“Oct 7 2023”

This is not a time for Canadian Jews to mince words, not when they’re feeling so deeply disturbed by recent events, even fearful for their safety. This is about much more than hurt feelings.

If the slaughter of more than 1,400 men, women, children and babies in southern Israel by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 had many people questioning their faith in humanity, the celebration of, and nonreaction, by some Canadians to the atrocities has me questioning the Canada I know and love.

The endorsement by some of Hamas and lack of revulsion at their genocidal evil is accompanied by a dramatic spike in antisemitism in Canada. In recent days, the Toronto Police Service hate crimes unit has been investigating numerous incidents targeting Jews.

Well, start with the fact our ruling class decided to enrich us with the import of a cult that despises everything the west stands for.

The anti-Semitism now on display on college campuses has one of its origins in the erosion of public order during the summer 2020 “racial reckoning.”

Last night, a small cluster of Jewish students barricaded themselves in the library of Cooper Union, while a crowd outside banged on the doors chanting: “Free Palestine.”

Scenes like this have become familiar on college campuses. Radical activists have spent years devising strategies to drown out and, in some cases, physically threaten undesirable voices. In March 2017, masked activists at Middlebury College mobbed the social scientist Charles Murray, chasing him and others into a car. They shoved and pulled the hair of the faculty moderator for the event (who said that she disagreed with Murray about many issues). These tactics of revolutionary exception are now being used to target Jewish people on campuses and in cities across the United States.

Video from the ⁦@cooperunion⁩ library now: pic.twitter.com/skOM1vWsv0

— Jake Novak (@jakejakeny) October 25, 2023

In Vienna, London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels and dozens of other European cities, demonstrations “in support of Palestine” were organised even before the Israelis responded the jihadist pogrom perpetrated by Iran-backed Hamas on October 7, while the corpses of more than 1,400 Israeli victims — tortured, raped, murdered and mutilated, babies decapitated or burned alive — were still warm. According to a JNS report:

“[T]he IDF on Monday [Oct 23] published two segments from the interrogation of Hamas terrorists who participated in the massacre..

“‘The purpose of entering Israeli territory… was to kidnap civilians; they want as many hostages as possible,’ one of the terrorists revealed. He added, ‘They [Hamas] promised us that whoever brings a kidnapped person will receive an apartment and $10,000.'”

All the same, each and every one of these demonstrations in Europe was the scene of hate-filled slogans against Israel and Jews.

NPR’s Michel Martin guest hosted PBS’s Amanpour and Company on Wednesday and described her guest, Tareq Baconi, as a Hamas historian which she was careful to distinguish from a “Hamas apologist.” However, Baconi is a Hamas apologist, as he absurdly described Israel as “fascist” while, even more absurdly, saying Hamas is no longer anti-Semitic.

Israeli warplanes have tonight unleashed airstrikes of ‘unprecedented’ intensity across all parts of the Gaza strip, as it announced it was ‘expanding’ its ground forces’ operations.

The aerial onslaught came with a warning from the IDF to Palestinian civilians still living in Gaza to move south as soon as possible, amid fears that the long-awaited ground invasion of the enclave may take place within hours.

The bombing, which observers described as much more ferocious and louder than previous days, coincided with electricity and communications blackouts in much of the besieged enclave.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the savage butchery visited upon innocent Israelis on October 7 was the worst since the atrocities of the Holocaust. No one paying attention has a problem believing that. You won’t either after reading this.

British state broadcaster the BBC interviewed a Hamas spokesman who, when challenged on “killing people as they sleep”, terminated the discussion.

Ghazi Hamad, described by The Times of Israel as a “senior Hamas official” was interviewed by the BBC in Beirut where he lives on Thursday, but threw his microphone on the ground and walked out after the conversation turned to the massacre of civilians by his organisation in October’s terrorist attack. In footage released by the broadcaster Hamad, who has been a frequent guest on BBC programmes going back decades, insisted the October 7th attack was purely military and not aimed at civilians.

Ghazi Hamad

The moment when Hamas spokesperson Ghazi Hamad abruptly ends a BBC interview after being questioned about the justification for attacks on Israeli families while they were asleep. He angrily tosses aside the microphone and leaves.#Israel #Hamas pic.twitter.com/EyLNLQQHWR

— Voice of Europe 🌍 (@V_of_Europe) October 27, 2023

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli forces backed by fighter jets and drones carried out a second ground raid into Gaza in as many days and struck enemy targets on the outskirts of Gaza City, the military said Friday, as it prepares for a widely expected ground invasion of the territory ruled, through Hamas, by Iran.

American warplanes, meanwhile, struck targets in eastern Syria that the Pentagon said were linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. That followed a string of attacks on American forces. Two mysterious objects hit towns in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, adding to the already high tensions fueled by the three-week-old Gaza war.

Whatever follows Hamas’s bloody and terrible period of misrule can only be a relative improvement.

Western media has devoted prohibitive attention to the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip precipitated by the Hamas regime’s support for a complex military-style operation explicitly designed to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible. That sequence of events might convey to the casual observer that the conditions the Gazan people are presently enduring are a function of their government’s recklessness, inhumanity, and general commitment to maladministration. Maybe that’s why so many Western media outlets seem committed to advancing the notion that Gaza’s plight is a function of Israel’s response to the unprecedented butchery of over 1,400 of its citizens.

What United Nations secretary-general António Guterres said this week about Israel is a disgrace, a calumny and a lie, all rolled into one.

Speaking at a UN Security Council meeting, Guterres stated: ‘It is important to also recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.’

A California city has become the first in the US to pass a resolution condemning Israel — accusing the Jewish nation of committing “ethnic cleansing and collective punishment.”

The resolution passed by the Richmond City Council around 1 a.m. Wednesday states, in part, that Palestinians in Gaza “are currently facing a campaign of ethnic cleansing and collective punishment by the state of Israel.”