By Howie Silbiger
There’s always a story. And lately, in Canada, there’s always a Jewish one. Not the kind where Jews are getting harassed, blocked, shouted down, or told to go back to where they came from. Those show up, then disappear. They don’t stick. They don’t get pushed. They don’t get repeated all day. The ones that do are the ones where Jews are the problem, the escalation, the thing everyone is supposed to be watching.
This week it was another “plot.” Another headline that moves fast because it lands exactly where it’s supposed to. You read it and you’re already filling in the blanks, organized, coordinated, something bigger than it actually is. That’s the whole point. That’s what people take with them. Then you get into it a bit more, and like always, it shrinks. One guy. Maybe two. No network, no structure, nothing close to what the headline made it sound like. But by then it’s done. Nobody goes back and re-reads the correction. The first version is the one that sticks.
And this isn’t new, this is how this works now. Look at the language that keeps coming up. “Violent settlers.” You hear it enough times and it starts to sound like an official category, like there’s some defined group operating with intent behind it. Canadian media leans on it constantly because it works. It’s clean, it’s simple, it’s easy to drop into a sentence and move on. But once you start actually looking at what’s being grouped together under that label, it doesn’t hold. Incidents that have nothing to do with each other get pulled into the same pile. Context disappears. Defensive situations get treated the same as aggressive ones. And after a while, you’re not really looking at events anymore, you’re looking at a narrative that’s already decided what you’re supposed to see.
Then you watch it happen here, in real time. Last night, both CBC News and CTV News pushed out that Israel was preventing Christians from worshipping in Jerusalem. That’s a heavy claim. That lands. That shapes how people see the whole situation in seconds. And that’s exactly how it was presented, clean, sharp, no hesitation. What didn’t get the same treatment, not even close, was what happened right after. Benjamin Netanyahu steps in, reverses it almost immediately, tells them to allow access. That should change the story. It does change the story. But it doesn’t get treated like it does, because it doesn’t serve the same purpose. One version builds something. The other just gets in the way.
One version becomes the story, the other one barely exists.
And it’s not just here. You see the same thing in the United States with people like Tucker Carlson. Take something partial, strip out whatever complicates it, say it clean, say it confidently, and move on. No need to fill in gaps if your audience isn’t going to go looking for them. It lands because it’s simple. It sticks because it gets repeated. Different place, same pattern.
Now put that next to what’s actually happening here. In Montreal, we’ve seen it. Not online, not filtered, right in front of people. Students getting surrounded, shouted at, told they don’t belong. Not subtle. Not misunderstood. And still, it gets described like it’s just friction, just “tensions,” like this is two sides having some kind of equal disagreement. Across campuses in Montreal, in Toronto, you have people openly calling for violence, harassment that isn’t even pretending anymore, and it still gets softened. “Clashes.” “Protests.” Words that take the edge off what’s actually happening. No sharp language. No urgency. Nothing that forces anyone to actually deal with it.
So you end up with two completely different ways of talking about things. On one side, anything tied to Jews gets tightened, sharpened, turned into something bigger than the individual event, something symbolic. On the other side, sustained hostility toward Jews gets watered down, explained away, pushed into the background like it’s just part of the environment. That doesn’t just happen. That’s the result of choices, over and over again, what gets emphasized, what gets smoothed out, what gets ignored.
And after a while, people stop noticing how they’re being led. They’re not sitting there comparing coverage. They’re just absorbing it. And what they’re absorbing, again and again, is that Jewish aggression is something to watch, something to worry about, while everything else is just noise. Anyone paying attention can see it. Most people aren’t paying that kind of attention.
At some point, you stop buying that this is all just random. You don’t get this kind of consistency across different outlets, different countries, different voices, unless there’s a shared instinct behind it, a sense of what story people are comfortable telling, and what story they’re not.
And right now, in Canada, that instinct is not hard to read. It is easier, and it is more comfortable, to build and sell a story where Jews are the danger than it is to deal with what’s actually happening in the streets, in the schools, and on the campuses. One of those stories is clean, controlled, easy to repeat. The other is messy, uncomfortable, and forces people to deal with things they would rather not look at.
So they go with the story that works…
Howie Silbiger is the host of The Howie Silbiger Show on truetalkradio.com and Political Hitman on Israelnewstalkradio.com. He is the Editor in Chief of The Montreal Jewish News.
