Youth Lenient, Older Demographic Condemn Protest Violence: Poll

"Mask-wearing protest may serve to shield persons engaging in hate expression as seen in the recent case of Montrealer Mai Abdelhadi, who engaged in hate speech in front of the main campus of Concordia University."

"The survey indicates that Canadians do not regard hate expression as protected free speech. In that regard, it is important to determine whether Ms. Abdelhadi's vile utterances violate our country's anti-hate laws and, if so whether legislators should proceed accordingly."

"The poll serves as an important reminder that Canadians regard acts of vandalism as indefensible and that they cannot be justified as political gestures."

"Canadians also desire greater accountability on the part of persons engaging in protest that condones vandalism and/or hate speech."

Jack Jedwab, president, Association for Canadian Studies

Demonstrators fill Ste-Catherine St. during Friday’s protest. Photo: John Mahoney/Montreal Gazette

 

A new poll conducted for the Association for Canadian Studies by Leger found that close to three-quarters of Canadians (74 percent) reject as unacceptable property destruction during protests. Politically motivated violence and vandalism is rejected by an overwhelming majority of Canadians. The poll results represent a firm rebuke in response to the recent riots in Montreal when anti-Israel and anti-NATO social 'activists' smashed windows, torched cars and clashed violently with police. 

That most of the rioters also wore masks with the obvious intention of hiding their identities is another item that most Canadians are opposed to. A common practise for anti-Israel activists who frequently hold disruptive protests in Montreal, Toronto and other areas and cities across the country, since the terrorist attacks on Israel that occurred on October 7, 2023 by Hamas. Mask wearing finds only 23 percent of respondents saying that it is an acceptable practise.

When views expressed at these protests are 'overtly racist', a minority of 29 percent believe free speech should be protected. The individual mentioned, Abdelhadi, was a franchisee of a Second Cup cafe situated within Montreal's Jewish General Hospital who used a Nazi salute against pro-Israel demonstrators challenging their opposite numbers, pointedly chanting "The Final Solution is coming". The result of which was that the franchise within the hospital was speedily shut down by the cafe chain, sundering its contract with the franchisee.

Poll results found that support for violence during protests was highest with younger Canadians; a third of those between 18 and 24, and close to a quarter of 25 to 34-year-olds stating that such actions are justified to achieve political goals. Rates of agreement with vandalism were similarly observed when the results were segmented based on status of employment with over a quarter of students (26.4 percent) maintaining that destruction of public property meant "to send a political message is acceptable".

Poll responders in the  retirement category (87.1 percent) and self-employed individuals (75.6 percent) were most emphatically opposed to such demonstrations where destroying property occurred. As opposed to part-time workers finding such behaviour acceptable, at 19.3 percent. Politically motivated violence was rejected by Montrealers in particular, with 81 percent condemning it in any circumstances, in comparison with a response of 65 percent in Vancouver.

Riot police line the sidewalk on St-Laurent Blvd. Photo by John Mahoney /Montreal Gazette

Palestinian Purveyors of Hate

"Canada has turned its back on Israel. It really feels like a betrayal."

"Canada knows how Hamas has taken over UNRWA. Once [during the Conservative-led Stephen Harper government] Canada completely stopped the funding for UNRWA under a different government, because they understood what it is."

"They understand that Hamas is controlling a 2.5 million population in Gaza through UNRWA, supplying them services that are being paid for through the international community ... and through that control they're able to radicalize that population."

"[Canada's] not helping the Palestinians because aid isn't being bought with that money. It doesn't reach the Palestinian people. Hamas is taking half [of the aid] and selling it in the market, so it can pocket that money."

"They're turning schools and hospitals into military bases. They know that, yet [countries] still contribute and even top that with more money."

"That attempt of recognition of the Palestinian state, it was here in Parliament [House of Commons in the nation's capital, Ottawa] where they were trying to push it and trying to debate it -- it's absurd, this is rewarding terrorism."

"What will other terror organizations learn from that? Murder people, create the worst massacre the world has seen in recent history and then hide behind the civilian population? The international community will let you off the hook."

Canadian-born Sharren Haskel, member of Israeli Knesset

The encampments at Canadian campuses have followed months of protest marches, petitions, sit-ins and hunger strikes by pro-Palestinian activists since Israel's military response to the Oct. 7 attacks led by Hamas. (Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press)

 

Under its current government, headed by Justin Trudeau, Canada has undergone a multitude of changes, none of which has resulted in better government, or given Canadians a reason to be proud of their country. It is a nation undone as a nation, and deliberately so by a prime minister whose agenda runs counter to reason, justice and morality. In this particular instance, a country whose government has chosen to turn its back on a member-democracy that the government before this one supported wholeheartedly. When Justin Trudeau came into the position of control of the nation he described as 'post-national' he instantly turned around the preceding government's ethical, moral, political, diplomatic sureties.

 

We have become a nation divided on many issues, moving offside social mores, to natural resource extraction friction, from alienating West from East and North from South, and issues of social and criminal justice, of serving peoples' needs completely in collapse. Above all, a significant portion of Canadian ethnic identity has been fractionalized, endangered and isolated by actions taken by hostile factions within the population campaigning against Israel and by extension Jews, through loud, vulgar and slanderous antisemitism accompanied by violent criminal acts, with no remedial action by the Trudeau government in upholding the human rights of Canada's Jewish population.

 

In a speech to the Israeli Parliament in 2014, then-Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper called efforts to compare Israel to apartheid-era South Africa 'sickening' and '​​the face of the new antisemitism.' (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

Israel's pain and grief in the aftermath of the horrors of the terrorist attacks of October 7 in southern Israel have been set aside once the initial shock settled, as irrelevant to empathetic recognition in an atmosphere of volatile, threatening and violent verbal attacks against the existence of the State of Israel, alongside physical criminal acts of sabotage targeting Jewish-owned businesses, community centres, parochial schools, synagogues and Jewish-majority neighbourhoods, with scarcely a counteractive move by government.

 

The disruptive marches organized by Palestinians and their supporters echoing the situation of antisemitic activism taking place throughout Europe and the United States, supported by left-wing 'progressives', unions, environmental and LGBTQ-2 groups has been unprecedented and demeaning of the social values of the West. Knesset member Sharren Haskel, born in Canada, now a member of the Israeli parliament, decries what she has observed of the direction that Canada has taken at the United Nations, at Canadian universities whose campuses have been allowed to fall to the Hamas-supporting factions of Jew-haters without recourse to the law to uproot their divisive, destructive tactics.

 

University of British Columbia is among nine Canadian universities that have seen encampments erected in recent days. (Chuck Chiang/The Canadian Press)

 

Skyrocketing antisemitism has shocked and threatened the well-being of diaspora Jews everywhere in this unexpected tsunami of Jew-hate orchestrated by Islamist thugs who feed off slumbering antisemitism in society, bringing it to a crescendo of full-blown antipathy destabilizing law and order while nothing is done to ensure the security of Jews and their social and religious institutions from attack and demonization. In Canada, that blase obliviousness of the government's obligation of duty to all its citizens reflects pervasive antisemitism at the core of society.

 

The sadistic sexual depravity of Palestinian terrorists against Israeli children, girls and women, the wholesale slaughter of Israeli families, the terror inflicted upon infants and teens, women and the elderly, the murder of entire families burned beyond identification in their vehicles, in their homes, on the streets of the kibbutzim, the hundreds of young men and women killed at a music festival, the hostage-taking of girls and women, the elderly and infirm, of infants and children, fails to move the empathetic dismay and outrage of civilized countries beyond the initial acknowledgement of the atrocities.

 

They are now persuaded instead that Israel, in its internationally-recognized right of response to such malignancy, determined to destroy the terrorist ghouls who repeat at every opportunity their intention to repeat October 7 endlessly until Israel is destroyed and Jews are obliterated, is being bullied and threatened by its 'allies' in democracy, by the UN General Assembly, by the International Criminal Court, to cease and desist in its mission to protect itself and its people from another genocide. 

 

Reuters

 

Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government ceased its financial support of UNRWA in the knowledge that its functionality as a UN operation dedicated to the 'victimized' Palestinians' welfare in pursuit of 'right of return' to overwhelm and destroy Israel as a Jewish state and capture its ancestral territory for a state dedicated entirely to Palestinian nationhood; a decision overturned by Justin Trudeau. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency is a major employer of Palestinians in Gaza, many of whom are members of Hamas.

Proof was given to the world at large of UN schools built over underground Hamas bunkers with rocket launchers metres from UN refugee camps. The UNRWA Gaza headquarters hosted a Hamas data centre. UNRWA employees took part in the savagery meted out to Israelis on October 7. The tent fire that took place in Rafah following an Israeli airstrike meant to target two Hamas officials did not occur as a result of the precision small-impact bombs, but rather the ammunition depot installed close to the camp exploded, lit by the bombs that hit their targets, resulting in the deaths of dozens in the camp.

And in Canada, pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas protests organized by Palestinian student groups from the days following directly on the October 7 atrocities, have roiled the public square, shutting highways, closing access to public facilities, raiding shopping centres, blocking hospital entrances, setting up blockages at bridges leading to majority Jewish neighbourhoods, carrying posters reading "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free!", in the absence of Israel. Signs congratulating Hamas, flaunting the 'intefada', promising a 'final solution'. Jewish  university students and faculty are blocked entry to universities whose campuses have become tent camps for the proliferation and promulgation of antisemitism.

This is a government for which no action is deemed required to put an end to masked provocateurs fulminating and threatening and accusing Jews of genocide against Palestinians. This is a shameful period in Canadian history, but worse, much worse, a fearful time of living on the edge of a threatening volcano being experienced by the Jewish community worldwide.

"As we witness a surge in conspiracy theories circulating online, it is worth mentioning that the history of antisemitism is full of these. Ideas about Jewish manipulation – spread among a wider segment of the population – can also be used in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They “explain” things such as the US support for Israel and the positioning of western media."

"All of these historic deeply embedded conspiracies and antisemitic beliefs feed into a fevered atmosphere where Jews can feel threatened wherever they live, and this is, unfortunately, unlikely to disappear."

The Conversation

A French police officer sits outside a Paris synagogue. Data suggests that attacks against Jews around the world goes up when there is conflict in the Middle East. AP/Alamy