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Don’t miss reading this piece by Kile Jones in Pat Johnson’s Substack newsletter. HR
THE TARGETING
Kile Jones
Pat’s BEATEN WITH A SHTICK Substack
July 18, 2026
Antizionism Spread its Embers throughout Canada and only Jews got the fire.
Good morning! I am incredibly honored to share a guest post today from Kile B. Jones, a reformed antizionist, whose “Inverted World” Substack is one of the smartest, sharpest, and most necessary voices on the subjects we care about. If you like my posts, you’ll love Kile’s. Please subscribe to Kile’s “Inverted World” for more brilliance like this one.
If a citizen harbors rage against a foreign government, the coordinates are fixed: the embassy on the capital’s highway, the consulates in metropolitan hubs, and the ministry buildings where statecraft is executed. These are the addresses of power. They’re the only terminus realistic enough for an argument about foreign policy. They represent the state, and therefore, they represent the accountability protesters demand.
For the last few years, however, a different pattern has taken hold—an inversion. A movement claiming to challenge the actions of a state six thousand miles away has persistently bypassed the seats of power to settle upon a different set of coordinates. They’re not marching on embassies, they head to the synagogue, the elementary school, the bookstore, and the neighborhood.
This is a diagnostic of a profound breakdown occurring. If this were a debate over the Middle East, the targets would be governmental. That they are exclusively, repetitively, and violently Jewish reveals antizionism for what it truly is: Jew-hatred.
The Trail of Fire: 2023–2026
The evidence for this transvaluation isn’t abstract. It’s recorded in police logs, security footage, and the remains left of community buildings. The timeline of this siege begins in late 2023. On November 12, the Yeshiva Gedola in Montreal was struck by gunfire. Less than twenty-four hours later, the Talmud Torah elementary school suffered an identical attack. These were not random acts of vandalism, they were strikes against the educational arms of a minority community.
The pattern migrated westward with staggering precision. In Toronto, the Bais Chaya Mushka school for girls was targeted by gunfire. When it was struck yet again, the “outlier” hypothesis collapsed. By spring 2026, the situation reached a boiling-point. A string of drive-by shootings targeted Temple Emanu-El, Shaarei Shomayim, and Beth Avraham Yoseph. In each instance, the choice of target was deliberate: they were houses of worship, spaces defined by their role in Jewish congregational life.
The 2025 B’nai Brith Audit adds quantitative weight to these attacks. The report documented 6,800 acts of antizionist hate—an average of 18.6 per day—shattering all records since before I was born in 1982. Of these, 6,248 occurred online, a 203.9% surge since 2022. This digital volume isn’t separate from the physical reality, it’s an antecedent. It provides the tactical coordination that allows a protest to morph into an antizionist siege.
The Impunity
The transition from policy critique to street-level siege is sustained by a failure of the legal system. In many jurisdictions, the intimidation of private locals, bookstores, restaurants, and worship halls, has been met with a refusal to categorize the actions as hate crimes.
Consider the legal proceedings following the 2025 assault on a Jewish man in a Montreal park. Despite clear documentation of the motivations of the assailant, the court navigated to a finding of the psychiatric. This is a recurring trend showing the path of least resistance for the legal system individualizes the grievance rather than confronting the movement behind it.
Similarly, the 2026 blockades at the Indigo bookstore chain demonstrated this. Despite the occupation of commercial businesses, actions clearly intended to place pressure on Jewish entities, authorities struggled to go beyond warnings. When charges were ultimately withdrawn, the message sent to the world was that the cost of disrupting Jewish life is nothing. The benefit of signaling antizionism is worth the risk.
This is further bolstered by the adoption of an aggressive symbolism and lexicon. The inverted red triangle, a symbol used in Hamas propaganda to designate a target for a snipe, has moved from digital darkness into your squares. When a protester wears this symbol, they’re not engaging in free speech, they’re designating targets. When that symbolism is paired with the slogan “globalize the intifada,” it’s a call for the import of Gazan violence into Canadian neighborhoods.
Intellectual Permission
The engine of this antizionist surge is the employment of academic theories to create a permission structure for violence. Terms such as “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” have been stripped of their nuance and weaponized as blunt instruments. They work as a universal solvent, dissolving the distinction between the Jewish state and the Jewish individual.
In this perspective, the “Zionist” label is applied to every Jewish entity. A congregant at a Sabbath service is no longer viewed as a private citizen, but as a proxy for whatever Israel happens to be doing. By this logic, an elementary school is a center of indoctrination, and a bookstore is a node in an enemy complex. This is the logic of war, applied to your communities. Chants like “from the river to the sea” act as a blueprint, legitimizing the removal of a Jewish presence from the public as a requirement for sanctity.
The Testing
This remains a definitive diagnostic for the state of Canadian society. If the grievance were about Middle Eastern policy, the protests would be centered on the consulates. Instead, the evidence shows the school for the ministry, the bookstore for the arms exporter, the neighborhood for the city hall, and the congregation for the state building.
This substitution is a mapping signature of the antizionism around us. The normalization of this hate isn’t a crisis of foreign policy, it’s the active, accelerating collapse of protections meant for the less than one percent. You’ve witnessed the line between the protester and the persecutor effectively erased. The evidence—the bullet trajectories into schools, the 203% surge in hate, the withdrawal of charges for commercial blockades—is mountainous and devastating.
When the history of this time is written, the failure will not be attributed to a lack of information. It will be attributed to the deliberate blindness of those who prioritized the optics of “protest” over the reality of death. The map of where the fire is burning provides all that’s required to identify who’s being hunted, and who’s hunting. There’s no ambiguity. The target is the Jewish citizen, and the evidence of the hunt is the burning around you. The question remains: does your state possess the will to protect its own, or has it already been abandoned to the fire?
Postscript
My heart goes out to Jewish Canadians. Since witnessing the protest with the effigy being hung in Montreal, I’ve felt nothing but sadness and worry for them. I can’t imagine living under those circumstances. I’ve spoken with a school teacher there, and have developed a few meaningful friendships with Canadian Jews since my “deconversion” from antizionism — they strike me as nothing but loving people in a country that isn’t protecting them. I send you my care and hope for your safekeeping. We cannot let antizionism and antisemitism quash your safety; not because ours is next, but because it’s unjust and morally indefensible. And since you are worth caring for. You’re not alone.
35 Likes∙
A guest post by
Former antizionist now fact-checking, researching, and fighting against Jew-hatred and anti-Israel bias. Writer @timesofisrael. Citations > slogans. M.T.S, S.T.M., Boston University. Antizionism Glossary out soon.
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