Inside the ‘World Symposium Against Antizionism’: Where contempt for Muslims and leftist Jews took center stage

Describing the anti-Zionist Jew as an “execrable” insect with a parasite-hijacked brain, Gad Saad asked the large hall of hundreds to call out names of the most “degenerate wood crickets.” The crowd enthusiastically began to shout a list of Jews. “Bernie Sanders!” “Peter Beinart!”

Saad responded from the podium: “Beinart is a good one, I despise him. But no.” He paused. “Gabor Maté.”

Maté is a Hungarian-Canadian physician and author, internationally renowned for his work in trauma research and addiction. He also speaks out about the “brutal and illegal occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel.” Saad mocked Maté’s “empathetic” duplicity and called it a “stretch” to believe that he is a Holocaust survivor. This was a false perch from which to manipulate people, he alleged, because Maté was only six months old when he was removed from his family to escape the Nazi genocide. “If he is a Holocaust survivor, then I too am a Holocaust survivor, because in the 1940s I was swimming in my dad’s testicles as a spermatozoa.”

Saad then launched into his theory of “suicidal empathy,” which maligns empathy when it is based on anti-oppression frameworks. Referring to a debunked figure on Muslim sex trafficking in the UK, he asked, “How is it that it’s Jews that are to blame for Muhammad, Muhammad, and Muhammad gang-raping your daughter? And the answer is, ‘Who let them in?’ Jews. So, even when three Muhammads gang-rape your daughter, it’s Mordechai that’s to blame, of course.”

Lunch had still not been served, and the Jews were already compared to parasites, Holocaust trauma was disputed, the Islamic faith was maligned, and the left were labeled useful idiots. Welcome to the first-ever World Symposium Against Antizionism (WSAA). Held at a multi-use event space in Woodbridge, Ontario, on May 17, this reboot of the Zionist movement pivoted away from a focus on antisemitism towards anti-zionism as the main threat in the world to Jews.

Keynote speaker and digital entrepreneur, Ben Shapiro, blamed anti-Zionism not only for the sins of the left, but also for the rise of what James Lindsay (another panelist at the conference) calls the “woke right.” Shapiro stated that since 2016, “The right was becoming increasingly warm towards fringe, antisemitic voices in the name of being ‘anti-left.’” These splinter factions aimed to take over the entire party and hijack the right. This is why Trump has tried to throw Tucker Carlson and Candace Owen out of the movement, Shapiro declared.

But as Naomi Klein points out, it was Trump who lost control of the widely popular, independent pundits on the “Groyper” right. His eclipse in the party by this faction presents a truly dangerous alignment of anti-Jewish conspiracy theory that builds on the genocidal violence of the war on Gaza. This non-MAGA right is focused on a retrenchment of white, Christian values that de-link and deeply question the Judeo-Christian civilization narrative. It is the “great replacement” faction posing as anti-Zionists.

However, even given his antipathy for Nick Fuentes and his followers, most of Shapiro’s remarks were directed at the anti-Zionism of the left. This kind of anti-Zionism, he claimed, is the “stress test” for a much wider range of deplorable ideologies that focus on the “destruction of the West,” like opposing the nation-state, strong borders, private property, the gender binary, the free market, and individual liberty.

He argued that left-wing anti-Zionism is “evil” and “predicated on violence to achieve the ends it seeks.” Zionism, on the other hand, simply means the belief that “Israel ought not be destroyed.” If you’re wondering where this leaves Palestinians, he doesn’t care. He claimed the “bullshit Nakba” was a concept which originally meant the “failure to destroy the actual state of Israel.” Palestinians experienced a “false expulsion” from “Israeli-owned land.” Shapiro also received huge applause for stating that anti-Zionist Jews who oppose an ethnostate are not real Jews.

While dubbed a “symposium,” the energy in the room often felt more like a rally, with standing ovations, raucous laughter, and applause from the crowd. The symposium was organized by the far-right Jewish organization Tafsik. They formed after October 7 as a “wartime” response to Jew hatred, criticizing the legacy pro-Israel organizations for being too cozy with government and too broadly focused on a range of social issues to fight this battle effectively. They call themselves a “grassroots” alternative that is free to speak unfiltered. As an example of this gloves-off speech, Tafsik’s director, Amir Epstein, told a newspaper that an exhibit on Palestine launched at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights didn’t represent the views of Jews who “celebrate the Nakba.”

The WSAA event on May 17 was heavily secured, with police stationed outside the venue in Woodbridge, Ontario, and a Zionist vigilante security force called Magen Herut working the door and positioned throughout the venue. Outside the event space, for about an hour at the start of the day, about a dozen anti-zionist activists from the Jews Say No To Genocide coalition held a bagel lunch on the lawn. One woman held up a sign that said, “Anti-Zionism is Love.”

The alliance between Zionists and the far-right was evident throughout the day, often resting heavily on a shared platform of Islamophobia. On the “alternative media” panel, moderator and Zionist influencer Emily Austin noted that immigration was a problem for Zionism in America. “People leave their third-world countries to come to a phenomenal, functional first-world country that suffers from suicidal empathy, that allows them in en masse, and then they bring the values that destroyed their country into this one.”

Turning to Eve Barlow, a former music journalist who has transitioned to a full-time advocate for Israel, Austin asked, “Eve, is there any hope for the UK, for Canada, for these suicidal, empathetic countries that do not see the threat of radical Islam conquering their country from within? Is there hope?”

Barlow replied, “People are still afraid to talk about what’s really going on, which is [that] this creeping Islamism and anti-Zionism has been the Trojan horse.” She described a “dark energy” in the UK ascribed to the rising power and presence of Muslims.

Several theories were thrown around the panel on the sources of anti-Zionism and why it is growing. Austin alleged that it was a product of “boredom” and “privilege.” Barlow argued that people were “obsessed” and “addicted” to Jew hatred. Canadian podcaster Jesse Brown believed the pleasure of hatred is “fun” for people. “It is a daily operation where every day you have to find new fuel for your hate, and it has to be bigger and more extreme each day, which is why it gets stories like Nicholas Kristoff’s story,” Brown said, apparently refuting the New York Times article on the rape of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

Brown made no reference to the lives of Palestinians impacted by Israel’s mass killing in the Gaza Strip, or its destruction of villages throughout southern Lebanon, or its war on Iran. Instead, he lamented that Zionists are “losing” and being censored out of the media. “We’re tiny, and they are a global phenomenon, and we are right now losing.”

The virulent anti-Muslim fear and hatred was coupled with equal amounts of fear expressed towards Jews who challenge Zionism. Lawyers talked about their attempts to fuse Zionism and Judaism inseparably in the law, all the while insisting that Judaism be inseparable from a no-holds-barred defense of Israel, with seemingly no exception or limit to its actions.

For example, Mark Goldfeder, CEO and Director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, Inc. (NJAC), argued that immutable identity was a solid legal defense in cases alleging discrimination against Jews, since “Zionism is an integral part of our identity, changing it would be very dramatic, and it would be abhorrent for the government to try and do so.” Immutable identity is a protected category under the Civil Rights Code.

He noted two successful test cases. One involved charges against an activist from the group Code Pink for pulling an Israeli flag off a Jewish woman in November 2024. The District Circuit of the District of Columbia court found it to be an act of racial antisemitism.

The other case involved a protest outside the Adas Torah synagogue in Los Angeles in June 2024, for which they filed a lawsuit against the protesters under the FACE Act. The FACE Act is the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances. Using a clause in the Act that protects religious spaces, the NJAC argued that because the event featured real estate sales in the West Bank geared towards Americans making aliyah — a religious pilgrimage to Israel — the protesters could be prosecuted, since aliyah is a protected right under the First Amendment. Since then, the Department of Justice has formed their own FACE Act team to prosecute pro-Palestine protests.

But herein lies the crux. Zionists insist that Jews and Zionism cannot be prised apart, and yet they call it “antisemitism” when anyone holds Jews accountable for Israel’s actions. The left has been targeted, arrested, detained, and seen campus life decimated by these allegations. Now that the “woke right” has caught on and rejected this logic, the alliance of the right against the left will prove useless to Zionists. They have splintered towards MAGA, yet Israel and its supporters are increasingly isolated even there. Vice President Vance has warned, “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”

In the end, the World Symposium Against Antizionism showed that Israel’s right-wing supporters are not truly concerned with the mainstreaming of antisemitism in U.S. politics and around the world, but instead only see a threat in those working to disrupt Israel’s colonization of Palestine. As this leads to the emergence of dangerous new alliances, it’s clear that the target will be aimed squarely at Palestinians.

Shiri Pasternak
Shiri Pasternak is an Associate Professor of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is a member of the steering committee of the Jewish Faculty Network.