Since "Israel" began its genocidal onslaught on Gaza over 16 months ago, killing close to 63,000 Palestinians and its relentless bombing campaigns having transformed the once vibrant Strip into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, weaponising antisemitism in order to attack and silence Palestine advocacy has reached unprecedented levels in the West.

Fuelled by the controversial IHRA working definition of antisemitism which conflates criticism of "Israel" with Jew-hatred, "Israel" and its apologists direct baseless accusations of antisemitic bigotry at anyone who dares to call out its violent system of settler colonial oppression in Palestine.

A look at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s notorious top ten list of antisemitic incidents in 2024 reveals just how ludicrous and dangerous these defamatory allegations are. Last year’s ranking of the world’s leading “antisemites” includes everyone and everything from climate justice icon Greta Thunberg to Amnesty International, the country of Ireland to the UN.

In Canada, former human rights commissioner Birju Dattani was forced to resign a day before he was set to begin his role in August 2024 following what he calls a “strategic, deliberate and malicious” campaign against him led by Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman, right-wing media personality Ezra Levant and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a Zionist lobby group.

Their beef with Dattani? His proximity to Palestine advocacy, for which he is accused of being an antisemite, an “Islamic extremist” (Levant) and a supporter of terrorism. “Another antisemite gets promoted by Trudeau. Birju Dattani, known for perpetuating hate toward Jews, has been appointed chief of the Canadian Human Rights Commission,” wrote Lantsman in a June 25, 2024, Instagram post, just to give a taste of what kind of baseless allegations he has been the target of.

Dattani, the first Muslim to be called to head the commission, has now filed defamation lawsuits against the three who, according to a media advisory released by his lawyers, continued their “vicious online attacks” even after an independent investigation launched at the behest of Justice Minister Arif Virani had cleared his name.

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Lantsman and the others have based their accusations against Dattani on factors such as his partaking in Palestine solidarity protests, a 2014 social media post in which he shared an article, entitled “Palestinians are Warsaw Ghetto Prisoners of Today” and his participation in a 2015 panel which included a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a group which opposes the existence of "Israel" and which the outgoing Trudeau government is considering listing as a terrorist entity. At the time, Dattani said he was unaware that someone from the group would be part of the panel.

The fact that Dattani, according to CIJA, “lectured during ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ at British universities about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement”, is also being used to falsely portray him as an antisemite.

These attacks against someone whom one of the lawsuits refers to as a “highly regarded, decorated and acclaimed” human rights professional, are emblematic of the colonial discourse that surrounds the issue of "Israel"/Palestine in the West, one that wilfully allows comparisons between "Israel’s" horrific genocide in Gaza and the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, most prominently made by Jewish journalist Masha Gessen in a December 2023 New Yorker essay and most recently by Burmese anti-genocide activist and scholar Maung Zarni in an op-ed for TRT World, entitled “80 years after Auschwitz: Milk the Holocaust but ignore Israel’s genocide”, to be discredited as antisemitic.

The delegitimisation of calls to boycott "Israel", widely recognised by Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organisations as a political entity that practices apartheid, follows the same weaponisation-of-antisemitism logic: In 2016, Canada’s parliament approved a motion condemning the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as “a form of discrimination” that is “anti-Israel”, conflating its non-violent actions against the Israeli occupation with anti-Jewish boycotts throughout history.

Also, one does not have to be a “controversial Islamic activist group”, as CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster, describes Hizb-ut-Tahrir which is banned in several countries, to question the existence of the "State of Israel". Any human rights discourse worth its salt should problematise a Euro-Western settler colony founded on the racist ideology of Zionism and forced upon the geography of West Asia after the Shoah by imperial powers, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 in what is known as the Nakba, with cataclysmic repercussions for Palestine and the broader region to this day.

By pursuing accountability for his accusers, Dattani, who is now a Senior Fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Free Expression, is not only defending himself as someone who has been harmed by a smear campaign that, in his words, “has caused serious and potentially irreparable damage” to his reputation and impacted his mental and physical health.

He is also pushing back against the hegemonic narrative in the service of "Israel" which wants us to believe that condemning the systematic injustices perpetrated against the Palestinians in the name of Zionism and supporting their national liberation, a cause that prominent political activist Angela Davis has described as “a moral litmus test for the world”, is somehow antisemitic.

May the proverbial wheels of justice turn in Dattani’s favour.