Article content

“Dirty Jew.”

It’s the Summer of 1986. The place: Caroline, Alta., just outside Red Deer.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or KINSELLA: PM branding Scheer a Nazi sympathizer to distract from Lavscam trivializes hate victims' suffering Back to video

The slur has been uttered by Terry Long, the “High Aryan Warrior Priest” of the Canadian branch of the Aryan Nations. I’m at the fenced gate leading to Long’s acreage. On either side of me are Meir Halevi and Irv Rubin — the Canadian and American leaders of the Jewish Defence League.

And Long has just called Rubin “a dirty Jew.” One of his followers, holding a rifle, laughs.

It’s a couple years later, Canada Day weekend 1988. I’m in Minden, Ont., at night, outside the rural property of John Beattie, one-time leader of the Canadian Nazi Party. A hundred or so neo-Nazi skinheads have gathered at Beattie’s property — for a cross burning.

As the cross is set alight, I can hear a hundred young voices shouting, their voices echoing through the woods: “Sieg heil! Sieg heil!”

Hail victory.

And now, it’s many years later. Things have gotten worse. A lunatic is in the White House, one whose very first promise was to bar Muslims from the United States. Far-right “populists” are seizing power all over. Racist and anti-Semitic crimes are surging, around the globe.