Hamilton NS13 and How the Far Right Benefits Zionism

Hamilton NS13 shows how externalizing the far right benefits police power and Zionist interests by framing fascism as aberrant while disciplining protest.

On February 22, 2026, roughly nineteen members of Nationalist-13 gathered outside Hamilton City Hall dressed in black, faces masked, and performed a Nazi salute. They held a banner that read: “No mercy for pedo scum.”

CBC Hamilton reported it. Mayor Andrea Horwath condemned it. The article cited the Canadian Anti-Hate Network for classification context. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network was co-founded by Bernie Farber, who — before he helped build that organization — spent three decades as a registered federal lobbyist pushing Parliament to expand Canada’s hate crime architecture, and who publicly equated a protest outside an Israeli settler-colonial NGO with antisemitism.

That chain of connections is not incidental to understanding what happened in Hamilton on February 22. It is the story.

The Banner Isn’t an Accident

Start with what NS13 actually did and why it works. The “no mercy for pedo scum” banner isn’t a distraction from the group’s white supremacist politics — it is a recruitment mechanism.

Several researchers quoted in the CBC report say so explicitly.

McMaster associate professor Ameil Joseph described it as a way to “garner public support while eliciting an emotional response.” Hamilton Anti-Racism Support Centre executive director Lyndon George called it “a provocative, emotionally charged narrative… which can be weaponized to deepen division and erode trust.”

This is the entry point tactic. You lead with something no one can publicly oppose — protecting children — and you attach it to your actual agenda, which is ethno-nationalist street organizing and the acceleration of institutional collapse.

The banner does two things at once: it recruits people whose political outrage is unformed but emotionally available, and it generates mainstream press coverage that normalizes the group’s visible presence.

The goal is not to actually prosecute pedophiles. The goal is to appear on the front page of CBC Hamilton while performing a Nazi salute — and to make those two things seem, for a moment, compatible.

NS13 has been escalating this public presence deliberately. According to CBC’s months-long visual investigation with The Fifth Estate, the group has moved steadily from private gym training into anti-immigration protests in Hamilton, London, and Toronto, holding banners calling for “mass deportations” and training with networks linked to designated terrorist organizations like Atomwaffen Division and the Canadian Proud Boys.

They are not an isolated collection of angry young men. They are a locally rooted node in a global network with documented ideological commitments to race war.

The question the CBC article doesn’t get to is: what conditions produce them, and what does the institutional response actually accomplish?

The Man Who Built the Pipe

To understand the anti-hate apparatus cited in the CBC story, you need to understand Bernie Farber.

Farber spent nearly thirty years at the Canadian Jewish Congress, becoming its CEO in 2005. During that time, he was a registered federal lobbyist — registration number 775794-351 — lobbying Parliament on behalf of the CJC for specific legislative outcomes: amendments to the Criminal Code to expand hate crime coverage, amendments to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act on antisemitism, and continued state authority to revoke citizenship in cases involving “extreme promotion of hate.”

He is also listed in lobbying records as supporting what would eventually become Canada’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.

That adoption happened in 2019, under sustained advocacy from CIJA — the pro-Israel lobby group that absorbed the CJC when it dissolved in 2011 — and has since been promoted by CIJA for use in training attorneys general, prosecutors, and police.

In 2018, Bernie Farber co-founded the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and served as its chair until October 2023, stepping down quietly in September, just weeks before October 7.

The Canadian Jewish News documented that CAHN was “infamously silent” in the weeks following October 7th, and that Farber’s departure was tied to that tension.

He remains listed on CAHN’s masthead as Founding Chair Emeritus — an honorary position that keeps a founder’s name and credibility attached to an organization after they step back from active governance.

The Regavim Tweet and What It Shows

Farber’s political formation is not a matter of inference. It is documented.

As CAHN chair, Farber publicly described a protest outside an event by Regavim — an Israeli organization that advocates for demolishing Palestinian homes in the West Bank, widely characterized by international law scholars as a settler-colonial project — as “an antisemitic act no matter how it is defined.”

That sentence is doing a lot of work: it positions opposition to a settler-eviction organization as equivalent to anti-Jewish hatred, and it does so categorically, with no qualifiers.

More than 500 people emailed CAHN’s board to demand he retract it. He eventually deleted the tweet without apologizing.

CAHN’s executive director Evan Balgord distanced the organization from Farber’s history while defending him personally, saying “his views have changed quite a lot.”

In a 2020 public debate, Farber co-argued in favour of applying the IHRA definition of antisemitism in Canadian institutions alongside CIJA Vice-President Richard Marceau — the same IHRA framework that 56 scholars of antisemitism and Jewish history have called “highly problematic and controversial” because it includes, in its illustrative examples, language that classifies criticism of Israeli state policy as potentially antisemitic.

Canada’s own IHRA Handbook, published in 2024, lists as an example of antisemitism a social media post that reads: “You can’t be anti-racist and Zionist. Zionism is a racist & settler-colonial project to ethnically cleanse Palestine of Palestinians, including by genocide.”

Independent Jewish Voices Canada, in their response to that handbook, stated plainly that the adoption of IHRA “is itself antisemitic, because it conflates critique of Israel with racism toward Jews as a whole, and promotes anti-Palestinian racism.”

The man who lobbied for expanded hate speech architecture, who co-founded CAHN, who argued for IHRA adoption in Canadian institutions, stepped down from CAHN’s chair five weeks after October 7 — when his organization would not condemn the Hamas attacks in terms he found sufficient, and when the tension between CAHN’s anti-fascist positioning and Farber’s Zionist commitments became impossible to manage publicly.

He then remains on the masthead as Founding Chair Emeritus. And when CBC needs an authoritative organization to classify NS13, the citation goes to CAHN.

The Classification Chain and What It Actually Does

Here is the mechanism, stated plainly:

Farber’s three decades of lobbying produced or contributed to expanded hate crime legislation, IHRA adoption into federal policy, and its rollout into training for police and prosecutors.

CIJA and allied organizations lobbied — successfully — for that definitional framework to be cited specifically in law enforcement training.

The framework classifies anti-Zionism as antisemitism in certain formulations.

The organization that Farber founded and chaired is the one that Canadian media, including CBC, cite as the authoritative source for classifying far-right groups in Canada.

The classification system thus moves on two tracks simultaneously. On one track: NS13 gathers at city hall, CBC reports it, CAHN classifies it, the mayor condemns, the cycle repeats.

On the other track: Palestine solidarity organizing is classified using the same IHRA-derived framework that CAHN’s founding chair lobbied into federal policy, and that framework has been used — documented in university disciplinary proceedings, grant denials, permit refusals, and campus bans — to position anti-Zionist speech as analogous to hate speech.

You don’t have to assert that these tracks were deliberately designed to converge. You only have to follow the logic of the institutional architecture that was built.

The specific operation of that definitional infrastructure in Canadian media and political discourse — how the IHRA definition and antisemitism framing have been deployed to suppress material critique of Israeli state policy — is examined in the analysis of the politics of perception management on anti-Semitism.

What is described here is an apparatus that expands police power under the pretext of combating far-right extremism, while simultaneously redefining Palestinian solidarity as a variant of that extremism. The outcome is predictable: the expanded powers are not directed at fascists, but at dissidents.

The concrete Canadian example of that flow — Palestine solidarity organizing criminalized through the same apparatus that claims to monitor fascism — is documented in the report on Yves Engler’s arrest over criticism of Israel’s genocide.

This is precisely what occurred post-October 7. Across Canadian campuses, Palestine solidarity organizers faced complaints, investigations, and suspensions invoking antisemitism frameworks.

Hamilton police, who told CBC they were monitoring NS13 in coordination with provincial and federal partners, have not charged the group with anything. NS13 has been publicly geolocated, had members identified by name, been the subject of a multi-month Fifth Estate investigation, and continues to train and demonstrate openly.

The Far Right as a Managed Externality

This is where the externalization function becomes visible. By producing NS13 as a visible, legible, classifiable threat — masked Nazis performing salutes in front of city hall.

In this instance, the apparatus achieves something valuable. It demonstrates institutional vigilance. It generates funding cycles. It produces the moral clarity that positions liberal governance as the bulwark against fascism.

What it cannot do — what it is structurally prevented from doing — is address the conditions that fill NS13’s recruitment pipeline. McMaster politics researcher Chris Erl said it directly in the original CBC active clubs investigation: Hamilton needs “a program to address the reason why people join white nationalist groups, to address issues like economic insecurity.” That sentence appeared in the article. It was not the article’s frame.

The frame was monitoring. The frame was classification. The frame was whether Hamilton police and city council were doing enough to surveil and condemn. The implicit resolution the article offers is better institutional response — more reporting, more CAHN engagement, more mayoral condemnation. None of that touches the deindustrialization, housing crisis, and institutional collapse that produces twenty-year-old men looking for belonging, purpose, and an enemy to name.

An apparatus that cannot address the structural causes of fascism but can maintain the visibility of fascism is not fighting fascism. It is managing it. The managed visibility justifies the budget. The budget funds the classification system. The classification system extends outward. And the people it extends toward are not the ones performing Nazi salutes in front of city hall.

The Informant Question

It would be irresponsible to assert without evidence that NS13 members are police informants or undercovers. That evidence is not public.

What is public is the structural pattern. Groups that are known to police, photographed in their training locations, named in federal monitoring partnerships, geolocated by journalists, and whose prominent members have been publicly identified — and who continue to operate openly, unimpeded, for years — fit a profile that has, in documented American counterterrorism cases, been associated with informant penetration and managed threat production.

Trevor Aaronson documented in The Terror Factory (2013) that the FBI built a network of more than 15,000 post-9/11 informants — many of them operating in communities already under surveillance, not to disrupt organizing, but to maintain prosecutable threat visibility.

RCMP uses analogous methodology in Canada. The question of why NS13 — geolocated, photographed, investigated, named — has not faced charges is one worth asking.

One answer is that Canada’s hate speech and criminal law provisions are genuinely difficult to apply to ideological affiliation alone. Another answer, not incompatible with the first, is that an ongoing visible fascist threat is more institutionally useful than a dissolved one.

The documented Canadian precedent for that methodology — police using undercover infiltration and agent provocateurs to manage the visibility of political organizing rather than disrupt it — is examined in the analysis of Toronto G20 policing, spectacle, and power.

The banner said “no mercy for pedo scum.” The story said the experts are watching. Neither sentence explains why young men from Hamilton are marching in masks — or why the organization cited to explain them was built by a registered federal lobbyist who called a protest outside a settler-eviction organization antisemitic.

That explanation requires following the chain. It does not end at NS13’s city hall steps.

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