Crisis for Canadian Jewry

by Igal Hecht

• Because this is precisely where Canada is going. Historically, Canada has been behind Europe on antisemitism by a generation, but the pace at which it is gaining momentum is now catching up. The same forces that have harmed France and the United Kingdom are now entrenched in Canada: radicalized academic environments, media that demonize Israel and downplay antisemitism, politicians pressured to appease extremists, and a Jewish community that, even as it grows more alarmed, is still unwilling to confront the reality of the threat.
• At the eye of the storm is the Liberal Party of Canada and its new leader, Prime Minister Mark Carney. Many would argue that in the past decade, the Liberal government under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau increasingly empowered antisemitic elements.... In the process, it has encouraged antisemitic opinions to intensify and be legitimized.
• Britain's and France's abuses did not happen by chance. They were the consequence of political choices. In Canada, those choices have already been made.
• Some in the media, politics and faculty members excused or justified these acts. What if black students had been prevented from moving freely on campus? All hell would have broken out — or should have. Yet, when it comes to Jews, or as the antisemites like to say "Zionists," no one, it seems, has a problem.
• In Carney's Canada, violence, intimidation and dangerous rhetoric against Jews, like that of the Nazi sympathizers of the 1930s, are now becoming the norm.

Since October 7, 2023, on university campuses across Canada, encampments have appeared, where Jewish students and faculty are harassed and obstructed. "Montreal has become North America's capital of antisemitism," according to Professor Gad Saad, of Montreal's Concordia University. The city is quickly becoming the continent's largest hotbed of radical Islam. Pictured: A banner calling for a violent "intifada" at an anti-Israel protest encampment, on the campus of McGill University in Montreal, on April 29, 2024. (Photo by Graham Hughes/AFP via Getty Images)

History is a stern teacher. Too frequently, its warnings go unheeded. Twenty years ago, France descended into a season of antisemitic violence that continues to this day. In 2006, when a young Jewish man named Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured for three weeks, then brutally murdered by a Muslim criminal gang infamously referred to as the "Gang of Barbarians," the international community was shocked. The reason for the kidnapping, torture and murder was the old stereotype that supposedly all Jews are rich. Halimi's family could not afford to pay the 450,000 euros demanded as ransom.

Antisemitic crimes in France, however, exceeded that single event. In 2012, a Muslim terrorist attacked a Jewish school in Toulouse and murdered a rabbi and three young children.

For centuries, Jewish communities have been, with various pretexts, objects of hostility.

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