The National Post and Postmedia must be held accountable for threats against NDP leader

In late September, the National Post published an opinion piece penned by Yoni Goldstein titled “Jewish law tells us how to deal with Avi Lewis.”

In the article, Goldstein labeled Lewis a rodef, a term from traditional Jewish law referring to a person having the active intent to harm others. The label merits the extrajudicial killing of the rodef in order to protect the people they threaten.

Goldstein is using the same reasoning as the ultranationalist assassin of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for his participation in the 1993 peace process. Current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party directly contributed to the killing of Rabin with their language at the time.

Let us be clear. In this context, Goldstein’s piece is a call for violence against people challenging the powerful in our society and opposing genocide abroad.

Known as “Stochastic terrorism,” Goldstein’s language is driving violence towards politically marginalized group of people. It’s arguably one of the dangerous forms of dog whistles, done explicitly to use mass media to target and demonize groups of people, in this case, anti-zionist Jews who have a history as old as the Zionist movement itself.

Condemnations have largely been localized to commentary spaces and online discourse, with a notable exception such as Judy Rebick’s piece in The Breach. While a step in the right direction, the condemnations must be broadly applied and we must turn attention to the system that allows this atrocious threat to be employed.

Postmedia’s National Post’s opinion section regularly denies genocide. Its writers have not only denied the genocide in Gaza, but also the genocide of Indigenous peoples in this country, particularly what took place in residential schools.

Postmedia claims they do not impose editorial controls over individual outlets, but their hiring and firing of writers and editors have created the exact conditions that allowed this piece to be penned uncritically. Previous reporting has shown that the majority U.S.-owned Postmedia is increasingly pushing American-style fascism in their outlets, further inflaming this phenomenon.

There will always be people acting heinously like Goldstein, and criminal charges will not fix the problem of Postmedia’s massive reach (approximately 15 million unique readers) that allows for Goldstein’s hateful message to be spread. This permission structure combined with the corporate dominance that Postmedia enjoys creates the conditions for Goldstein to be protected from the overwhelming condemnation.

We cannot afford to ignore this call to violence in a free and democratic society. If it becomes permissible to call for the deaths of NDP and other left-wing figures, the permission structure will eventually expand to Liberal, Green, and Bloc Québécois representatives. This cannot be allowed to happen.

The question of permissibility is one of unconscious acceptance. Our political culture shifts through social acceptability. At one point, it was considered socially acceptable for unions to take much more militant actions such as the Winnipeg General Strike, but repeated public condemnations of such labour actions over several decades have changed our political culture to make such actions less socially unacceptable.

The shifting of the political culture can also happen when people with a voice and platform remain silent when figures like Goldstein blatantly step over our shared political red lines. In much simpler terms, how we speak, and act now determines acceptable behavior and speech in the future.

However, there is a clear New Brunswick context to this story. The company’s control over media in this province is overwhelming. The NB Media Co-op and CBC are some of the only major outliers to this corporate influence.

The silence from Postmedia-owned outlets after this call to violence against a national political leader is deeply worrying. With Postmedia’s massive viewership across over a hundred outlets, their collective silence in the wake of such a piece creates a narrative that such behavior is tolerable, despite being a call to violence.

This is even more concerning in the New Brunswick context where they maintain an even larger percentage of the market share of readership compared to the national level. Their outsized ability to steer the provincial discourse also allows them to be a gatekeeper of permissible political language in the future, opening the door for even more dangerous flirtations with political violence.

While the provincial government has very limited powers over antitrust action, it should be taking immediate actions to limit Postmedia’s power in our province, uplift competition to weaken their grip while demanding further action from the federal government.

An effective long-term solution would be converting Postmedia’s outlets into worker co-operatives owned by their staff and writers. Collective public power must be used to oppose this immense corporate influence because when the collective silence of an entity with such a large market dominance can harm all of society, it now falls under the public interest. When corporate power becomes overwhelming, public power must be mobilized to counter it.

The government should not control the media once the dust settles, however, there is a clear obligation to a democratic society that demands government intervention.

Showing solidarity with one another is the only way we can push back against this dangerous behavior. We must learn from our past and put our foot down now, before someone gets killed.

Alex Gagne is a socialist, anti-fascist organizer who has participated in various campaigns across the province for the past 14 years. They are the former Vice-President (language) of the New Brunswick NDP, former organizer for ACORN Canada and graduate of St. Thomas University.