KINSELLA: Bracing for 2026 as antisemitism spreads like an insidious cancer

Milton Sanford Mayer was an American journalist, a Quaker, with Jewish heritage. But that isn’t the important thing. The important thing is what he wrote in one of his many books, titled, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45.

After the war, Mayer interviewed 10 ordinary German men. He wanted to ask them about their views about National Socialism and Adolf Hitler and Jews. None of the Germans he interviewed had criminal records, with the exception of one who had set a synagogue on fire.

Mayer did not disclose that he had Jewish antecedents, because none of the men would have agreed to speak to him. All of them spoke fondly of Hitler, and all of them expressed disdain for Jews.

World went mad

Mayer wrote this passage about the beginnings of it all, when Germany — and quite a lot of the world — went mad. He wrote about how a country, a people, lose their humanity.

“In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next,” he wrote. “And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.”

How it happens

That’s how it happens, Milton Mayer wrote in his book. All the shops and the holidays and the jobs and the mealtimes look the same, but they aren’t the same. “Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

When did it happen to us, now?

Was it when 15 Jews were gunned down on a beach in Australia? When two Jewish kids were shot to death in Washington by a guy yelling “Free Palestine?” When an elderly Jew was burned to death in Boulder, Colo., also by a man screaming “Free Palestine?”

Here, in Canada, was it when banners proclaiming “Intifada” — which is a specific promise of murder — are unfurled at Toronto’s Easton Centre, and the police stand by and watch? Was it when a Toronto school for Jewish children — just four or five years old — was shot up once, twice, three times? When an alleged ISIS enthusiast was arrested for terrorism offences — and then swiftly released on bail?

Mayer’s point, I think, is that the darkness doesn’t announce its arrival with a herald of trumpets and a glossy TikTok PR campaign. It happens quietly, like a whisper. One minute you are in Canada, and the next minute you do not recognize the land beneath your feet. Because by then, as Mayer notes, it is already too late.

A cruel year

In the past year, which has been a cruel and terrible one, I have spoken to Jewish groups from Calgary to Halifax. The people I meet tell me what they are feeling: Anger, terror, anxiety, defiance and betrayal. Some talk of making aliyah, which is moving to the Jewish homeland. Others talk of forming yet another group to oppose antisemitism, or petitions, or boycotts, or whatever.

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Inevitably, I get asked why I — an Irish Catholic — am so passionate about supporting them, about being an ally of Jews. The question always angers me, simply because it shouldn’t ever need to be asked. So I mumble thanks, and say it is how my parents raised me and my brothers — or that I am following my heart, which makes it easy.

But I dislike the question, intensely, because it reminds me that I am indeed among the few who has spoken up. It reminds me that too many — too many friends, too many colleagues, too many people I once admired — have chosen silence.

That choice — that indifference, that shrug, that cowardice — is what has gotten us to where we are, here and now, which is a country that no longer is the country we knew. Like the one Milton Sanford Mayer wrote about, Canada has changed, perhaps for good.

Me, I don’t know what else to do. So I intend to keep speaking out, even though I now believe 2026 will be far worse than what preceded it. And, after much thought, I purchased a bulletproof vest over the holidays.

A few people suggested I needed it, because that is the country we live in, now.