Features
“The Cure for Hate” – how a former neo-Nazi Skinhead turned his life around
By BERNIE BELLAN On Sunday, November 19, the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, in cooperation with the Jewish Federation, Westwood Collegiate, and an organization called “peace days,” screened a documentary film titled “The Cure for Hate – Bearing Witness to Auschwitz.” The film documents a visit made to Auschwitz by former neo-Nazi Skinhead Tony McAleer, during which he confronts his own violent past and discusses the long and complicated journey he has taken through his life
(As an aside, we also had a story in our January 19, 2022 issue, written by Jon Van Der Veen, in which Jon wrote about an interview he conducted with McAleer when Jon was a student in Atlantic Canada. You can find that story on our website, jewishpostandnews.ca..)
Following the screening of the film Tony McAleer was joined on stage at Westwood Collegiate by Westwood History teacher Kelly Hiebert to discuss the film. Also participating in the discussion was the film’s director, Peter Hutchison, who joined in via Zoom.
Interestingly, this was the second Sunday in a row that Westwood Collegiate, in cooperation with the Jewish Heritage Centre and the Jewish Federation – with particular thanks to Kelly Hiebert, served as the venue for the showing of a film and discussion afterward directly related to the subject of antisemitism. The November 12 event revolved around the screening of “Reckonings,” about which we wrote in our November 22 issue. (If you missed seeing that story you can also find it on our website
“The Cure for Hate” follows McAleer on a tour of Auschwitz, where he is accompanied by a Jewish Polish tour guide.
Here is a summary of the film’s storyline: “In the Jewish tradition, tshuvah means ‘return’, and describes the return to God and our fellow human beings that is made possible through repentance for our wrongs. Tony McAleer is a former Skinhead and Holocaust denier who went on to become a founding member of the anti-hate activist group Life After Hate. Profoundly aware and deeply ashamed of the lineage of hate he’d once promoted, Tony had long-contemplated traveling to Auschwitz in the spirit of tshuvah – to bear witness to the inconceivable ravages of the Holocaust, and deepen his personal work against the rise of extremist politics. This project documents his profoundly personal journey of atonement to Auschwitz/Birkenau – exploring the conditions that allowed for the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe; shedding a unique light upon how men get into, and out of, violent extremist groups; and serving as a cautionary tale for our time that underscores the dangers in allowing hate to be left unchecked.”
The film is fairly long – 74 minutes, and it is somewhat repetitious, as McAleer reiterates the shame he feels for his past over and over again, but it does offer some profound insights into what motivates many young men to be drawn to a violent neo-Nazi lifestyle.
At the beginning of the film, McAleer says he has often been asked: “How did you lose your humanity?”
He responds: “I didn’t lose it. I just kept it down until there was nothing left.”
As he begins his tour of Auschwitz, walking through the gate under the infamous sign that says, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work will make you free), McAleer notes that when he used to get together with his Skinhead friends they would joke that when they’re done with the Jews the sign would read “Nothing will make you free.”
The film follows a pattern of McAleer walking along with the guide (who is often difficult to understand because of her heavy Polish accent), discussing his life and what led him to have an epiphany moment when he realized that the life he had been living was so wrong.
He observes at one point that “no one becomes a Nazi overnight. It’s a slow progression.”
As Jon Van Der Veen describes in his interview with McAleer, McAleer came from an affluent Vancouver family. According to Jon’s article, and something that is also mentioned in the film – although not to the extent it’s discussed in Jon’s interview, it was McAleer’s discovering that his father was having an affair that shattered his life and led him to descending into a downward spiral that culminated in his becoming a full-blown Neo-Nazi.
At one point, McAleer, who engages in quite a bit of introspection throughout the film, repeats something that was said to him by a psychiatrist who was treating McAleer: “All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self esteem.”
McAleer was influenced by a number of prominent Neo-Nazis, he says, whose names he recounts during the film, including; Richard Butter (who McAleer describes as the “spiritual leader” of the Aryan Nations, and who led the infamous 1978 march through a heavily Jewish neighbourhood in Skokie, Illinois which had a very high proportion of Holocaust survivors living there); Tom Metzger, of the White Aryan Resistance, and someone by the name of Lewis Beeton (although I may not have written that name down correctly since I could find no reference to anyone by that name on the internet).
Something that McAleer says during the film – and which is even more chilling than his description of his own long relationship with neo-Nazi ideology, is how so many neo-Nazi groups have been using the tactic of “mainstreaming,” whereby they educate their members to drop the appearance that is often associated with such groups, including uniform dress, scary tattoos and other such paraphernalia, and blend in with the “mainstream.”
Further, according to McAleer many neo-Nazis have been infiltrating police forces and armies in both Canada and the U.S. (Perhaps the most chilling story of such an infiltration came a few years ago when a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, Patrik Matthews, was unmasked as a member of a group known as “The Base,” thanks to the brilliant – and very brave investigative reporting of former Free Press reporter Ryan Thorpe.)
As the film progresses, McAleer describes the process through which he realized that his life had been a total waste. He acknowledges the contribution that his therapist, Charles Barron (who, incidentally, is Jewish), made to his coming to terms with what he had done with his life.
But, in treating him, McAleer says, Barron made him realize “This is what you did, it’s not who you are.”
The reason he had been attracted to neo-Nazi Skinhead ideology, McAleer observes, is out of a “search for longing and purpose.”
So, what turned McAleer around? There were two events that proved pivotal, he explains. One was the birth of a child. (He now has two, he noted during the discussion that followed the film, but he is no longer together with his children’s mother.)
The other event, he says in the film, “was receiving compassion from someone he didn’t expect it from.”
As well, he observes, “Allowing one to have compassion for oneself leads to compassion for others.”
Yet, in what comes as a dark warning toward the end of the film, McAleer states that “the inescapable truth is that white supremacist ideology, if left unchecked, always ends in violence.”
Following the film, McAleer and Peter Hutchison engaged in a discussion with Kelly Hiebert, followed by questions from the audience.
Kelly Hiebert asked McAleer whether there was “a transformative moment for you that led you to leave the movement?”
McAleer answered that “it was a process rather than a moment. For me it was the birth of my daughter. (His son was born 15 months later, he said.) Up until then I was a self-absorbed narcissist. I had been cut off from my emotional self.”
Someone in the audience asked Kelly Hiebert: “Why do you what you do?”
(Kelly Hiebert is a Governor General’s Award-winning educator who has made Holocaust education a key component of his teaching.)
Hiebert answered: “I do what I do to create a better world – for myself, my kids, and my students.”
Someone else asked Hiebert what he says to his students about what’s going on in Gaza?
He answered: “A lot of students are very confused. There’s too much information out there. I’m teaching them to develop a critical consciousness about what they’re consuming…to help them understand the difference between free speech and hate speech.”
Tony McAleer added: There’s confusion between identity and politics. It comes from understanding that it’s not the politics that’s wrong; it’s where I am that’s wrong.” But the identification with a certain brand of politics, he suggested, comes from “a thirst for community, a thirst for belonging.”
Peter Hutchison observed that the shift toward identifying with particular political beliefs “was never a defining characteristic when I was growing up…You end up getting ‘siloed’ in a lot of way. As Americans have become less identified with church, we’ve become much more strongly identified with ideology.”
And, as individuals become more immersed in particular ideologies, “it prevents us from seeing the humanity in one another,” he added.
The discussion turned to Holocaust denial. Peter Hutchison suggested that “if you can tear a hole in a little bit of data you can deny everything.” He went on to discuss the argument that there could never have been 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust – that it was Allied propaganda.
“It’s happening in real time,” Hutchison observed: “As information came in about a hospital (El Shifa – which was hit by a stray missile found to have been fired by Islamic Jihad) being bombed in Gaza, ”you can discount it or you can extend it to a much larger truth.”
Kelly Hiebert added: “People will believe the first thing they see.”
Someone asked McAleer: “What can you do to bring students together?”
McAleer answered: “Curiosity, courage, and compassion…What we try to teach young people is that it’s very hard to hate someone you meet.”
He cited as an example a student-led initiative that was put forward by students in an American high school – a program called “No one eats alone.”
The idea was to make sure that no one eating lunch would be left to sit by themselves. It was important to work with “students struggling at the margins,” he said.
In another school, students were asked to whom would they like to talk (among other students in their class) if they were “struggling.”
“We went to those students (the ones who were identified as one to whom the struggling students would like to be able to speak) and asked them if they would serve in that role.”
Hutchison noted that “it’s hard to teach ‘compassion.’ We teach ‘active listening’…how to be curious, how to wait your turn to speak…We also ask kids, ‘How does it feel to be hurt?’ “
Someone in the audience suggested that underlying a large part of the alienation that many young boys feel that, in turn, leads them to be attracted to neo-Nazi type groups, is wondering “How can I get girls to like me?”
McAleer responded that “We have to have better discussions about masculinity with young men…There’s a generation of young boys who feel alienated and there are groups who know how to pull them in.’
Peter Hutchison added: “Young men have heard the expression ‘toxic masculinity’ so often they don’t know what healthy masculinity is.”
And, while Belle Jarniewski made an observation about antisemitism sometime in the middle of the discussion, I thought it was particularly relevant to end this article with what she had said.
Belle explained that when a criminal offense occurs that has an antisemitic component to it, someone in the Crown Attorney’s office will often suggest that they ought “to bring in a Holocaust survivor for that offender to meet.”
“In truth,” Belle observed, “it would be much better if they were to meet someone like Tony.”
Features
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Features
Will the Democratic Socialists of America control the Democratic Party?
By HENRY SREBRNIK On June 23, radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates backed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won multiple Democratic Party primaries in New York City and elsewhere in the state. They also were victorious in other parts of the country.
The socialist victories in New York far surpassed anyone’s predictions. Who, three years ago, could have predicted that a Muslim anti-Zionist would be elected mayor of a city with 900,000 Jews and would lead insurgents to victories in that party’s primaries in 2026? Yet here we are.
Marxist Third Worldist ideology has moved out of the universities into the polling booths, after campus activism, divestment campaigns, and social media have reinforced an anti-Israeli framework for years. The DSA’s platform states it plainly: It pledges “support for Palestinian self-determination against Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.”
The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed “the Team”: Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander. The last two unseated incumbent Democratic congressmen. Mamdani has assembled a coalition in New York City that is capable of elevating like-minded candidates to office.
In the Seventh Congressional District, which straddles northern Brooklyn and southwestern Queens, an open primary to replace retiring progressive Rep. Nydia Velázquez saw State Assembly Member Claire Valdez’s’s defeat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. She was even further left than Mamdani himself. In the end, it was not even close: Valdez prevailed with 56.1 per cent of the vote to Reynoso’s 35.8 per cent.
In 2019, Valdez joined the DSA after seeing the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state senator Julia Salazar, both of whom were elected with the DSA’s help. Valdez emphasized her anti-Israel activism as a key part of her campaign. At events, her staff handed out signs that said “Free Palestine.” She launched her campaign alongside Mahmoud Khalil, a key anti-Israel leader at Columbia University that the Donald Trump administration has tried to deport.
Valdez referred to Israel’s war against Hamas as a “genocide” as early as October 13, 2023. She lambasted police for restraining anti-Israel mobs chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and waving Hezbollah flags outside a Brooklyn synagogue last June. “New Yorkers don’t just have the right to protest the sale of stolen Palestinian land — they have a responsibility to,” she declare. She has repeatedly criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She also boasted on social media of having “wiped my hand on the American flag.”
In the Thirteenth Congressional District, covering the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights and parts of the West Bronx, Darializa Avila Chevalier won a much more startling victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent Democratic Party power broker and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillat’s campaign was heavily backed by AIPAC. Chevalier defied expectations and won by gaining 49 per cent to Espaillat’s 46 per cent. She told the crowd at her watch party that she had fought against the “Democratic machine.” Espaillat lost despite the backing of Democratic leaders in Congress and the state, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council.
When Chevalier, draped in a keffiyeh, first announced her candidacy in November of last year, few outside her immediate circle knew her name. But her message was clear: she presented herself as an organiser working to unite families torn apart by the immigration system and against “what we all know is a genocide in Palestine.”
Chevalier has publicly proclaimed her hatred for Israel, the United States, and “Western civilization” as a whole. She has called for the abolition of prisons, open borders and an end to deportations — even for people convicted of violent crimes. As a student at Columbia University, she was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2024, she returned to her alma mater to help organize an anti-Israel encampment that was ultimately disbanded by the police.
She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one,” it states.
The day after the October 7 attack, Chevalier attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. “I can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life,” when asked about her attendance at the rally. Chevalier has said that her conversion to Islam was inspired by the Israel-Hamas war. Mamdani celebrated her win, describing Chevalier as a person “of clarity, of conscience and of conviction.”
The war was also on the minds of voters in former Comptroller Brad Lander’s race against another AIPAC-funded incumbent, Rep. Dan Goldman, in New York’s Tenth District, covering lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. Both are Jewish, but Goldman has been a steadfast friend of Israel while Lander is the quintessential anti-Zionist and a key faction of his coalition was anti-Israel. It was a contest that laid bare the party’s divisions over the Israel-Gaza war.
At his son Marek’s bris, Lander gave a speech lambasting Israel. “We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history,” which was later reprinted in a 2003 book titled Wrestling with Zion. Lander enjoyed the night’s biggest victory, winning 65.8 per cent of the vote to Goldman’s 34 per cent. Many Democrats have suggested that Lander has proved useful to Mamdani and other leftists who have been accused of antisemitism for singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium.
In the run-up to Election Day, a chain of Brooklyn coffee shops called Poetica posted that it would have barred Goldman entry had they recognized him during a recent visit to their storefront. “We don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers,” Poetica declared. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
At the state level, seven of the eight candidates endorsed by the DSA for the New York State legislature also won their primary elections. One of them is Aber Kawas, a Queens-based community organizer. If she, as expected, wins in November, she will be the first Palestinian woman elected to state office in New York history.
“Were defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump?” asked Will Rahn, a senior editor and writer for The Free Press, rhetorically, in a June 26 column. “Of course not. They lost because they aren’t anti-Israel enough. ‘Free Palestine’ is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters.” No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.
For most of the postwar era, support for Israel was one of the least controversial positions in Democratic Party politics. That consensus has not merely weakened; it has collapsed. Once viewed as a righteous anti-colonial cause, Zionism has been reframed by radical thinkers as the ideology of a colonial oppressor of stateless Palestinians. Opposition to Israel is now the litmus test in Democratic Party politics. “There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” warned Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton University professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.
The DSA has now built an entire ecosystem that runs parallel to the official Democratic apparatus, equipped with their own consultant network, endorsing organizations, donors and even billionaires who back them.
A generation after Pat Buchanan was denounced as an antisemite by all proper liberals for saying things like “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” will the left now embrace him as a “premature antizionist”? Even satire can’t match this.
Think about it: Since October 7, Israel has done what every other country viciously attacked by implacable enemies throughout history has done: It has lashed back in a defensive war. This is a policy that any state that cared for the life of its citizens would have to adopt.
Yet Israel has become the “omnicause.” That’s why antisemitism and antizionism are two sides of the same coin: hatred of Jews. Jews around the world aren’t being attacked because of Israel. Israel is itself being condemned because it’s Jewish.
American Jews have been blindsided by this, as the French writer Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells us in a brilliant article, “Stand Up,” Tablet, July 6, 2026. “When anti-Jewish hostility arrives wrapped in the language of liberation, antiracism, decolonization, and human rights –when it emerges among allies, colleagues, students, professional peers, or other minority communities — the disorientation is deeper. It is inside the world in which one has built a life. It speaks in familiar accents. It borrows cherished values.”
In “A Profound Question Haunting Jews Today,” New York Times, July 6, 2026, Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, agrees. He writes that for half a century or more, American Jews could achieve, “through being successful, culturally Jewish, Zionist, liberal and not especially observant,” a status that elsewhere has persistently eluded them.
“This set of certainties has evaporated. Today, Israel is the pariah nation of the world, and ‘Zionist’ has become an epithet, something it’s unacceptable to be, at least in progressive circles,” where most Jews have usually found themselves.
So, are the Democrats going to become America’s anti-Israel party? And then what?
Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
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