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To understand Trudeau’s purpose, you should consider together both what the Liberal leader said and the way he said it. He didn’t just defend the niqab. He defended the niqab by trivializing the Nazi Holocaust. Out of all the whole vast archive of human experience, Justin Trudeau reached for that one particular volume. Why?

The short answer is that the “key audience” Justin Trudeau wished to reach in his Toronto speech is an audience that seeks to appropriate Jewish history for their own political purposes. To champion the niqab as a symbol of liberty may collect some votes. To champion the niqab in a way that edits Jews out of history and substitutes others into their place — that is intended to collect many, many more.

We hear a lot these days about “the new Jews”: people who supposedly have replaced the Jews as the victims of persecution. But when you review the data on which religious groups are targeted for hate crimes, it turns out — to borrow a line from an old rock anthem — that when you meet the new Jews, they’re the same as the old Jews. And when you listen to the debate about Charlie Hebdo, about the massacre at the Parisian kosher market, about the attempted massacre at a free-speech gathering in Copenhagen, and the actual murder at the synagogue there — you realize that some of the people most eager to pose as victims are in reality the most merciless victimizers.

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Justin Trudeau himself is no kind of victimizer, of course. He’s a mild Canadian Liberal practicing a very familiar kind of Liberal politics: trying to win immigrant votes with a salute to the most radical elements of an immigrant community, a cheap gesture for a big payoff. The Toronto speech was promptly followed by a tweet opposing Israel Apartheid Week at McGill. As in the old joke about the teacher asked about the theory of evolution, Trudeau can do it either way.