other related costs.

Finlayson says that after a long period of recovery from injuries documented by WSIB and treated through their benefits program, he is preparing to take four of the key officials involved to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.

“The thuggishness and outright dishonesty of union officials and key administrative officials at Guelph, OPSEU, CUPE and Humber College is shocking,” Finlayson said. “But they have violated the human rights code, and I, in spite of their efforts, have spent almost three years documenting their actions and their words, and they will have to give an accounting in court.”

Finlayson hopes the University of Guelph and Humber College will be forced to publicly own up to what they did.

“They were not happy with firing an excellent and beloved professor because he stood with Israel,” he said. “They had to deliberately destroy his reputation, and then when caught they didn’t just say they would not stop spreading their lies - they threatened me that I could end up in jail for asking staff members to stop lying about me."

The actions of the University of Guelph and Humber College are and have been hateful, indecent and cruel.”

Media contact
Paul Finlayson
pfinlayson30@gmail.com

Relevant correspondence, supporting screenshots and interviews available on request. Any recipient can share, retweet or repost any of the above.

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