Date: June 11, 2018

From: Derek Penslar, William Lee Frost Professor of Modern Jewish History,
Harvard University
To: Ministry of the Attorney General, Province of Ontario
Re: R. v. Sears and St. Germaine

My name is Derek Jonathan Penslar. I am the Samuel Zacks Professor of European

Jewish History at the University of Toronto and a Visiting Professor of History at
Harvard University. On July 1, 2018, I will assume a permanent appointment at
Harvard as the William Lee Frost Professor of Modern Jewish History. I hold a B.A.
in History from Stanford University, and an MA and PhD in History from the
University of California at Berkeley. In addition to Toronto and Harvard, I have
taught at Indiana University, Bloomington, where I was a professor of history and of
Jewish studies, and at the University of Oxford, where I was the Stanley Lewis
Professor of Modern Israel Studies. I have research and teaching expertise in the
history of Jewish civilization, Jewish-Christian relations in medieval and modern
Europe, antisemitism, the Holocaust, and the state of Israel.

As per your request, I have studied all issues of Your Ward News (hereafter, YWN)
published between 2015 and Spring 2018 and have considered whether YWN’s
language and imagery are antisemitic. I have read YWN against the background of
my intimate familiarity with antisemitic texts and images produced in Europe, North
America, and the Middle East over several centuries. My reading is also informed by
a substantial body of scholarly literature on antisemitism, some of which I have
authored or edited.1 Based on my reading, I have determined that YWN espouses
antisemitic doctrines and that both its textual and visual representations of Jews are
rooted in antisemitic concepts with a long historical pedigree. I have further
determined that YWN’s antisemitic rhetoric frequently echoes or resembles

1 Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation
to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1943, new ed. 2002); Leon
Poliakov, The History of Antisemitism (IV v., orig. 1955-1977, new ed. University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2003); Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Antisemitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1964); Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Antisemitism 1700-
1933 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); ); Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing
Politics in Imperial Russia (London: Macmillan, 1986); R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990); Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Penguin, 1993); Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism
in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Gavin Langmuir, Towards a Definition of
Antisemitism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996; Saul Friedländer, Nazi
Germany and the Jews (II v., New York: Harper Perennial, 1998-2008); Derek J. Penslar, Shylock’s
Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2001); Derek J. Penslar, Michael R. Marrus, and Janice Gross Stein, eds.,
Contemporary Antisemitism: Canada and the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005);
Idem, “Antisemites on Zionism: From Indifference to Obsession,” The Journal of Israeli History 25, 1
(2006), 13–31; Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust (London: Picador, 2011); Anthony Julius,
Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Antisemitism in England (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
2012); David Niremberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: Norton, 2013)
language employed by neo-Nazi extremists in the United States and disseminated
either in print or, more recently, via the internet.

YWN consistently expresses hatred of Jews via five distinct yet overlapping
mechanisms: 1) Expressions of revulsion against the Jewish faith and its
practitioners; 2) Accusations that Jews were collectively responsible for Bolshevik
atrocities in the USSR; 3) Claims of Jewish conspiracies to conquer and control
humanity, especially through banking and finance; 4) Demonization of the state of
Israel; and 5) Holocaust denial. Undergirding these five forms of antisemitic
expression is a consistent and explicit admiration for Nazism in general and the
German dictator Adolph Hitler in particular. Since antisemitism was a key
component of German National Socialism and motivated the Nazis’ persecution and
genocide of European Jewry, YWN’s emulation of Nazi Germany deepens and
intensifies the various forms of Jew-hatred that the newspaper espouses.

For the purpose of clarity, I would like to define antisemitism before entering into
my analysis of YWN’s content. Over the past decade, various governmental and non-
governmental organizations (e.g., the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith, the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe [OSCE] and the United States
State Department) have formulated definitions of antisemitism. Both the OSCE and
the U. S. State Department have endorsed wording produced by the International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA], according to which antisemitism is “a
certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.”
Antisemitism “frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is
often used to blame Jews for ‘why things go wrong.’ It is expressed in speech,
writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative
character traits.”

Quoting from the IHRA, examples of antisemitic representation include:

Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations

about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially
but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews
controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.

Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined

wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts
committed by non-Jews.

Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of

the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany
and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust)

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 Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or
exaggerating the Holocaust.2

As we shall see, the content of YWN conforms closely to the descriptions of

antisemitic speech and imagery in this definition.

I would like to make one further preliminary observation. Some of the articles in
YWN are presented in an ostensibly satiric or ironic vein, and its images are often
cartoonish. Yet these texts, no less than those that are unvarnished polemics,
communicate hatred and disgust towards Jews. My reading of YWN has been
informed by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s judicious words at the outset
of his celebrated essay from 1944, Anti-Semite and Jew:

Never believe that anti‐ Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of
their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge.
But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to
use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the
right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous
reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in
acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to
intimidate and disconcert.3

I Expressions of revulsion against the Jewish faith and its practitioners

YWN’s assault on Judaism stems in part from longstanding Christian accusations

that Jews, especially the Pharisaic elite in Roman Palestine, were responsible for the
death of Jesus. This association is personified in the figure of Bernie Farber, former
chief executive officer of the Canadian Jewish Congress, who, on the front cover of
the Spring 2016 issue, is depicted as a Pharisee wearing a pentagram, which is a
symbol of witchcraft. (Tab A) This image also depicts Calvary, with YWN’s editor in
chief, James Sears, in the place of Jesus on the cross, with YWN’s publisher, Leroy St.
Germaine, as one of the thieves who were crucified next to Jesus. In the Summer
2016 issue Farber is once again depicted as a Pharisee, this time commanding a
bowman to fire “Satan’s ZioMarxist” arrows at a Canada Post letter carrier
delivering copies of YWN to homes. (In the image, Farber says, “Keep firing, you
spazzy putz! The blood of six million lampshades is on your hands!”) (Tab B)

YWN vilifies the Talmud, a vast compendium of Jewish legalistic and exegetical
writings that is the core of Judaism as it has been practiced for the past 1500 years.
(YWN attempts to draw a distinction between “Torah Judaism,” based on the Old
Testament and practiced by ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist Jews, and Talmudic

2 https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-antisemitism (accessed 21 May

2018).
3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (New York: Shocken,

1948/1976), 13.

3
Judaism, but in fact this distinction does not exist, and the ultra-Orthodox Jews to
which Sears refers are devoted to the most demanding forms of Talmudic Judaism.)
YWN calls the Talmud “a satanic Babylonian book in which the Pharisees brag about
murdering Jesus, called the Virgin Mary a ‘whore,’ call non-Jews ‘subhuman,’ etc.”
(April 2015, p 13) The claim that Jews consider Gentiles to be “subhuman beasts” is
repeated in the June 2015 issue, which insinuates that the Talmud justifies the
abuse of Gentile women ("I will resist the temptation to publish passages out of the
Jewish Talmud to explain [accused rapist Jian] Ghomeshi’s treatment of gentile
women.” [p 2]) “I call upon Canadian Jews,” writes Sears in July 2015, “to denounce
the teachings of the Babylonian Talmud and to petition the Canadian government to
make the token gesture of banning the Talmud in Canada as ‘hate literature’
directed against the Gentile 99%.” (p 2) Elsewhere in YWN the Talmud is called “the
oral teachings of the Christ-murdering Pharisees.” Acts of violence committed by
Jews against Palestinians in Israel are described as the work of “Christ-hating Jewish
Talmudic terrorists” (July 2015, p 2) and “bloodthirsty Talmudic Zionist Jews”
(September 2015, p 3). In the Winter 2017 issue, YWN foresees a “great pogrom”
that will kill 99 per cent of the world’s Jews, leaving behind only those who have
rejected the “satanic Babylonian Talmud.” (p 6)

The identification of Jews with the Talmud and of the Talmud with villainy and
deception is a staple of modern antisemitism. Such associations were particularly
frequent in Germany, as exemplified in books like Johannes Eisenmenger’s Judaism
Unmasked (1700), which was largely reproduced in August Rohling’s book The
Talmud-Jew (1871) and later became a major component of Nazi and neo-Nazi
propaganda. Accusations that the Talmud preaches hatred of non-Jews appear in
the autobiography of David Duke, former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and
an active disseminator of antisemitic propaganda in our own day.4

Like YWN’s denigration of the Talmud, there is a long pedigree to YWN’s claims that
it wants to protect the “misguided, devil-worshiping Antichrist Talmudic Jews”
(Winter 2017, p 6) from eternal damnation as well as acts of violence by extremists
by bringing them to embrace Christianity. Avowals of Christian love of Jews have
long co-existed with, and legitimized, hateful depictions of Jewish religious texts and
practices as well as animosity towards Jews as individuals. Indeed, YWN’s assault
against the Talmud is rooted in anti-Jewish practices dating back to the Middle Ages.
In the thirteenth century, European monks began to learn Aramaic and Hebrew well
enough to read the Talmud, and they were displeased to learn that Jews no longer
followed the biblical laws in the form prescribed in the Torah. They were also
angered by occasional negative references to Christianity – approximately eighteen
of the Talmud’s 36,000 pages make such references, and many of those are indirect
or metaphorical. In the later Middle Ages, in western Europe copies of the Talmud
were subject to strict censorship and on occasion they were publicly burned.

4 David Duke, My Awakening (Covington, Louisiana: Free Speech Press, 1998), 62, 241, 244-45); idem,
“The Talmudic Roots of Jewish Supremacism,” https://davidduke.com/the-roots-of-jewish-supremacism/ 4
October 2013; accessed 4 June 2018).

4
YWN not only perpetuates long-established calumnies against the Talmud but also
rehashes accusations, dating back to the twelfth century, that Jews ritually murder
Christian youth and consume their blood. The accusations flourished in the Middle
Ages and returned in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Russia, Germany,
Hungary, and what is today’s Czech Republic. The ritual murder charge has long
been linked with associations between Jews, black magic, and Satanism. These
elements come together in YWN’s Winter 2018 issue, whose cover image depicts
Hungarian-American financier George Soros speaking from a conference call box to
a variety of Canadian leaders, including Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne and prime
minister Justin Trudeau. (Tab C) The assembled are drinking blood, with blood
dripping from Trudeau's mouth, from a bottle labeled “Château Rothschild 1948
Essence d’Enfant”. Below, I discuss the prominence of Soros and Rothschild in
YWN’s antisemitic conspiracy theories, and the applications of these theories to
Israel and the Israel-Palestine conflict. (The state of Israel was founded in 1948.)
Here, I want to note the unambiguous reference to the blood libel, whose heinous
quality is further enhanced by the fact that one of the assembled is wearing a satanic
pentagram.

YWN draws on debates about the origins of the Jews to further demonize them and
their faith. Since the 1870s, some scholars have contended that in the eighth
century CE a substantial number of people in the Khazar kingdom in the Caucasus
converted to Judaism, and that most of the Jews who lived in Europe in subsequent
centuries were descended from these converts. The “Khazar thesis,” in and of itself,
is not antisemitic, but it has been used by antisemites to deny any connection
between modern Jewry and the ancient land of Israel, and especially to deny that
Jesus himself was a Jew. The Summer 2017 issue of YWN takes this argument a step
further, claiming not only that the Jews have no link with ancient Palestine and are
descended from the Khazars, but that the Khazars were “a phallus worshiping
satanic cult until they converted to satanic Judaism circa 740.” (p 16) At this point
they adopted the Babylonian Talmud and other “satanic, blasphemous books which
they sacrilegiously insist are greater than the Torah and the holy Bible." (ibid) The
“true Jews spoken of in the Bible” are the Palestinians, who are the direct
descendants of Jesus. (October 2015, p 3)

In antisemitic literature, religious anti-Judaism and secular economic antisemitism

are closely linked. Accusations that Jews are avaricious and engage in noxious
economic behaviour have been common in Christian Europe since the late Middle
Ages. These accusations often center around usury and sharp business practices,
but in recent years one particularly powerful form of economic antisemitism has
blamed Jews for trafficking in slaves. This argument is central in the writings of
Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam in the United States and author of the
1991 book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. Referring to Farrakhan
as “one of my heroes,” in the Fall 2016 issue of YWN, Sears, casting himself as YWN’s
“resident Jewologist,” depicts Jews as responsible for the slave trade throughout
human history. (p 16) Sears reproduces several quotations that appear to be from

5
legitimate scholarly works to back up his claims. In fact, one quotation is taken
directly from Tony Martin’s antisemitic work The Jewish Onslaught (1983), while
two others are taken from pages 9 and 91 of Farrakhan’s book. Like Farrakhan,
Sears manipulates the truth; for example, biblical law justified slavery, and Jewish
merchants did engage in the slave trade in medieval Europe, but slavery was a
widespread and accepted institution in the ancient and medieval worlds. Claims
that Jews were heavily involved in the Atlantic slave trade in modern history are
baseless, as has been demonstrated by several reputable scholars, including David
Brion Davis, a distinguished historian of the American South.5

In the pages of YWN, antisemitism frequently takes the form of caricature, such as
the image on the cover pages of the May and June 2015 issues of a Jewish postal
worker, who refused to deliver YWN, with a contorted face and the forelocks of a
Hasidic Jew. (Tab D) The image is accompanied by the words “Postie Putz” (putz is
Yiddish for “prick”), a flaming bagel screaming "it's the Holocaust all over again,”
and two men (Bernie Farber and a man named Saul), wearing kippot embroidered
with the Hebrew words “our lord, our teacher and rabbi,” saying that “these goyim
(a derogatory term for Gentiles) are meshuga (Yiddish for crazy), but where’s the
hate?” As we have seen, depictions of Judaism and of Jewish practice in YWN are
hateful and are well-informed by long traditions of religious and economic
antisemitism.

II Accusations of collective responsibility for Bolshevik atrocities

On at least twenty occasions, YWN refers to Jews as “ZioMarxists.” Each of the two
components of this term need to be analyzed separately. The first documented use
of the word “Zio” as a pejorative dates back to the end of the 1980s, when it was
connected with “Nazi” to form “ZioNazi,” a hostile reference to the state of Israel and
its supporters. Over the past decade, “Zio” has broken away from specific links to
Zionism or Israel and has become a derogatory term for Jews. The broader use of
the term was popularized by David Duke.6 “Zio” is frequently linked with a second
noun or adjective via a hyphen, endowing that word with what are thought to be
irradicable and noxious Jewish qualities (e.g., “Zio-economics”, “Zio-media”).

Many of YWN’s references to “ZioMarxism” and “ZioMarxist” come in the context of

articles accusing Jews of involvement in revolutionary and leftist causes in general

5David Brion Davis, “The Slave Trade and the Jews,” New York Review of Books, 22 December 1994,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1994/12/22/the-slave-trade-and-the-jews/ (accessed 25 May
2018).

6https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-how-chicago-s-dyke-march-adopted-an-anti-
semitic-slur-dear-to-far-righists-1.5494579;
https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/03/whore-you-calling-a-zio/ (accessed 28 May
2018).

6
and with the leadership of the former Soviet Union in particular. In March of 2015,
YWN wrote of the “ZioMarxist genocide of 50 million Christians” in the former
Soviet Union. A photograph of corpses was accompanied by the caption “Some of
the 50 million Orthodox Christians slaughtered by Marxist Jews in the Soviet Union.”
(p 12) Among those fifty million for whose deaths Jews bear direct responsibility,
according to YWN, were Tsar Nicholas II and his family. YWN singles out for
condemnation Genrich Yagoda, the director between 1934 and 1936 of the Soviet
security and intelligence agency NKVD. According to YWN, Yagoda was “a
ZioMarxist Jew who loathed Christians (most of Stalin’s high-ranking bureaucrats
were Jews) [and] personally oversaw the murder of ten million Orthodox
Christians.” (p 13) These accusations are repeated in the issues of July 2015 (p 1),
January 2016 (p 10), and Winter 2017 (p 16). In the January 2016 issue, “Bolshevik
Jews” are accused of having “burn[ed] down almost every church,” while sparing
“every synagogue and rabbi”. In Winter 2017, YWN claims that “Jewish deputies
established and managed the gulag system.” The only Jews actually mentioned by
name, however, are Yagoda, Lazar Kaganovich and Leonid Reichman. YWN
acknowledges that Yagoda’s successor at the helm of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, was
not Jewish but notes that he “had a very Jewish wife.”

There are elements of historical truth in this narrative about Jews, the Soviet
security services, and Bolshevik terror, but there is also willful and/or reckless
exaggeration and distortion. The figure of fifty million victims of the Leninist and
Stalinist regimes has been offered by the historian Norman Davies, but that figure
would encompass all people, regardless of religion or ethnicity, who died in the
USSR between 1917 and 1953 via executions, deportations, death by natural or
unnatural causes in gulags, and the mass starvation of Ukrainians known as the
Holodomor. While it is true that, during the first two decades of the Soviet Union,
Jews were disproportionately involved in the country’s security services, “[t]here
was,” according to eminent Soviet historian Yuri Slezkine, “no Jewish interest that
these people had in common – any more than the German officials and professionals
in imperial Russia had had a special German interest.”7 Jews had higher than
average rates of literacy and higher education, and during the USSR’s early years
they were prominent in many branches of the Soviet bureaucracy - not only the
security services, but also the military and academia. What is more, their presence
in the security services dropped drastically during and after the Great Purges of the
mid-1930s.

On page 12 of its March 2015 issue, YWN attempts to justify its antisemitism by
selectively quoting from Winston Churchill, who, in an essay from 1920, associated
Bolshevism with Jews. This same essay, however, also praised assimilated Anglo-
Jews and Zionists for contributing to Britain both at home and throughout the
Empire, including Palestine, which had recently come under British control.8
Churchill was willing to flirt with both antisemitism and philo-semitism to suit what

7 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 255.
8 Sharman Kadish, Bolsheviks and British Jews (London: Routledge, 1992), 136-37.

7
he thought to be Britain’s political interests. YWN takes this and other bits of
historical documentation out of context in order to confirm a pre-existing belief in
what since the 1920s has been known as “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

The idea that a Jewish cabal was responsible for Bolshevism and for communist
movements throughout Europe was first developed by Russian opponents of Lenin
and became a staple of Nazi propaganda during the 1920s. In 1924, Dietrich
Ekhardt, a member of a forerunner to the Nazi party, published a pamphlet on
Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin. Once in power, Hitler routinely linked Bolshevism
with the Jews, and during World War II he, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels,
and Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS and security forces, proclaimed the
war against Bolshevism and the war against the Jews to be identical. After 1945, the
myth continued to be popular in Soviet-dominated Poland, where it was known as
“Zydokomuna” (Judeo-communism).

During the interwar period, the Judeo-Bolshevik myth also appeared in North
American antisemitic writings and figured prominently in The International Jew, a
series of more than ninety long articles commissioned by automobile magnate
Henry Ford for his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. The Judeo-Bolshevik
myth was a means by which people in prosperous western countries who were
doing well under a capitalist regime expressed their fear of communism. YWN
carries on in this tradition, although the collapse of communism at the end of the
1980s explains why YWN’s hatred of Jewish communists is more about actions in
the past - the violent deaths of Soviet citizens under a now extinct regime - than in
the present. That said, the term “ZioMarxist” appears frequently in YWN articles
alleging a wide variety of current Jewish conspiracies, whose goals far exceed those
of the spread of communist revolution.

III Financial and other Jewish conspiracies

YWN disseminates a Judeo-Bolshevik myth, but it makes more frequent reference,

and in harsher language, to the alleged dominance of Jews in capitalist finance, both
historic and in our own day. The issues of May and July of 2015, January and Spring
of 2016, and Winter of 2018 make a series of inter-related claims about Jewish
banking conspiracies. I would like to lay out the elements of this envisioned
conspiracy in YWN’s own words and then comment on its significance and historical
pedigree.

According to page 15 of the May 2015 issue:

[i]n 1974 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau gave Rothschild control of our
Bank of Canada. That is why unemployment, taxes, and prices are so high.
Since 1974, every major political party leader has been a Rothschild puppet.
They do not have the balls to shake this parasite loose for fear of being
assassinated! U.S. President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order to
mint silver coins. silver coins. His plan was to shut down the Rothschild-

8
 owned Federal Reserve and have the American people print their own
currency. Within weeks he was assassinated! Newly sworn in President
Lyndon Johnson's first act, out of sheer fear, was to rescind Kennedy's
executive order! Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, a socialist who was loved
by his people, announced he would issue a "gold dinar" coin to put all of
Africa on the gold standard. Countries would stop paying interest to the
Rothschild banks, thereby lifting the continent out of poverty. Within weeks
the Zio-Marxist-controlled mainstream media made up false accusations that
Qaddafi was ‘bombing his own people’. Then the ZioArmies armies quickly
invaded and he was assassinated. Israel and the United States want to invade
Syria, Iran, and North Korea, claiming their leaders are ‘evil’. If it was not for
Vladimir Putin and Kimmie’s nukes, they would have. NOT A COINCIDENCE!
The only countries in the world that do NOT have a Rothschild Bank are
Syria, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Cuba!

The July issue elaborates further: Until 1974 the Bank of Canada “printed interest-
free money for its own use….But Rothschild would have none of it! All three
branches of government now had to pay billions of dollars a year in tribute to his
banking empire.” (p 10) Lord Jacob Rothschild and his family “dominate the
consortium reigning over the Earth’s most gigantic and powerful force – that of the
Money Power.” (p 5) The January 2016 issue claims that since 1974 Canada has
been a “ZioMarxist vassal state….Both the Queen and our Prime Minister take orders
from Rothschild.” (p 10) The Winter issue of 2018 claims that Richard Nixon took
the United States off the gold standard in 1971 “so that the Rothschild-owned U.S.
Federal Reserve could print more money and throw America into debt slavery.” (p
7) The connection with Canada is the claim that in the latter country interest-free
loans provided by a national bank were replaced by interest-bearing loans by
private banks, thus increasing individual and public debt.

Hostile statements about Trudeau’s economic policies abound on the internet. They
take a kernel of truth – the slippage of the Canadian government from surplus into
deficit due to a combination of the oil crisis of the mid 1970s and increased public
spending – and reshape it into a myth that reflects a populist suspicion of both
central government and big banks. In the United States and Canada, this kind of
rhetoric dates back to the late nineteenth century. It always had a potential to slip
into antisemitism, as “New York bankers” were at times invoked as a euphemism for
“Jewish bankers.” In and of itself, a critique of Trudeau’s economic policies, even
one that posits a fictional conspiracy, is not antisemitic, but YWN harnesses this
story to a hoary antisemitic myth of Jewish financial control. This myth can be
summarized in the apocryphal quote “It doesn’t matter who wins. I print the money.
I make the laws!” attributed by YWN to both the Rothschild dynasty’s founder,
Mayer Amschel Rothschild (who died in 1812) and its current leader. (Compare May
2015, p 15 with January 2016, p 10)

The notion of a global Jewish financial conspiracy is older than the Judeo-Bolshevik
myth, as the latter emerged with the rise of revolutionary radicalism in the late

9
1800s, while the former dates back to the beginnings of industrial capitalism earlier
in the century. The antisemitic critique of capitalism appeared in France and
Germany in the 1840s, and its volume and intensity increased dramatically as a
result of a series of economic and political crises from the 1870s through the early
1900s. Central to the antisemitic critique of capitalism was the presentation of Jews
as a cabal that controlled global finance and was on the verge of attaining global
domination. These arguments were found in a variety of popular books, e.g.,
Alphonse Toussenel’s The Jews: Kings of Our Time (1845), Otto Glagau’s The Stock
Exchange and Real Estate Swindle in Germany (1876), Eduard Drumont’s Jewish
France (1886), Theodor Fritsch’s The Antisemitic Catechism (1886), and the
anonymous Protocols of the Elders of Zion (first published in Russia in 1903 and in
many languages in 1920).9 In the eyes of the Nazis, Jews, both poor and rich alike,
were consummate economic criminals and conspirators. The concept that Jews
ceaselessly strive for economic supremacism survives in our own day in the
ideology of David Duke.10

Presentation of the Rothschilds as preternaturally wealthy, clever, and powerful

dates back to a British pamphlet of 1846 and appears in most antisemitic literature
of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The image of the
Rothschilds as an octopus, whose tentacles cover the globe, first appeared in the
United States in 1894. The equivalents here are YWN’s April 2015 issue’s warning
that "foreign elements are slowly sinking their tentacles into Canada, sucking us dry
of our wealth, taxing us to death, and destroying our society's moral and cultural
fabric." [p 15]) Or, as the May 2015 issue put it succinctly in advance of the
provincial elections, “Stop Rothschild! Vote Independent on October 19!” (inside
back cover)

Antisemitic myths of Jewish financial power are frequently expressed in terms of a

puppeteer with world leaders dancing according to his dictates. On the cover of
the August 2015 issue of YWN, Rothschild is represented as a puppeteer
manipulating the leaders of Canada (Tab E); on page 11 of the Summer 2016 issue
there is a similar tableau, but the puppeteer is replaced by George Soros. (Tab F)
The depiction of Soros as an economic and political master and an insatiable seeker
of gain is common in American neo-Nazism and in antisemitic speeches and writings
in contemporary eastern Europe. Andrew Anglin, proprietor of the neo-Nazi web
site known as The Daily Stormer, claims Soros “runs one of the largest campaigning
groups in the world and is noted for his interference in foreign politics and
elections.” Soros allegedly seeks to overthrow President Donald Trump, thereby

9 I have written extensively on the origins and development of economic antisemitism in Shylock’s
Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Chapters One and Four), and in
“Antisemites on Zionism: From Indifference to Obsession” (see Note 1 above).
10 Michael Berkowitz, The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); In “Is the Rockefeller Foundation
Jewish? You Decide,” David Duke argues that even fortunes made and foundations established by
non-Jews are in time taken over and dominated by Jews: https://davidduke.com/is-the-rockefeller-
foundation-jewish-you-decide/ (3 February 2018, accessed 4 June 2018).

10
demonstrating that “the entire being of the Jew is devoted to their satanic agenda.”11
A recent political poster in Poland (Tab G) depicts Soros surrounded by American
twenty-dollar bills and reads “Soros puppets, get out of Poland! We will replay
March 1968!” (At that time, a government-orchestrated antisemitic campaign forced
thousands of Jews to leave Poland.) Another recent antisemitic Polish poster reads:
“For George Soros, a vicious financial shark, destroying all existing religious or
national communities is the most lucrative business. The vision of creating a ‘brave
new world’ is merely a neat phrase aimed at amassing a fortune.”12 (Tab H)

As I noted at the end of Section I, presenting Jews as architects of a global financial

conspiracy combines religious and secular elements, as figures like “Rothschild” or
“Soros” often assume super-human, indeed demonic, status. In the March 2015 issue
of YWN we are told that “Pharisees” control international banking. (p 14) In the Fall
2016 issue, Soros is described as “Satan incarnate.” (p 15) In the August 2015 cover
image of Rothschild that I referred to above (Tab E), he is depicted as not only a
puppeteer but also possessed of a forked tongue, devilish claws, and dollar signs in
his eyes. He is flanked on one side by a satanic pentagram with Hebrew lettering and
on the other side by a Star of David and a Masonic image of an omniscient eye. The
masonic symbol also appears in a derogatory depiction of a cloaked Soros, saying “I
have failed you, Master Rothschild,” on the cover page of the Fall 2017 issue (Tab I).

Also in the Fall 2017 issue, the League for Human Rights-B’nai B’rith Canada is
called a “Jews-only Masonic group”. (p 4) This connection between Jews and
Freemasons is a staple of antisemitism in the modern western world. Freemasonry
was ;a late eighteenth-century movement that brought educated men into secret
societies to discuss current affairs, including revolutionary politics. For two
centuries, freemasonry has been the subject of conspiracy theories, which are often
intertwined with antisemitism. This connection is exemplified by a right-wing
Polish newspaper which, commenting on the election in 1922 of Gabriel Narutowicz
as President of the Republic, wrote of “the ripe fruit of meticulous Jewish-Masonic
action that aims to take over the Polish state.”13

The conspiracies attributed by YWN to Jews, and especially to the house of

Rothschild and to Georg Soros, are more than financial. They are also political and
cultural. YWN blames Jews for the Canada’s secularization and the decentering of
Christian symbols from the public sphere, (April 2015, p 15) Similarly, “Jewish
handlers” lay behind the Russian women’s band Pussy Riot, which engaged in a

11 https://dailystormer.name/jew-soros-declares-that-trump-is-a-temporary-phenomenon/ (26
January 2018); https://dailystormer.name/soros-calls-for-social-media-shutdown-to-prevent-free-
thought/ (27 February 2018, accessed 6 June 2018).
12 This quotation and information are provided in an exhibition on the 1968 persecution of Polish

Jews in the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw (visited on 6 May 2018).
13 Ibid. (Narutowicz was himself not Jewish, but he was a Freemason, and he was sympathetic to the

Jews. He was assassinated five days after assuming office.) For a general history of Jewish
involvement in Freemasonry, and antisemitic perceptions of this involvement, see Jacob Katz, Jews
and Freemasonry in Europe, 1723-1939 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).

11
risqué performance in 2012 in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. (February
2016, p 14) YWN links secularization within Canada with mass migration into the
country; the latter is a diabolical plot contrived by “ZioSatanist Sir Evelyn
Rothschild.” (January 2016, p 10) Soros as well “is funding the invasion of Europe
by Africans and Middle Eastern ‘migrants’, and he is backing the invasion of Canada
by ‘Syrian refugees’.” (February 2016, p 15) Soros is also funding the Black Lives
Matter movement, “a psychological warfare operation being conducted by a ‘fifth
column’ of ZioMarxist operatives…[Soros’] modus operandi is to convince angry,
naïve Negroes that Caucasians are out to murder them, with the ultimate goal of
starting a race war to distract us from Soros’ plundering of North America.”
(Summer 2016, p 10) The Fall 2017 issue reiterates that Soros funds Black Lives
Matter and adds the leftist movement Antifa “and other terrorist groups.” (p 4)
Protests against presidential candidate Donald Trump in early 2017 were paid for
by "globalist agitator George Soros." (Winter 2017, p 8)

The scope and range of conspiracies attributed by YWN to the Jews is part and
parcel of modern antisemitic thinking. The classic antisemitic texts mentioned
earlier in this section presented Jews as responsible for the cruelties of communism
and capitalism alike, for the decline in religious observance and other rapidly
changing social mores, for any form of art, literature, or cinema that they found
avant-garde and distasteful, and for universalistic (as opposed to militant-
nationalist) political ideologies. In neo-Nazi writings of our own day, Jews are
associated with contemporary processes of social and cultural transformation, such
as globalization, mass migration, racial and economic protest, feminism, and gender
fluidity. In antisemitic thought, Jews are akin to a universal solvent, which eats away
at any social mooring. Antisemitism’s hatred of the Jews rests in fear of what
antisemites believe to be Jewish preternatural power and unshakable determination
to attain global domination. In its most recent iteration, antisemitism maintains the
fear of internationalism, be it governmental (e.g., the United Nations) or economic
(transnational corporations).

YWN’s belief that Jews lie behind all acts of injustice leads to the conclusion that
even groups that might appear to have nothing to do with the Jews are, in fact,
deeply bound to Jews. Thus, the Armenian Genocide, which, according to the May
2015 issue of YWN, “is falsely blamed on Turkish Muslims, in fact was orchestrated
by the ‘Dönmeh,’ who were Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain[.] They controlled
the ‘Young Turks,’ who were also mainly crypto-Jews. These inconvenient truths
are one of the reasons why Israel has refused to recognize the Armenian Holocaust.”
p 12) YWN is employing a venerable antisemitic linkage between Dönmeh (Ottoman
Jews who converted to Islam in the seventeenth century) and the Young Turk
Revolution of 1908, which led to the overthrow of the Ottoman sultan Abdelhamid II
and the establishment of a secular republic under Mustafa Kemal Attatürk. This
accusation features prominently in the recently-broadcast Turkish television series
The Last Sultan. This program, which aired on a government-owned television
station, reflects the sympathies of Turkey’s current leader, Recep Erdogan, who is

12
hostile to Atatürk’s secularism and sees himself as embodying the Islamicist virtues
of Abdelhamid.

A final form of crypto-Jewish conspiracy appears in YWN’s Winter and Spring 2017
issues (pp 7 and 16 respectively) where YWN argues that Saudi Arabia’s ruling
dynasty is descended from Jewish converts. How else, YWN asks, could Saudi
Arabia “fund terrorism worldwide without suffering repercussions? How Israel and
America never criticize Saudi Arabia, the world's leading human rights violator?
How Saudi agents openly helped Israel and the CIA on 9/11, yet the ZioMarxist
controlled mainstream media turned a blind eye”? The answer, according to YWN,
is that centuries ago a band of treacherous Jews “murdered the original rulers of
present-day Saudi Arabia and stole their land." What is more, “In 1922, the Saudi
king signed a document offering Palestine to the Jews, killed a sheikh who criticized
his act, and then used the sheikh’s blood as an ablution liquid before he stood up for
his prayer." These claims are not only baseless, they simultaneously elevate and
denigrate Jews to a supremely powerful force for evil, and the story about the Saudi
King’s sacramental use of the murdered sheikh’s blood preserves key elements of
the medieval blood libel referred to in Section I above.

The conspiracy tale linking the Saudi royal family with Jews demonstrates areas of
overlap between North American, white-nationalist, and Christian antisemitism, on
the one hand, and Islamicist antisemitism, on the other. YWN’s reportage of the
alleged Saudi-Jewish link came after the story appeared on internet sites purporting
to represent the views of Islamicists hostile to the Saudi regime. Both YWN and a
Pakistani Islamicist web site claim to prove the Saudis’ Jewish roots via almost
identical quotes from former Saudi King Faisal: “In an interview to [sic] Washington
Post on September 17, 1969, King Faisal is reported to have said “We, the Saudi
family, are cousins of the Jews. We entirely disagree with any Arab or Muslim
Authority which shows any antagonism to the Jews.”14

The presentation of groups as disparate as Dönmeh and the Saudi royal family as
Jews appears to be tied to a deep-seated antisemitic notion that Jews are capable of
changing their outward appearance as suits their nefarious purposes. In late
nineteenth-century Germany, for example, antisemites claimed to be most afraid of
assimilated Jews, who might be indistinguishable from Christians. The Nazi
antisemitic film from 1940, The Eternal Jew, made a similar claim.15 In the cases of

14https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/the-origin-and-historical-background-of-saudi-royal-
family.375044/ 13 May 2015, accessed 5 June 2018); compare with YWN Spring 2017, p 7, and
Summer 2017, p 16. See also http://themillenniumreport.com/2015/12/is-the-saudi-royal-family-
jewish/ (4 December 2015; accessed 5 June 2018); http://alwaght.com/en/News/58057/The-
Saudi-Royal-Family-Are-Crypto-Jews (18 June 2016; accessed 5 June 2018).

15 Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish
Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982, 58-79); Richard
Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998, 179).

13
the Dönmeh and Saudi royal family, Jews are hiding not as Christian Europeans, but
as Turkish and Arab Muslims. The exteriors are different, but the underlying logic is
similar. The fear of the Jew as shape-shifter is not limited to the Christian West but
exists in parts of the Muslim world as well. YWN is part of a global network of
people expressing fear of and hatred towards Jews.

IV Demonization of the state of Israel

YWN’s allegation of a conspiracy between Saudi Arabia, the CIA, and Israel to
instigate the attacks of 9/11 highlights a crucial distinction between those forms of
criticism of or hostility towards the state of Israel that are and are not antisemitic.
Criticism of or hostility towards Israel, in and of itself, is not necessarily antisemitic.
Unlike the conspiratorial Jew of the antisemitic imagination, Israel is a concrete
entity. Israel’s creation led directly to the forced flight or expulsion of almost two
thirds of the Arabs who lived in historic Palestine. Since 1967, Israel has occupied
territory on which some five million Palestinians live, and another five million live
as refugees in neighboring Arab lands. Those who sympathize with the Palestinian
cause can be hostile to Israel without being antisemitic; that is, they can decry the
oppression of the Palestinians without hating Jews as such. Nonetheless, anti-
Zionism and antisemitism do overlap in many fora in the Muslim and Arab world,
among the far-left in western Europe and North America, and among the North
American far right.

There are four ways in which YWN’s depiction of Israel clearly crosses the line into
antisemitism. First, YWN presents Israeli oppression of the Palestinians as an expression
of inveterate Jewish malevolence, or what YWN calls “Israel’s Talmudic bloodlust.”
(April 2015, p 15; see also the reference to “bloodthirsty Zionist Talmudic Jews” on page
3 of the September 2015 issue.) Second, the state of Israel is described in explicitly
antisemitic language, e.g., Israel is an “illegitimate ZioMarxist apartheid state” whose
violence is dictated by the Talmud. (April 2015, p 15) Third, YWN falsifies history in
order to foment disgust and hatred for the state of Israel. In the July 2015 issue, YWN
claims falsely that Jewish-Arab relations in Palestine were amicable until the
establishment of the state by “Jewish invaders” in 1948. (In fact, there had been many
periods of tension between Jews and Arabs, with outbursts of violence against Jews in
1920, 1921, 1929, and 1936-39. In 1929, the principle victims of that violence were
ultra-Orthodox, non-Zionist Jews in the city of Hebron.) YWN further claims that during
the 1930s “Hitler and his Zionist Jewish collaborators teamed up to move Jews into
concentration camps. The eventual goal was to ship them to Palestine to form a Jewish
state under the authority of the Balfour Declaration.” (p 1) In fact, although the Nazis
allowed German Jews to flee to Palestine, Hitler loathed Zionism and did not support
Jewish aspirations for statehood. In Mein Kampf, Hitler claimed that Jews had no
intention of constructing a legitimate state in Palestine, or ability to do so, but rather
wished to make it into a clearing house for their international economic swindling
operations. “[E]ndowed with sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of

14
other states,” a Jewish state would become “a haven for convicted scoundrels and a
university for budding crooks.”16

Fourth and most important, YWN fits Israel into its general conspiratorial view of
Jews as agents of intrigue, destruction, and domination. Commenting on former
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s support for Israel, in April 2015 YWN bemoaned
that “now we are a ZioAmerican vassal state, with our Prime Minister gesticulating
at the Wailing Wall like a pathetic Shabbos Goy clown.” (p 13) On page 10 of the
November 2015 issue, YWN explained how, in its view, “Harper was co-opted by
Canadian ZioFascists with their eyes set on turning Canada into a ZioMarxist vassal
state.” As a result, Harper went from a "Hitler–loving nationalist stud muffin, to a
puppet of the ZioFascist elite.” Bill C 51, the anti-terrorism legislation of 2015,
represented the "culmination of [Harper’s] Ziofication of Canada.” Angered by the
legislation, "Canadians felt that Shabbos goy Harper had to go.”

YWN rehashes a common antisemitic canard that Israel was responsible for the
September, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. It adds that Israel was also
behind the attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in November 2015. In
December, YWN described both as “false flag” operations and claimed that ISIS was
an Israeli creation. (p 10) According to YWN, the Israeli espionage agency Mossad
planned the 9/11 attacks, which were then executed by Israeli art students who
planted bombs in the World Trade Centers. Also, a "rich Zionist Jew Larry
Silverstein had just bought the World Trade Center and took out a massive
insurance policy" shortly before the attacks. YWN repeats a widespread, antisemitic
internet falsehood that on the day of the attacks Jews had been forewarned and so
stayed away from the twin towers. Regarding the Bataclan attack, YWN claims that
French president Francois Hollande is “Jewish” and “know that Israel is behind the
recent Paris ‘terrorist’ attacks (the big lie being that ‘Muslim extremists’ did it.) He
was likely in on it.” In a later issue of YWN, the prime minister of the United
Kingdom at the time, David Cameron, is also described as “Jewish,” the proof being
that he denounces conspiracy theories. (December 2016, pp 16-17)

YWN expresses frustration that the state of Israel receives support from Evangelical
Christians. In the November 2015 and Summer 2017 issues, YWN accounts for that
support via a particularly insidious and successful Jewish conspiracy, which links
anti-Zionism with the anti-Judaism described in Section 1. The nature of the
conspiracy is explained in detail on page 10 of the November 2015 issue:

16For Rosenberg’s and Hitler’s views on Zionism, see Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the
Palestine Question (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1985), 20-28; and Robert Wistrich, Hitler’s
Apocalypse (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985) 154 –63. (The quotation from Mein Kampf is on
155.)

15
 All evangelical Christians have been brainwashed by the “Scofield Reference
Bible”. This “Bible” includes gross misinterpretations of Scripture which have
sadly infected the minds of tens of millions of people worldwide, but
primarily in North America. The blasphemies include false notions that Jesus
Christ was a Jew, Jews are God's “chosen people”, and Christians must
support Israel AT ALL COSTS. This work of fiction was created by Cyrus I.
Scofield, a bribe-taking, thieving alcoholic with a history of fraud. Scofield
met a group of Jewish businessmen who funded the writing and publishing of
his Satanic bible and helped promote him as a modern-day missionary. Of
course, they just wanted to infect the minds of American Christians with Zio-
Marxist ideology.

Cyrus Scofield (1843-1921) was an eminent and influential minister, whose highly
popular Reference Bible (1st ed. 1909), was an important source for modern
fundamentalist Protestantism’s emphasis on eschatology – the end of days that will
follow certain predictable historical events. By transforming Scofield into a
blackguard, and a pawn of wily Jews with far-reaching conspiratorial designs, YWN,
whose editor in chief claims to be a devout Eastern Orthodox Christian, maintains
longstanding practices within or between Christian denominations of criticizing
one’s rival of having Judaized or having fallen under Jewish influence.17 YWN
combines this practice with a specific animosity towards the Jewish state and its
supporters. For YWN, Evangelical Protestants are at worst naïve and misguided,
whereas Jews are depicted as malevolent and supremely powerful.

V Holocaust denial

YWN’s expositions are often labyrinthine and contradictory (e.g., simultaneously

calling Jews “ZioMarxists” and “Ziofascists”), though the newspaper’s articles clearly
convey sentiments of fear, animosity, and disgust towards Jews. YWN’s narrative
about the fate of the Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945 is, however,
unambiguous. On a dozen occasions, YWN denies that Jews were victims of a
genocide or expresses support for holocaust deniers. Unlike Jews, YWN writes,
Soviet Christians, Armenians, and aboriginals, African slaves, and Irish immigrants
in North America “had ACTUAL holocausts.” (May 2015, p 12) YWN compares
German concentration camps during World War II with concentration camps set up
by the British during the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth
century. In both cases, “most deaths were caused by diseases which included
typhoid and dysentery, despite chambers used to disinfect and delouse clothes and
linens with gaseous concoctions of various import.” (June 2015, p 3) The gas
chambers employed to kill Jews and ovens to burn their bodies during the war are
“myths” (September 2015, p 3), and a “false Hollywood narrative.” (Summer 2016, p
6) The Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter is praised as an “expert forensic analyst,”

17David Niremberg’s authoritative book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (see N1 above),
explicates this argument thoroughly.

16
and his discredited 1988 report denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz
was a “devastating document.” (April 2015, p 1) Abortion provider Henry
Morgentaler “murdered aboriginal and European Christian Canadians for the
Trudeaus to replace. Unlike Hitler, Morgentaler participated in a REAL Holocaust of
six million people.” (January 2016, p 7). The Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg
promotes a “Holocaust myth” contrived by the "vile Zionist, Israel (Izzy) Asper” and
Justin Trudeau, who is “doing the bidding of his Zio-Marxist overlords.” Asper
“donated $20 million to make [the museum] into an ‘indoctrination center’ about
the Jewish Holocaust.” This was "the biggest lie of the 20th century that 6 million
Jews were gassed (there were no gas chambers, only a few thousand Jews tragically
died due to starvation and the typhus epidemic that rapidly spread through the
concentration camps at the tail end of the war), and there is ZERO DOCUMENTED
EVIDENCE of the planned extermination of Jews by Adolph Hitler.” (Spring 2016, pp
10-11).

There is legitimate debate among scholars about details regarding the Nazi genocide
of the Jews, e.g., the timing of decisions to ghettoize, despoil, and kill Jews and how
these decisions were implemented; relations between German and local actors in
occupied Europe; and the distribution of Jewish deaths between death camps in
eastern Poland, concentration and labour camps throughout occupied Europe, and
the killing fields of the Soviet Union, where Jews were shot to death en masse in the
second half of 1941. But there is no doubt that some six million European Jews died
during the war and that industrial killing centers, where Jews were killed with
poison gas, played a major role in the genocide. As the American Historical
Association noted succinctly in 1991, “no serious historian questions that the
Holocaust took place.”18

Holocaust denial is antisemitic in that it not only denies the existence of one of the
most thoroughly documented crimes in human history, it also attributes the “myth”
of the Holocaust to Jewish machinations. Theoretically, one could deny that the
Holocaust took place while attributing beliefs in its historicity to well-intentioned
errors of judgment. Conversely, one could blame the diffusion of the “myth” of the
Holocaust on parties other than Jews But these are not the reasons for the diffusion
of Holocaust denial in influential works such as the pamphlet Did Six Million Really
Die?, published in 1974 by Ernst Zündel, Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century (1976), or the conferences sponsored by the pseudo-scholarly Institute for
Historical Review, founded by Willis Carto in 1978, or the IHR-sponsored Journal of
Historical Review, edited by Mark Weber. In all of these cases, the myth of the
Holocaust was presented as, in whole or in part, the invention of Jews in order to
promote their collective political and/or financial interests. Holocaust denial and a
presentation of Jews as inherently evil and conspiratorial characterized the
teachings of Alberta schoolteacher James Keegstra, who was convicted in 1984 of

18https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-
1991/aha-statement-on-holocaust-denial (accessed 4 June 2018).

17
“willfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group.”19 Similar arguments may
be found in Victor Thorn’s book The Holocaust Myth Exposed: Debunking the 20th
Century’s Biggest Lie (2012). The presence of antisemitic intent behind the writings
and speech of Holocaust denier David Irving was established by British Justice
Charles Gray in his 11 April 2000 ruling in Irving’s unsuccessful libel suit against
historian Deborah Lipstadt.20 (On page 1 of its April 2015 issue, YWN praises
Irving’s writing skills.) Like Irving and the other authors cited in this paragraph,
YWN sets Holocaust denial within a framework of animosity towards Jews, whose
claims to have suffered a holocaust are evidence of “an arrogant sense of
entitlement” and an “inherent supremacist attitude.” (May 2015, p 12) By faking the
Jewish Holocaust, according to YWN, Israel acts with impunity as it “holocausts the
Palestinians whose land they stole.” (April 2015, cover page)

VI Glorification and Emulation of Nazism and Adolf Hitler

YWN attempts to both deny the Holocaust and shield Hitler from responsibility for
the Nazis’ crimes are the product of an intense admiration for Hitler and Nazism, an
admiration that highlights and intensifies the antisemitic thrust of YWN.

Both YWN and Sears’ political party, known as the New Constitution Party, explicitly
borrow from Nazi discourse and symbols. Every issue from July 2015 onward
contains an announcement, usually on the back page, of a forthcoming “old-
fashioned anti-Marxist book burning.” In these announcements (Tab J) there is an
explicit parallel with a Nazi rally at Nuremberg and a photograph of a Nazi book
burning, accompanied by the caption, “Nothings brings a community together like
burning Marxist books and effigies while everyone salutes and yells ‘hail victory!’
‘Expel the parasite!’.” “Expel the parasite!,” which serves as a motto of the New
Constitution Party, is in and of itself strongly redolent of Nazi propaganda’s constant
refrain that Jews were unproductive, parasitical beings that create nothing, but feed
off of the labour and wealth of others. The party’s armband is reminiscent of its
Nazi predecessor, and its black uniforms recall those of fascist and neo-fascist
organizations. Both are displayed in advertisements soliciting party membership
from April 2015 onwards. (Tab K)

Admiration for Hitler is ubiquitous in YWN. A photograph of a little boy dressed as

Hitler for Halloween elicits the caption “now THAT is cute!” (October 2015, p 11;

19David Bercuson and Douglas Werheimer, A Trust Betrayed: The Keegstra Affair (Toronto and New
York: Doubleday, 1985)

20David John Cadwell Irving v Penguin Books Ltd and Deborah E. Lipstadt S 9:5 and 9: 8-17, 13:100-
105. The judgment in its entirety is available at http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/i/irving-
david/judgment-00-00.html (accessed 4 June 2018).

18
Tab L) On page 3 of both the Fall 2016 and Summer 2017 issues, an image of a
young boy pointing to an emperor wearing no clothes (comparing Justin Trudeau to
the fatuous emperor in the famous story by Hans Christian Andersen) sports a Nazi
armband. (Tab M) In the December 2015 issue (p 3) Sears solicits columns from
Jewish authors so long as they do not insult Christ, Hitler, or U.S. Libertarian
politician Ron Paul. In the Fall 2016 issue, Sears declares his intent to found an
“Adolph Hitler fan club.” (p 17) The Winter 2017 issue praises Donald Trump as
both a divinely-appointed prophet and the incarnation of Adolf Hitler. (pp 6, 8)

YWN mimics Nazi iconography in ways that are all the more telling for not being
explicit. The membership card for the New Constitution Party, which first appears
on the inside cover of the April 2015 issue, is nearly identical to a 1934 Hitler Youth
recruitment poster drawn by the Nazi artist Ludwig Hohlwein. (Tab N) James Sears’
personal identification with Hitler is apparent from an image on page 15 of the April
2015 issue of Sears on horseback and wearing medieval armor. The drawing is
identical to Hubert Lanzinger’s 1935 poster of Hitler dressed as a medieval knight.
In the 2015 YWN version, Sears’ head has been photoshopped in place of Hitler’s,
and the Nazi flag has been replaced by that of the NCP. (Tab O)

Sears’ associates himself with Hitler to the point of grafting his own head in place of
that of the Führer. This act logically connects Sears with Hitler’s feelings about the
Jews, because Jews were central to Hitler’s world-view, and he regarded Jews with
the utmost loathing. As Hitler said in the German parliament on January 30, 1939:
“If the international Finance-Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in
plunging the peoples of the earth once again into a world war, the result will not be
the Bolshevization of earth, and thus a Jewish victory, but the annihilation of the
Jewish race in Europe.”21 The genocide was directed by men at the very top of the
Nazi leadership, such as SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, director
of the Reich Main Security Office, with whom Hitler worked closely. In his final
political act before committing suicide on 29 April 1945, Hitler wrote a testament
heaping blame for the war and the German defeat on the Jews. His final words
before shooting himself were “[a]bove all I charge the leadership of the nation and
their subjects with the meticulous observance of the race laws and to the merciless
resistance to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.22”

The extremist ideology that suffuses YWN manifests itself in ways whose connection
with antisemitism is sometimes indirect yet present nonetheless. On Page 11 of the
April 2015 issue, YWN presents Hitler as an environmentalist, a vegetarian, and a
lover of animals. There is nothing inherently political about any of these qualities,
and in our own day environmentalism is often associated with the left, but a strong

21The audio of the broadcast speech and an accompanying transcript may be found at a web site
maintained by the United States Holocaust Memoria Museum:
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_fi.php?ModuleId=10005175&MediaId=3108 (accessed 31
May 2018).

22 Cited in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2001), 823.

19
connection between the far right and environmentalism dates back to the early
twentieth century. In Germany, the so-called Life Reform Movement combined
vegetarianism, environmentalism, communalism, and antisemitism. The common
bond between them was hatred for the Jew as allegedly responsible for the
destructive qualities of modern urban, industrial, and capitalist society. Nazi
ideology maintained this attachment to preserving the environment. It was
precisely the commitment to saving the planet from lethal, polluting forces that
drove Hitler and his lieutenants to engineer the genocide of the Jews, who were
perceived as noxious vermin.23

YWN’s frequent attacks against feminists as well as Jews are in keeping with
Nazism’s program to restore both a Christian-Aryan social order and a patriarchal
and heterosexual gender order. Many supporters of Nazism viewed women in the
Weimar Republic as having exceeded their natural capacities and abandoned their
social obligations to be mothers, homemakers, and helpmates to their husbands.
Homosexuality amongst Aryans was seen as an abomination that would lead to
race-suicide, abetted by non-Aryan homosexuals tempting Aryans into perversion.
The connection between misogyny, homophobia, and antisemitism lay not only in
the fear that Jews, feminists, and homosexuals were leading Germany to disaster.
Nazi propaganda also claimed that Jewish males lacked manly strength and courage
and that they compensated for this lack with cunning, devious, and stereotypically
“female” behaviour.24 There are intriguing parallels between this sexual anxiety
about unmanly men and YWN’s frequent barbs against “metrosexuals,” that is,
urbane men who shun aggressive masculinity. (As the oft-advertised book burning
promised, “handsome heterosexual NCP men will be on hand – no metrosexuals
allowed!” [Tab J]) American neo-Nazi writings can also combine antisemitism and
antifeminism.25 I am not claiming that antisemitism and misogyny are causally
linked, but rather that they frequently accompany each other because both are
means of expressing anxiety about perceived threats to social status, and a common

23See Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Marc Cioc, and Thomas Zeller eds, How Green Were the Nazis?:
Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Miami, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005);
Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Penguin Random
House 2015).

Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St.
24

Martin’s Press, 1987); Dagmar Herzog, ed., Sexuality and German Fascism (London: Berghahn, 2004).

25 According to a report on Andrew Anglin by the Anti-Defamation League, “From his many posts on
the subject, it is clear that Anglin is every bit as misogynistic as he is racist and anti-Semitic,
expressing a deep contempt for women, even the movement’s precious white women, at every turn.”
https://www.adl.org/blog/white-supremacists-feud-over-the-racist-gender-
gap?_ga=2.94453916.1463053364.1528316489-1987495757.1528316489, 26 April 2016 (accessed
6 June 2018).

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response to anxiety is a feeling of resentment or hatred against the alleged source of
that threat.26

VII Conclusion

In this report I have demonstrated linkages between YWN and a long historical
legacy of antisemitic writings. YWN’s depictions of Jews are consonant with
antisemitism as set out in the IHRA’s definition with which I began this report. YWN
makes “mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about
Jews as such or the power of Jews as a collective.” It preaches numerous myths
“about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy,
government or other societal institutions.” YWN presents the state of Israel as a
point of origin of or prime beneficiary of these conspiracies. In its writings on
politically-motivated persecutions in the former Soviet Union’s security services,
YWN “accuses Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined
wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts
committed by non-Jews.” YWN explicitly denies “the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g.
gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of
National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II
(the Holocaust).” Moreover, it “accuses the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of
inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust. In its depictions of Jews, YWN resembles a
variety of North American neo-Nazi publications that, since the 1970s, have
preached antisemitism as a prominent component of a fearful, hateful, and
conspiratorial world-view.

26On antisemitism as an expression of desire to restore status hierarchy, see Roger Petersen,
Understanding Ethnic Violence: Feat, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Part I passim. and Part II, Chap 6.

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