Palestinian and Jewish Unity Statement
For immediate publication
Montreal, October 9, 2026
The National Post (owned by an American Hedge-Fund, the Chatham Asset Management, with close ties to the U.S. Republican Party and headquartered in New Jersey) has a tooth to pick with any and all expressions of Left politics. It is also unconditionally pro-Israel to the degree of entirely effacing the question of Israeli apartheid and Israel’s genocide in Gaza from its print and on-line formats. It is the darling of the pro-Israel lobby in Canada and of unconditional pro-Zionist politicians such as Liberals Anthony Housefather and Mark Miller, Conservatives Pierre Poilievre and Melissa Lantsman, and Bloc Québécois MPs Rhéal Fortin and Alexandre Brunelle-Duceppe, just to name a few.
Little wonder then that National Post columnist Yoni Goldstein launched into a vicious attack on New Democratic Party Leader Avi Lewis – a self-avowed Jewish anti-Zionist – an attack which goes well beyond the limits of what is acceptable in a civilized society. In fact, Goldstein’s polemical tirade borders on the criminal.
What was Lewis’ crime? He published a few lines after the Jewish Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) reminding Jews of the moral obligation which the Jewish faith fixes upon Jews:
Yom Kippur is a time of atonement — a time to grieve those who have been lost, a time to acknowledge and take responsibility for harms we have caused, individually and collectively.
For Jewish people, the personal has always been political and the political always personal. This year I’m reflecting on the fact that we failed to do our part to stop an ongoing genocide committed in our name.
The reference to “genocide” which is exactly what is taking place in Gaza along with the silent complicity which characterizes most of Canada’s political class, Canada’s corporate media, and much of the Jewish community, is what sets off Goldstein’s tirade against Avi Lewis. It should also be mentioned that Avi Lewis is one of the authors of The CIJA Report, published by the Jewish Faculty Network, which points to the less than savory doings of CIJA, that particular instance of the pro-Israel lobby, when it comes to intimidating critics of the crimes committed by the State of Israel via the epithet of “antisemitism.” That must certainly have hung in the balance so that Yoni Goldstein and the National Post already had Avi Lewis in their sights.
Yoni Goldstein declares that the entire Jewish community in Canada is “duty-bound” to take “forceful” action to stop the NDP leader from speaking up on the Gaza genocide. What exactly did Goldstein mean by the reference to “forceful action”? He presents a framework in which “forceful action” appears to imply a physical assault against the person of Avi Lewis. “Jewish law tells us how to deal with Avi Lewis” is the title of Goldstein’s hate-speech article and by the very nature of the title itself alludes to dealing collectively with Mr. Lewis in the harshest way.
In describing Lewis, Goldstein refers to the biblical story of Korach, whose family was burned alive and swallowed by the earth for daring to question Moses’ leadership. “Suddenly, God caused the earth to open up, and Korach and his family were swallowed alive. The 250 admirers were consumed by fire.”
Goldstein continues:
“The biblical story of Korach presents a stark lesson in how Jews think about internal dissent, when it escalates to become a threat to the continued viability of the community itself. It is indeed an extreme consequence for eliciting communal harm, but then Jewish law is fairly clear on the subject: when a Jew endangers the Jewish community, the community is obligated to stop them.”
Which presumably means “stop them from telling the truth, stop them from criticizing Israel,” because Goldstein’s narrow tribalism, which he mistakes for the expansive and transcendent moral precepts of Judaism, means accepting the State of Israel as the embodiment of all the world’s Jews, and accepting the right-wing ultra-nationalist and ethnocentric movement known as Zionism, as synonymous with Judaism, the Jewish religion.
Not content with holding the Sword of Damocles over Mr. Lewis’ head, Goldstein launches into an even more hateful and dangerous allusion to Avi Lewis as a “traitor” in using the Hebrew terms “moser” (traitor to the community) and “rodef”(an individual who pursues another person with the intention of committing murder). In the context of defaming Avi Lewis by the term “moser,” the punishment described by an ancient and outdated Jewish law calls for “din moser,” which prescribes severe penalties, including the death penalty.
No one should misunderstand the intent of Yoni Goldstein in referring to Mr. Lewis as “moser”: it is a call for a physical assault against Avi Lewis with the possibility of even causing his death. This is not only hate speech; it is a criminal act and it follows that Yoni Goldstein should be prosecuted under Canada’s Criminal Code.( It is doubtful that the political sycophants who man the corridors of the Liberal (Zionist) party of Canada and the Conservative Party of Canada will undertake just such a procedure.)
Moreover, the terms “moser” and “rodef” carry a particular context which is dangerous and certainly implies violence against Avi Lewis. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by right-wing religious extremists (think of right-wing extremists Ben-Gvir and Smotrich as just such fanatics) as a “rodef” and “moser” because of his involvement in the Oslo peace process. Yigal Amir, the Jewish terrorist who murdered Rabin, subsequently invoked “din rodef” as justification for the assassination. Consider the language and terms used by Yoni Goldstein in his defamatory and hateful National Post column against Avi Lewis, and we see here the same type of fanaticism that led to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination.
It is to be noted that we have heard no denunciation of this hate-filled call to violence against the person of Avi Lewis – the leader of a national party in Canada – from the likes of the “proud Zionists” of the Liberal and Conservative parties of Canada, nor from those instances of the pro-Israel lobby in Canada, a small but influential group of individuals who claim to speak for all the Jews of the world, who smear all those who dare to speak up for Palestinian rights and publicly criticize Israel’s genocide machine with the epithet of “antisemitism,” and who defame anti-Zionist Jews as being “self-hating Jews.”
Yoni Goldstein shows himself to be an individual who is beneath contempt, a columnist who can only write for the “yellow journalism” of an American-owned medium called the National Post which presents itself as being a “national pillar” of Canada. The opposite is true.
- PAJU demands that the RCMP undertake an inquiry into the dangerous, unacceptable threats levied against Avi Lewis in order to decide if Mr. Goldstein’s polemic breaches the Criminal Code of Canada in terms of hate-speech.
- PAJU also demands that the National Post be subject to censure by the National NewsMedia Council of Canada.
Here is a link to the National News Media Council, where you can file complaints about the promotion of hate and threats in national publications:
Contact: info@paju.org
