Canada's Contribution to Global Terror and Attacks on Israel

"It's dangerous for Israel, and it may also be dangerous for Canada."

"It's a wake-up call for the international communities that something is happening here. Within the international context, it's dangerous."

"The most important and prevalent feeling you'll encounter among any Israeli is that we want to have our hostages back. Everybody is looking for this situation to end. Israel wants peace. Israel wants to live in peace with its neighbours."

Iddo Moed, Israeli ambassador to Canada

"While we are relieved that no innocent lives were lost in this attack, we are deeply shocked that a Canadian citizen would travel to Israel and retraumatize the Netiv Ha'asara community, already devastated by the twenty lives stolen in Hamas' murderous rampage on October 7."

"This incident highlights the potential consequences of pervasive misinformation surrounding Israel's conflict with Hamas -- where Israel is demonized and held solely responsible, and where Hamas has been absolved of responsibility for the impact on Palestinian civilians of the war they started."

"When demonstrations glorify terrorists as martyrs and call for global intifada without condemnation from our political leaders, it sets the stage for tragedies like today's attack in the Israeli town of Netiv Ha'asara."

David Cooper, vice-president of government relations, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs

Security guards confront a charging attacker at the entrance to Netiv HaAsara, an Israeli community near Gaza. Photo by X.com

How could it be otherwise? A growing population of Muslims in Canada, encouraged by order of the government in preferential immigration and refugee intake, among whom there are invariably Islamists who percolate their version of Israel and Zionists as white colonial settlers with no business being in the Middle East, the cradle of Judaism, arguing that only the destruction of the Jewish state, and just coincidentally Jewish lives will do justice to the aspirations of Arab 'Palestinians' for a state of their own on traditional Judean geography.

Second generation Muslim-Canadians, long steeped in narratives of the evils that Jews bring to the world, in particular the Jewish scheme to exile Palestinians from what they claim is their sole territory, the map of Palestine dating back to the Roman era denoting the homeland of Jews, treated by Rome as an occupied provincial holding in their greater domination of the world during that era of Roman military and social might. Viral resentment at the United Nations' Partition Plan zeroed in on Israel as a threat to Palestinian Arabs whose leadership incited them to 'resist' the 'occupation'.

In Islamic centres, mosques, social gatherings, social media, an amplification of the traditional convention of Jew-blame and hatred has percolated to the top in the wake of the terrorist Hamas invasion of southern Israel on October 7 where mind-bogglingly gruesome sadistic savagery was  unloosed on unsuspecting Israelis and the military outposts on the border with Gaza. Outdoing even their grisly penchant for blood and slaughter, thousands of terrorists filmed themselves indulging in and celebrating a mass slaughter, rape, mutilations, abductions of innocent civilians.

Despite the horrors of inhumanity perpetrated by well-rehearsed operatives of Palestinian terrorist groups, dismayingly, the international community has been fairly receptive to Hamas supporters in their midst as citizens of Europe and North America claiming that their battle for sovereign status from under the repressive heel of a Jewish state engrossed in a mission of Palestinian genocide, championing and supporting terrorists as liberators. In Canada and elsewhere around the globe, Hamas sympathizers have roused the latent antisemitism in communities.

In Canada in particular where the reigning Liberal government of Justin Trudeau feels itself heavily dependent on the goodwill of Muslim voters as a bloc that responds to the Liberal message, the message is that there will be no repercussions for the verbal violence claiming the need for a 'final solution' to the Jewish question, for the liberation of Palestine, for a global intifada. Characterizing the Palestinian 'protests' roiling society as merely free speech in action, deliberately overlooking the calls to destroy Israel and kill Jews, the Trudeau government sees nothing amiss.

Predictably, the same organized Palestinian students who planned and carried out protests and university campus encampments with the aid of foreign funding and non-university Palestinian groups whose format of slander and abuse upset normalcy in the social order, seeing no action taken by any level of government, giving them free rein to do as they would in clearly unlawful and criminal acts of intimidation and violence, would feel free to escalate.

Leading someone like Canadian citizen Zachareah Adam Quraishi to up the ante by travelling to Israel for the express purpose of committing violent extreme acts of antisemitism in Israel. A tourist visa gained this man entry to the country where he undertook to rush guards outside a southern Israel town to knife them, shouting "free Palestine!" at Israeli security guards who met him on his own terms and shot him to death as he was attacking them.

The town was Netiv Ha'asara, a farming community, one of many devastated by the terrorist attack of October 7, where in Netiv Ha'asara, twenty of its residents were murdered. Despite Jewish Canadian groups appealing endlessly to the federal government to put an end to the violent rhetoric and escalating violence against Jews in Canada, there was no response from the federal government, itself content to allow the anti-Israel protests to continue and as they did, create predictable escalation.

"Canada has a history of having foreign fighters -- Canadian citizens go off to distant lands in the Middle East and commit egregious acts of violence."

"We were a country that garnered, and rightfully so, international attention during allied operations to counter ISIS, because of how many Canadians have gone off to join the caliphate."

"You have people calling for the erasure of the only Jewish state standing in front of crowds of thousands calling for the death of Zionists -- which is just a code word for Jews; you have decapitated mannequin heads of Bibi Netanyahu being kicked around like soccer balls in Toronto; you have synagogues being burned; you have Jewish day schools being shot at."

"When the overwhelming majority of this goes on without any repercussions, you allow these ideas to take root and become normalized."

Casey Babb, senior fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute