Jonathan Kay’s resignation from The Walrus for his role in promoting a prize for a writer who engages in cultural appropriation is a relief for the magazine. But, Canada’s leading liberal magazine can’t say they didn’t know Kay was a bigot when they hired him to be editor-in-chief two years ago. Kay has repeatedly smeared Arabs and Muslims in the service of Israeli expansionism.
After protests against Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned speech at Concordia in 2002, Kay let loose about “an Arabist rabble…well-steeped in the specious propaganda of the Arab world” that made the Montréal university “the centre of militant Arabism.” Writing in the National Post, Kay added, “it is only among the school’s Arabs — many of whom like [activist Laith] Marouf, are immigrants from Arab nations where free speech is non-existent and anti-Semitic filth is widespread — that it is considered acceptable to shut your opponent up by force.” (In fact, hundreds of white and other non-Arab leftists were part of the protests that led to the cancellation of Netanyahu’s speech.)
Kay supported George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. In a 2002 column bemoaning the region’s “medieval hatreds” he wrote that Israel “can be trusted with nukes. But Iraq and its Muslim neighbours cannot.”
During its 2006 war on Lebanon, Kay claimed the media focused on Israeli killing because the world had become “inured” to “watching Arab terrorists kill innocent Jews for two generations.” He added a macho twist to his Israel apologetics. “Hezbollah may wage war while hiding behind women’s skirts and baby rattles,” Kay wrote, “but Israel stubbornly adheres to a more humane creed.” Over 1,000 Lebanese, including 300 children under 13, were killed during the 34-day war while 165 Israelis, including 44 civilians, perished.
In a 2007 column Kay bemoaned how, if you “connect the dots between Canada’s radicalized mosques and the terror threat…you get accused of Islamophobia” and two years later “applauded Jason Kenney for smacking down the Canadian Arab Federation.” The National Post editorial page editor wrote that CAF’s support for the Palestinian cause made them “a radicalized embarrassment to Canadian Arabs.” (Imagine a columnist calling the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs “a radicalized embarrassment to Canadian Jews” for cheerleading Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.)
In his column Kay claimed that in an interview with his paper’s editorial board a year earlier CAF representatives “laid blame for virtually every problem the world faces on Israel — including the alienation of Arab-Canadian children in Canada’s public school system.” Cue the image of a crazed CAF representative ranting about how Israel is directing Toronto school officials to diagnose Arab children with ADHD. I wasn’t there, but count me skeptical.
After Israel killed 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza in late 2008-2009, Kay wrote about “the difference between Israel and the terror-worshiping cultures that besiege it.” He described the “Arabs…sick spectacle,” which he contrasted to Israel as “a civilized culture that values human life.” For Kay criticism of Israel killing 300 children simply reflected longstanding anti-Jewish prejudice. “From the opening days of the Gazan campaign,” wrote Kay, “the blood-libels of ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’ have flown thick and fast.”
In 2010, Kay published a wildly Islamophobic screed, disseminated by the Jewish Defense League, titled “Jonathan Kay on Muslim anti-Semitism: A hate reaching back 1,400 years.” In it he wrote: “The rhetoric and barbarism hurled against Israeli Jews after the Zionist project began were not new but simply the old, more diffuse rhetoric and barbarism being redirected, as by a lens, toward a particular pinprick on a map…the continued vibrancy and economic success of Jewish civilization — so close to Islam’s very heartland — is precisely what has fed Muslim rage and jealousy for 14 centuries.” Kay added that violence is “encouraged and fetishized in such a lurid manner and [is] why so few Middle Eastern Muslims regard them [“suicide terrorism and missile volleys”] as a disgraceful or even regrettable part of their culture.”
In a 2014 piece titled “Ezra Levant’s trial echoes a time when Canada’s radical Muslim activists were taken seriously” he defended the Islamophobe’s slanderous attacks against Khurrum Awan. Found guilty of libeling Awan, Levant was ordered to pay him $80 000.
Claiming Gaza is home to “more than a million Palestinians seething with anti-Semitic hatred,” Kay repeatedly justified Israel’s 2014 attacks, which left 2,200 mostly civilians dead (6 Israeli civilians were killed). According to Kay, “hundreds of Palestinian children…died as unwilling martyrs to Hamas’ barbaric human-shield military strategy” in which “Hamas fighters hide behind skirts and baby strollers.” For Kay the battle was “waged between a nation seeking to live in peace and a terrorist group whose whole stated reason for existence is the extermination of the Jewish state and its inhabitants.”
Kay’s appointment to head a purportedly liberal magazine says a great deal about the Canadian media landscape and broader political culture. Alongside his Walrus gig, Kay is regularly invited to address liberal Zionist organizations. In 2015 he spoke at an event organized by the “progressive” New Israel Fund and at a York Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies panel titled “Trudeau — Good for the Jews?”
Last year Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto held a Kay vs. Kay debate, widely publicized by the Canadian Jewish News, on “whether liberal Jews are trapped by their own ideology.” Jonathan argued the “progressive” position and was countered by his hilariously right-wing mother, Barbara Kay, whose National Post column is largely devoted to stories of women oppressing men and the glory of Israel.
Jonathan Kay would probably deny any kinship with the Canadian Coalition of Concerned Citizens, Rise Canada, Soldiers of Odin and other openly Islamophobic/white supremacist groups. But, his Jewish/Western-supremacist outlook has led him to repeatedly denigrate Arabs and Muslims, which has contributed to the milieu that has seen the rise of these groups.
Why did The Walrus hire this guy?
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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