CUPE Vice-President Fred Hahn’s Antisemitic Social Media Posts Show He’s Unfit For His Post: DiManno
"It’s time for the union’s national executive to kick the embattled labour leader
Here is Rosie DiManno's complete article: ??
When someone finds it necessary to repeatedly declare that he’s not an antisemite, he’s probably an antisemite.
When someone finds it necessary to repeatedly declare that his endless loathing for the state of Israel isn’t antisemitic, he’s probably an antisemite.
When someone writes rapturously on X about the Hamas slaughter of some 1,200 Israeli civilians?— men, women and children, from Holocaust survivors to babies, nearly all of them Jews?— within a day of the Oct. 7 atrocity, celebrating the massacre as “the power of resistance”?— that is unequivocally antisemitic. “Resistance is fruitful and no matter what some might say, resistance brings progress.”
When someone shares on Facebook a digitally manipulated video depicting a Jewish athlete?— Star of David tattooed on his arm?— jumping off a springboard at the Olympics and turning into an exploding human bomb raining destruction on innocents?— that is indisputably antisemitic.
When that person offers limp and only belated apologies, only when called out for his appalling lapses of judgement, a qualified mea culpa which extends only to causing pain for “some”?who viewed it, that’s duck and bob antisemitism.
And when groups of people represented by that trade union executive?— Air Canada flight attendants, paramedics, an agency working with the homeless?— slam that individual for his “reckless”?social media, calling for the perpetrator's resignation, that’s evidence of objection to antisemitism.
Of course criticizing Israel, its treatment of Palestinians, its conduct of the war is not in itself antisemitic. But Fred Hahn has again and again seemed to deny the Jewish right to self-determination and, worse, to dehumanize Jews and treat their lives as expendable in service of his political agenda. We can’t know what’s in his heart, but his actions make his leadership untenable
But Hahn won’t resign.
He insists he is not antisemitic.?
“I want to be clear?— I utterly reject the charge of antisemitism,” Hahn wrote in a two-page statement released last week, vowing to defy a demand from the executive board of CUPE that he step down in the tumultuous wake of the aforementioned diving Jew-bomb posting, amid escalating clamour from union members.
The embattled labour leader can say and reject whatever he wants. He can call Israel a genocidal occupier or a war crimes state?— many agree, as the horrific military campaign unleashed in Gaza drags through an eleventh month, spilling blood, death and agonizing displacement everywhere, tens of thousands killed, and still Hamas holds on to 150 abducted hostages, with the volatile Middle East teetering on the precipice of a much wider conflagration that could engulf the region.
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But this is not the purview of public trade unions
Yet it’s Hahn who portrays himself as the victim, even as he pays lip service to Jewish existence, if not Israel’s existence and right to defend itself against terrorist attacks. “It is a terrible mistake, and antisemitic, to conflate abhorrent actions by the state of Israel with Jewish humanity or identity,”?he allowed. How very magnanimous of him.
In his statement, however, Hahn mewled that “those who spoke up against the actions of the state of Israel last fall were quickly labelled antisemitic, and vilified … I was one of those people. This smear is nothing new.”
This smear is no misguided venom. Hahn “spoke up”?with apparent glee within 24 hours of the violent Hamas incursion into Israel?on Oct. 7, before Israel had taken any retaliatory action. He continues to revile Israel by amplifying the premise?— the tropes?— of Israelis, Jews, as subhuman and the nation as distinctly, antithetically, immorally wicked.
It’s the same patch of rocky ground upon which antisemites plant their anti-Zionist flag, because that threading of the needle offers space to scorn and denounce whilst side-stepping?— to their mind?— the accusation of antisemitism. It allows the Hahns of this world to define antisemitism.
Hahn has been president of the public sector union’s Ontario arm since 2010, an elected position from which he can’t be ousted by the national executive; they can only jettison him as vice-president of the national body. The proviso protection Hahn at the Ontario level demands a closer examination of the union’s charter.
Since Hahn has made it clear hell-no he won’t go, the national executive must absolutely take the unprecedented decision to kick him to the curb.
Antisemitism in Canada is a monstrous blight that has peaked since last October and shows no signs of abating, as Jews and Jewish institutions, schools, daycare centres and businesses continue to be targeted. Hahn has contributed disgracefully to that hatred. His rinse and repeat sorry-sorry-sorry carries not a shred of sincerity.
Hamas is a designated terrorist group in Canada and just about everywhere else. It aligns with and is supported by international terrorist organizations including Hezbollah, Islamic State, Houthis and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
This is the mass-murdering merciless faction that Hahn has extolled.
Hahn won’t eat his repellent words. So spit him out.