KINSELLA: Video of NDP activist, candidate shows new low for the left​on March 28, 2025 at 2:23 pm

What has happened to the New Democrats?

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At long last, have they lost all sense of decency?

Thomas Mulcair wonders that too. In a column written for Postmedia in November, the former New Democratic Party leader wrote these important words:

“Hatred against Jews has a name: antisemitism. In Canada, antisemitism is on the rise; two-thirds of all reported acts of religious violence and hatred are directed at Jews … The Jewish state of Israel was created by the United Nations on the ashes of the Holocaust, the wholesale slaughter of over 6 million Jews, because they were Jews. It was the horrific culmination of hundreds of years of pogroms and other forms of overt hatred against Jews.

“When I was 14 years old, I visited the Dachau concentration camp. The words ‘never again’ were written on a monument there. Let’s make that a pledge that means something: never again.”

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Stirring, powerful words. Mulcair acknowledges that the beast of antisemitism is out of its cage, and seemingly everywhere these days. And Jew hatred on the left has been growing, like a cancer, for years.

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In the wake of Oct. 7, 2023 — when 1,200 Jews and non-Jews were slaughtered, and 250 kidnapped, and more than 100 Jewish women and girls raped and sexually mutilated — how can that be happening?

The left has always claimed to be on the side of the victims. On the side of the little guy. The ordinary people.

So why have they not taken the side of the Jews who were slaughtered on Oct. 7 — kibbutzim Jews who, overwhelmingly, were leftists and favoured peace and opposed the government of Benjamin Netanyahu? Jews have played key roles in the civil rights movement, in advocacy for women’s reproductive rights and for oppressed minorities — so why has the left abandoned their Jewish allies now, at their hour of need?

It’s a question that has come up, yet again, during Election 2025.

In a video sent to me and shared online by Facts Matter — a group I lead that fights antisemitism in Canada — Hull-Aylmer NDP candidate Pascale Matecki and longtime NDP activist Julien Newman approach a constituent’s home. Unbeknownst to Newman and Matecki, the constituent has a security camera aimed at his door.

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Here is the conversation captured by the camera:

Newman: And that’s why (Israel) exist(s). I think that’s why the United States supports on the side. Britain supported them because they won the … and actually the Arabs tried to create a pan-Arab state.

Matecki: Yeah.

Newman: And they weren’t able to because Israel was kind of in the middle.

Matecki: Exactly…

Newman: So, you know, I totally understand why the Arabs would want Israel to disappear. I also, you know, and I’m you know, I mean the Americans clearly they really want Israel to be there because it creates chaos in that regions, which it does.

Candidate: Yeah, yeah!

Their conversation stops when the constituent opens the door, tells them he has heard every word, and kicks Newman and Matecki off his property. They slink off. The video of them has received 200,000 views, and counting.

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It’s worth emphasizing the words uttered by Newman, as Matecki nods her head: They “totally understand why the Arabs would want Israel to disappear.” Get that? “Disappear.” That, without exaggeration, is the sort of thing infamous figures in history have said, too.

The “ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews altogether,” said one, in 1919. He would go on to become chancellor of Germany. You know his name.

So, how did Canada’s NDP reach this nadir, this moral depth? Your guess is as good as mine. It makes no sense, at all, at all.

Because Julien Newman, the one who uttered those foul words?

He used to advise Thomas Mulcair.

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