End the Siege on Canadian Jews Now!

"The most sacred duty of any government is to provide for the security of its citizens. No government could let these obscenities go unpunished and retain t he trust of its people."

"Hamas knew full well the reaction its murderous rampage against innocents would provoke. They knew and didn't care. Indeed, it is the reaction they sought. They chose to put the lives of the two million people of Gaza they claim to defend in mortal danger in a deliberate, nihilistic attempt to set the Middle East on fire."

"Why would they do this? It was not to increase the likelihood of a Palestinian State. It was not to improve the lives of the people of Gaza. So, why? Because these are terrorists in the purest sense of the word, for whom the senseless violent act satisfies the strategic objective, killing Jews."

"Hamas knew something else. They knew they could count on a legion of apologists who, while decrying attacks on Jews here at home, are prepared to accept attacks on Jews in Israel as deserved."

Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators, including a large crowd at Parliament Hill in Ottawa. (Rebecca Kwan/Radio-Canada)

 

At Concordia University a table draped with an Israeli flag and where photos of Israeli hostages were placed resulted in anti-Israel protesters screaming, uttering threats and resorting to physical violence. Yanise Arab, a humanities professor at University of Montreal whose specialty is "dominance and resistance in the Arab world", hurled an insult at one of the Jewish women manning the table: "Go back to Poland, sharmouta!" he shouted. (In Arabic 'sharmouta' is the word for 'whore').

 

A woman screaming obscenities at Jewish students went viral with 2.4 million views because she shouted 'kike' at a Jewish woman. The woman was later identified as a 29-year-old using they/them pronouns. These incidents have been occurring all over Canada, 'activist' pro-Palestinians confronting Jewish students, threatening and abusing them, bringing the conflict between Israel and Hamas directly to Canada in virulent confrontations.

 

A day ago bullet holes were discovered in the doors of two Jewish schools in a suburb of Montreal, two days after an overnight firebombing of a Montreal synagogue and the nearby offices of Federation CJA, a Jewish community organization. The message is clear and clearly violently antisemitic. Canada's prime minister responded with "We condemn this antisemitic violence in the strongest possible terms. This hatred has no place here in Montreal, in Quebec or in Canada."

The October 7 terrorist attack on southern Israel when Hamas operatives broke down the protective border wall and streamed into towns and villages in the early morning hours mutilating infants, shooting at civilians, murdering families at breakfast in their homes, raping girls and women, and in that one day of horror slaughtering 1,400 people in Israel, most of them civilians. Another 240 children, women, teens and soldiers were taken hostage into Gaza. That was a direct invitation to Israel to respond.

The protests by those claiming to be pro-Palestinian and demonstrating just how virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel they are, have been loud and adamant that Israel was responsible for the carnage created by the sadism of the Hamas terrorists. And Palestinian Canadians and other Muslim groups in Canada are making ti clear that while they're championing Hamas for its 'victory' over Israel, they're holding Canadian Jews responsible for the plight of the Palestinians under the Israel Defense Forces onslaught to destroy Hamas.

That this can all be taking place in a liberal democracy is more than a trifle disconcerting to the Jews experiencing the verbal and at times physical attacks by Hamas defenders. Prime Minister Trudeau has made some boilerplate statements meant to convey how measured he is in his condemnation of these un-Canadian acts of intimidation by one group of Canadians against another. 

"[The rise in antisemitism Canada has witnessed in recent weeks is] terrifying. Molotov cocktails thrown at synagogues, horrific threats of violence targeting Jewish businesses, targeting Jewish day cares with hate. This needs to stop, this is not who we are as Canadians."

"[Also troubling is the] rise of Islamophobia we're seeing across the country."

If there have been incidents targeting Canada's Muslim population in Canada, they're difficult to determine, because none have been reported in the news. If one thing can be guaranteed, it is that Islamic antisemites love to portray themselves as victims, at the very time that they're victimizing Jews; they turn the issue inside out to claim they've been targeted by the "Zionist lobby" merely because they have vented their spleen at Israel's 'occupation' and the slopover has targeted Canadian Jews.

This prime minister is tolerant of unsupportable abuse against Jews whose vote has traditionally gone to the Liberals. But his eye is on the far larger Muslim-Canadian population whose vote Mr. Trudeau feels he cannot afford to offend and lose at the ballot box. So protesters who hold up signs recalling Nazi death camps can be overlooked. While no Jewish protests have taken place outside of mosques or Palestinian businesses, shouting mobs in front of synagogues and boycotts of Jewish businesses is just business as usual.

This prime minister was quick to infer that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli hospital, that it was "absolutely unacceptable", and against "international law", even when Israel argued it was not involved, yet this prime minister preferred to believe the lies promulgated by a terrorist group rather than that of a Democratic ally state. Even after Canada's Minister of Defense issued a statement categorically assigning responsibility to Hamas's allied terrorist group Islamic Jihad, no apology slipped out of Mr. Trudeau's hasty tongue.

"In Gaza, as elsewhere, international law must be upheld by all. This includes humanitarian law. Even wars have rules", says this prime minister, offering a lesson in humanitarian law to a country that practices it as matter of course through its unassailable system of equality and justice while coping with ceaseless violent attacks from its neighbours. "Israel has the right to defend itself, but the price of justice cannot be the continued suffering of all Palestinian civilians", the man intones, with no expectation that those who rule the West Bank and Gaza may be ultimately responsible for the suffering of the Palestinians.

Canada's Jewish community is itself under siege. Canadians of all ages are threatened, and the result has been uncertainty as Canadian Jews are left concerned with their safety in a country they have viewed as their home for hundreds of years. This is a prime minister who cast himself as a leader for whom human rights applied equally in a just society that was his goal to achieve. No one realized at the time that he meant specifically that the rights of 'feminists', the LGBTQ-2 community, Indigenous, Black and people-of-colour were his concerns; Jews need not apply.

Tomorrow, on Remembrance Day, a day dedicated to the solemn dedication of the memory of those who fought and died for our freedom, Palestinian Students for Justice have arranged for yet another massive protest. Israel and Jews will once again be their targets. The Second World War targeted Jews with genocide, the pro-Palestinian, proxy for pro-Hamas champions will call once again for the obliteration of Israel in justice to the Palestinians, and here in Canada, Canadian Jews will again be threatened. And as usual, their prime minister will do nothing about it.

"They [protesters] actually jumped on to my car. They were banging on my windows, they were laying on the hood of my car and they were trying to prevent me from moving. I’m sure I’m on many pictures now on the Gaza Strip or wherever."

"There was no security around to help and I felt very, very unsafe."

"I then went into my Manitoba meeting and (Winnipeg Conservative MP) Marty Morantz, who is of Jewish descent, had been walking there and of course he felt more unsafe than I had and later we heard at our meetings that there were probably a dozen members of the House that had also been under attack."

"And when they had asked PPS (Parliamentary Protective Service) over at the House why they weren’t being given any help the answer was, we don’t have enough staff. They seemed to have enough staff to stop all the hot tub parties and barbecues when we had some friendly protesters here and now they don’t have enough staff when many of us feel very unsafe."

Senator Don Plett, 10 November 2023