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Chris Selley: The campaign against Jewish summer camps pulls the mask off the antisemites

The charge against them, essentially, is 'being Jewish in Canada'

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It has been three weeks since a repulsive group of fanatics claiming to speak for the Palestinian people, under the umbrella of various organizations I won’t stoop to naming, declared war on Jewish children’s summer camps across Canada, especially those in Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia. It has been more than a week since the media took major notice of it.

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These people want the three provincial camping associations, which accredit camps as safe and healthy environments for children — not as ideologically pure of heart — to strike off various Jewish camps for being too supportive of Israel. “We have identified at least 17 overnight summer camps throughout Canada that support the state of Israel in some way,” they breathlessly announced, providing what they imagined was compelling evidence.

Chris Selley: The campaign against Jewish summer camps pulls the mask off the antisemites Back to video

I’m not usually a “politicians must denounce” guy. There is no place in Canada for more meaningless political pronouncements that “there is no place in Canada” for intolerance and bigotry. Unless you have some kind of plan, it’s about as useful as saying “there is no place for jealousy.”

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But even if politicians’ statements are often useless, it can be revealing when they feel they need to say something and when they do not. After three weeks, it seems like this moment — this moment of threatening children’s summer camps — is not one of those times. The silence has been echoing.

These camps, and Canadian Jews, deserve some official public support, even if it’s just rhetorical. Far more to the point, they’re owed a plan to keep kids safe this summer, and every summer afterward. And the groups targeting them deserve every ounce of condemnation we can muster. As we have seen time and time again, including very famously at a youth camp in Norway, It only takes one psychopath or violent narcissist with a gun to destroy lives on an industrial scale.

Indeed, I don’t know which is more reprehensible: The fact these people named some of the 17 camps, with no regard to what some deranged person might do with that information; or that they didn’t name all of the 17, with no regard to what some deranged person might do to any Jewish summer camp.

The case against these camps would almost be laughably weak — and entirely against the spirit of Canadian multiculturalism — if the potential consequences weren’t so serious.

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Among the unclean 17’s sins: celebrating Israel’s Independence Day; honouring Yom HaZikaron, the day of remembrance for Israeli soldiers and victims of terrorism; “hiring Israeli staff,” which is ostensibly concerning because “military service is required in Israel (and) therefore, there is a real possibility that these individuals were or are members of the Israeli military”; “instill(ing) in all campers a respect and love for (the land of) Israel and its diverse peoples, cultures, history and geography”; and adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism — which dozens of national and subnational governments around the world, including in Canada, have also adopted.

The charge, essentially, is “being Jewish in Canada.” It’s somewhat bemusing they only managed to find 17 offending camps.

University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym studies Canadian Jews’ attitudes toward Israel, including in a 2024 survey that found 94 per cent supported “the existence of a Jewish state in Israel.” In a follow-up survey he found many Jews who hesitated to call themselves Zionist did so out of trepidation, and that only one per cent described themselves as “anti-Zionist.”

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So a Jewish summer camp that didn’t support Israel wouldn’t make very much sense — same as an Estonian-Canadian summer camp that didn’t support Estonia, or an Armenian-Canadian summer camp that didn’t support Armenia. At the risk of shocking readers, you might even find some real-live Estonian and Armenian citizens working at those camps, not least to teach Estonian and Armenian, as Israelis might teach Hebrew.

And I hope you’re sitting down, but both Estoniaand Armenia have mandatory military service, as do many other countries with Canadian diaspora, some of which run summer camps for children.

I have always been somewhat uneasy with the IHRA definition from a freedom-of-speech perspective (legally non-binding as it is in Canada, for now), particularly with respect to one of the examples of antisemitism it provides: “Applying double standards by requiring of (Israel) a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

Hypocrisy isn’t necessarily bigotry. But the anti-camp brigade is proving in spades how double standards can certainly reflect profound bigotry.

There are dozens upon dozens of religious summer camps for children in this country, and there always have been. Some are more culturally than observantly religious; some explicitly call themselves “Bible Camps” or similar. Either way, if you wanted to make it sound like something sinister, you could say children were being “indoctrinated” in particular beliefs.

What all overnight children’s summer camps are — if they want to stay afloat, at least — is first and foremost places where children go to make friends, learn the J-stroke, dump a sailboat into a freezing-cold lake, do arts and crafts, roll around in mud, fire an arrow out of a bow 10 feet wide of the target, and fall asleep exhausted.

These nominally “pro-Palestinian” groups clearly imagine summer camps for Jewish kids as Likudnik hellscapes designed first and foremost to draft impressionable Canadian children into the IDF. In other words: Jewish campers and their counsellors don’t do the things other campers and counsellors do at camp. They’re fundamentally different, a fifth column in sleeping bags in drafty cabins. That implication, to my eye, is antisemitism in the fullest bloom I have seen yet in this country.

National Post cselley@postmedia.com

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