National Post Op-Ed Suggests Old Testament Vengeance to “Deal” With Avi Lewis
By Keith Porteous
Canadian Jewish News’ Yoni Goldstein’s September 29 National Post Op-Ed deserves damning criticism on journalistic and ethical grounds. He frames Avi Lewis’s dissent over Israel and Gaza through the biblical story of Korach, whose rebellion against Moses ends with Korach and his followers being swallowed by the earth and consumed by fire. Goldstein moves from that story to the contemporary claim that when a Jew becomes a “clear and present danger” to the Jewish community, others are “duty-bound to step in.”
Goldstein makes the leap from political disagreement to a vocabulary of communal danger, religious punishment, and violent intervention. His invocation of Mosar and Rodef, with a history that makes their application to a living political opponent particularly threatening, turns an argument about speech into something that should be read as legitimizing violence. Critics have specifically noted the historical resonance of those terms in the context of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Yoni Goldstein’s National Post Op-Ed is not merely an ugly attack on Avi Lewis, it is a deeply disturbing attempt to dress political intolerance in the language of biblical vengeance. By invoking ancient stories and concepts associated with religious punishment to describe how a “disloyal” Jew should be dealt with, Goldstein crosses from political polemic into something far more sinister, by the legitimizing of violence against a Jewish dissenter. The language is not merely offensive, as it is dangerous.
To recast political disagreement as “disloyalty,” summon ancient narratives of destruction, and then suggest that Jewish law provides a remedy for the dissenter is an extraordinarily reckless act. It substitutes intimidation for argument and communal policing for debate. Whatever one thinks of Avi Lewis’s politics, no public discourse should normalize the idea that a Jew who challenges prevailing orthodoxies has thereby placed himself beyond the protection of ordinary political disagreement.
In a secular country, “disloyal Jew” is not a category of political jurisprudence, and it’s not a licence for contemporary punishment. Lewis can be challenged and debated, but invoking Old Testament biblical destruction and a Jewish obligation to “stop” him crosses a profoundly different threshold. The National Post chose to publish that argument under the headline “Jewish Law Tells Us How To Deal With Avi Lewis”, a formulation that makes the question of what exactly “deal with” means, and impossible to ignore.
The irony is particularly stark, where a Jewish tradition famous for argument, disputation, and centuries of internal debate is being recruited here as an instrument for defining which Jew has become sufficiently “dangerous” to warrant coercive treatment. That is not an argument against Lewis, but an argument about whether dissenters should be treated as political opponents or as enemies of the Jewish community. Those are very different propositions, and a major newspaper should know the difference.
There is nothing courageous about dressing political intolerance in religious authority. To invoke stories of divine destruction and eliminating perceived enemies, and then applying that vocabulary to a living political opponent, is an appalling degradation of public discourse. It turns disagreement into disloyalty and dissent into a threat requiring violent intervention. Lewis is entitled to criticize Israel, Zionism, or Jewish institutions, and those things should not make him a target for religiously sanctified punishment.
The most disturbing feature of Goldstein’s argument is not its hostility toward Lewis but his conception of Jewish communal life, where conformity becomes loyalty, dissent becomes betrayal, and ancient stories of destruction become political ammunition. Invoking the imagery and concepts of religious punishment against a contemporary Jew crosses a line that should be unmistakable. Political opponents should be debated, not cast as enemies whose alleged disloyalty invokes an ancient duty to “deal with” them.
Yoni Goldstein’s National Post op-ed does not strengthen Jewish political life, it debases it, and should be condemned in the strongest possible terms, along with the National Post for publishing it.
