Jews -- Reliant on None But Themselves

"While many different communities have been targeted, the greatest increase has been against the Jewish community by 69 percent. We strongly encourage the reporting of any suspected hateful act to police."

"[The Toronto Police Service's hate crime unit investigates] every reported instance of hate, including on the ground at demonstrations to gather evidence and investigate any suspected hate crimes of hate speech or signage. This includes the presence of flags that promote terrorist organizations as identified by Public Safety Canada. We remind everyone that charges can be laid at any time."

"But let me be clear, hate has no place in Toronto, and we stand united in protecting our diverse communities. We know emotions are intense and as demonstrations continue we must balance the right to assembly with the need to maintain public order and public safety."

"We have seen assaults on officers, including the use of weapons and physical attacks. These actions are dangerous for everyone."

"Marked police vehicles will be patrolling some communities with static red and blue lights on their rooftop bars to enhance visibility. In addition, three mobile command posts will be stationed in Jewish neighbourhoods, one at Bathurst and Glencairn, another at Bathurst and Sheppard, and a third at Bathurst and Finch."

"...[Another mobile command post] will be deployed to various mosques across the city."

"The Toronto Police Service will be a visible and reassuring presence for as long as is necessary."

Toronto Police Service Chief of Police Myron Demkiw

Toronto skyline stands on the waterfront. REUTERS/Mark Blinch

Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist savagery in southern Israel, its repercussions have echoed in surprising ways across the world, and no less so than in Canada. Despite the demonstrated reality of thousands of terrorists running amok in a gory bloodbath of rape, mutilation, mass murder and hostage taking as they overran farming communities in Israel across the border from Gaza, killing 1,200 Israelis including infants, their young parents, girls and women, soldiers and foreign farm workers, the world has failed to empathize with the plight of Jews in the aftermath of that savage pogrom.

Instead, there has been a steady rise in antisemitism, and with it, the glorification of the very terrorist hordes that inflicted sadistic atrocities on mostly Israeli civilians, along with looting and destroying kibbutzim. The Nova Music Festival that attracted thousands of young people for a celebration of the new year, of youthful companionship and of life's celebrations through the language of music, turned into a hideous torment of killing, the events videoed by the terrorists themselves as they went from venue to venue, laughing, slaughtering, enjoying the visceral carnage of proto-humanity.

 

That event saw Jew-hate and accompanying reports of hate crimes surge in Canada's largest, most populated city of Toronto. For the year 2024 so far, a 40 percent increase over the first nine months of last year has been documented. Since October 7, 72 protest-related arrests have been made by Toronto police. Given the fact that since that fateful day of October 7, over 1,500 demonstrations by those identifying themselves as 'pro-Palestinian' have taken place, 72 arrests given the hate-mongering, threats and intimidation displayed by Palestinian and Muslim groups aided and abetted by unions and the left, doesn't seem much of a response to such criminal activities.

 

Police investigators examine the exterior of a synagogue in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Que., where an incendiary device was ignited in November. (Francois Joly/Radio-Canada)

 

The firebombing, vandalizing, live gunshots at Jewish community centres, parochial schools, synagogues and private Jewish businesses, along with violently threatening marches through Jewish communities in Toronto, has in fact, seen a feeble effort on the part of police in Toronto. A reflection of what has been occurring elsewhere in Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver, Halifax to Calgary. Canada's Jewish population is one-quarter the size of its Muslim population, and it tells. Since it is, after all, the Muslim population led by Palestinians that has been perpetuating this violence in persecuting Jewish Canadians.

Toronto police have "conducted thousands of proactive visits to schools, places of worship and community centres to ensure the safety and security of our residents". An approach that is of questionable value when the school administrators and school boards all appear to have been infected with the virus of celebrating Palestinian victimhood grievances, themselves persecuting their Jewish students, from elementary school to high school, to the university level where faculty has taken up the new DEI-inspired conscience of 'anti-colonialism' and Israel is identified as the ultimate colonizer.

 

Demonstrators have now cleared a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. Still from video

 

Seated in its historical ancestral homeland in the Middle East, where Israel is the quintessential liberal-democratic melting pot of Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze, Bedouin, Kurds, Baha'i  belying the left's favourite charge against Israel as an 'apartheid' state, the anti-Israel legations throughout the West paint Jews in the Middle East as imperial colonialists, a charge that reality and history challenge with the proof that Jews are indigenous to the Middle East and in particular to their heritage Judean lands latterly occupied by Arabs largely from Egypt, Jordan and Syria who claim 'Palestine' for their own.

 

Police and politicians in Canada are functionally incapable of mentioning their efforts to come to grips with antisemitism without also mentioning the evils of 'Islamophobia'. And while the federal government under Justin Trudeau's governing Liberal party has been no friend to the fellow democracy that is Israel, it has long sought to garner support at the ballot box from the Canadian-Muslim voting bloc, adding an outsize number of Muslim Members of Parliament to its cabinet in the most inappropriate positions.

 

Typically, now in Canada, as elsewhere in the world and has been the 'norm' throughout history, Jews everywhere from Israel to the great diaspora dispersed throughout the globe, have been taught through sad experience that their safety and security, their future and that of their children is in their own hands for Jews cannot rely on others to lend support on an issue of trust and justice and the very perpetuation of Jewish existence and the legitimacy of Israel.

 

 

"Iran Wants to Destroy Israel Whoever is the Prime Minister"

"I can understand that there is a lot of criticism of him [PM Netanyahu] generally speaking. But to connect that to the situation right now, I mean he is operating under the most incredible stress and pressure and he is managing Israel's security according to his best judgement."

"And you can criticize that. It's a democracy so  you can always say that's a wrong decision -- all that is fine. But I feel sometimes what people are trying to say is that if you just had another leader everything else would have been different. But that's just not the case."

Israeli Ambassador to Canada Iddo Moed

Israeli soldiers, returning from the tunnel where they found six Israeli hostages murdered by Hamas terrorists, also brought back with them a Hamas document describing the terrorist group's public relations strategy. The third bullet point of which, translated from Arabic reads: "Continue with the line that Netanyahu is responsible for what happened". And it just happens to be a strategy that has met with stunning success in western media and political establishments all of whom quote the Hamas version of the events of October 7 forward, to an astonishing degree.

The document is nothing but verifiably sinister in its approach to cast the victim as the aggressor, responsible for the chaotic savagery exercised by Palestinian terrorists against mostly helpless Israeli civilians where children, the elderly, entire families were terrorized, mutilated and murdered. Where Israeli girls and women were tortured and gang-raped; those that were not slaughtered brought back to Gaza as hostages to be used as pawns in planned-for prisoner exchanges.

 

Israeli soldiers drive a tank on the border with the Gaza Strip on February 11, 2024.

Ariel Schalit/AP Photo

That the strategy to cast Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu  as responsible for the tornado of inhumane butchery unleashed by terrorists against a population of farming communities where Palestinians from Gaza found meaningful, well-paying employment in Israel, trusted to appreciate the trust placed in them by the people of the communities they betrayed by sketching schematics of each village and where their security personnel lived, with some among them joining the organized terror groups to reward that trust given them by taking part in the pillage and butchery, makes the success of Hamas's scheme all the more incredible.

In particular, given that in their power play of a death cult run rampant, first-hand, on-the-spot evidence was widely broadcast on social media and some legacy media through the cams worn by the marauders videoing the carnage and the joy of the terrorists in their sadistic butchery as the events of the odious day of infamy played out. Yet, despite that evidence and the stunning narrative of survivors and witnesses, it is Hamas that is being championed and Israel that is being held to account for its own tragic suffering.

 

FUNERAL of murdered hostage Eden Yerushalmi takes place in Petah Tikva on Sunday. The sign reads: ‘Sorry, Eden.’ (photo credit: AVSHALOM SASSONI/FLASH90)

Jews have a tendency to hope for the best of outcomes , to somehow find it possible to believe that the hearts of humanity could not possibly be as bleak and black as their own history of endless pogroms and the final one that deprived six million Jews of their lives taught them. So, yes, it was Benjamin Netanyahu who agreed to the deal to return Gilad Shalit, a single IDF soldier held as a hostage in 2011 in exchange for countless Palestinian prisoners that included Yahya Sinwar. Sinwar, who designed October 7 and unleashed hell on Israel. The same Sinwar whose life was saved when Israeli surgeons removed a brain tumour.

Yet the Hamas fiction, gossamer-light in its credibility would have it that the Israeli Prime Minister was alone responsible for the 1,200 Israelis that Palestinian terror slaughtered, for the plight of the unrecoverable hostages taken into Gaza to be raped, starved and tortured, then finally executed; others held, taunting Israel to release them by the simple expedient of a ceasefire that would enable Hamas to regroup, rearm and continue recruiting. By insisting that Israel's military under direction of its prime minister has an unshakeable goal of destroying Hamas, the reasoning is that Mr. Netanyahu is responsible for the death of Israelis that Hamas has no intention of releasing, not even in death.

 

Gazans celebrate by a destroyed Israeli tank at the broken Israel-Gaza border fence, east of Khan Younis, October 7, 2023. (AP/Yousef Masoud)

"Iran wants to destroy Israel whoever is the prime minister, if it's [former Prime Ministers Naftali] Bennett or Ehud Barak or [Ehud] Olmert or whoever."

"So it's kind of giving the other side, the terrorist, the slack and saying 'It's Bibi it's because of him'. And that's wrong."

"That's very, very wrong and that's aggravating."

Ambassador Iddo Moed

Redeem the Hostages -- Encourage More Hostage-Taking: Israel's Dilemma on its Mission to Destroy Hamas

"The objective is for this war to end very differently from all of the previous rounds. There has to be a clear victory."

"[Weakening Hamas was not enough] whatever has to be done to fundamentally change the situation will have to be done." 

Chuck Freilich, former deputy national security adviser, Israel

"We don't know the exact number [of hostages now held by Hamas] and we are still checking."

"Definitely I cannot say how much we will factor in the fact that we have maybe an unprecedented number of hostages in Gaza ... But it's not going to stop us, prevent us, from doing what we need to do in order to secure the future of Israel."

"Of course we want to see all of our boys, girls, grandmothers, everyone who was abducted, we want to see them back home."

"But right now, our focus ... is to obliterate Hamas terrorist capabilities."

Gilad Erdan, Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations

Israeli hostages taken by Hamas (Screenshot)

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad after storming into Israel Saturday morning, slaughtering hundreds of residents in their homes and streets in towns near the Gaza border, are now holding captive roughly 150 Israeli soldiers and civilians. Mobilization of Israeli reservists swiftly was expanded to 360,000 in response to the unprecedented invasion by Palestinian terrorists. It took days of offensive/defensive conflict but by Tuesday Israel's military had regained control over those areas that Hamas attacked in Israel's south.

 

Now the question on observers' minds is whether Israel will launch a ground assault into Gaza, governed by Hamas since 2007. A large portion of Gaza City's Rimal neighbourhood, the elite section of the city, was reduced on Tuesday to rubble by warplanes from Israel bombarding the area the night before. Hundreds of targets were struck in upscale Rimal, home to ministries of the Hamas government, including universities, media organizations and offices of aid agencies.

 

After warning civilians to evacuate targeted neighbourhoods, Israel launched their devastating attacks. Residents of nearby al-Daraj were told to evacuate and new explosions rocked the area soon afterward as well as in Rimal. Fishing boats were sent aflame when one strike hit the seaport of Gaza City. That same day Hamas fired barrages of rockets toward Ashkelon and Tel Aviv; no casualties were reported.

 

An emergency personnel works to extinguish a fire after rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip, as seen from the city of Ashkelon, Israel, October 7, 2023.(Amir Cohen/Reuters)

In Israel-Hamas conflicts between 2008 and 2021, four rounds were ended inconclusively, Hamas battered but still in control of Gaza. There is now intense pressure after the barbarously grotesque nature of this latest deadly infiltration of Israel with horrible carnage on a wider scale than could ever be imagined, for Hamas and its partners in jihad against Israel to be permanently removed as an ongoing on-again, off-again lethal threat to Jews in Israel. 

 

Palestinian Islamic Jihad is thought to be holding over 30 people as hostages. Hamas has the distinction of holding the greater number as bargaining chips where in past exchanges, a single Israeli hostage could be exchanged for hundreds of Palestinians  held in Israeli prisons for capital crimes. Authorities in Israel have not been publicly forthcoming about the hostages, leaving people searching for their family members turning to social media and local volunteer networks to appeal for information on their whereabouts. 

 

Aerial footage of charred and bullet-riddled cars at the site of Supernova Music Festival in Israel, where at least 260 people were killed by Hamas. Photo: South First Responders via AP

Contact has been made with families of 50 Israeli hostages to bring them updated information of the situation, by the Israel Defense Forces. The search for the hostages is complex; the Gaza Strip encompasses 140 square miles of territory and the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade has claimed to have 'relocated' Israeli soldiers and officers, keeping them "safeguarded in safe locations and in the resistance's tunnels". The tunnels infiltrate Israel underground and stretch throughout the breadth and depth of the Gaza Strip including beneath its cities.

"A vast underground city with dozens of access points located throughout Gaza", is how Israel describes the tunnels. Those people whom Hamas captured and held within Israel itself as fighting was underway around the border towns were eventually rescued by Israeli troops. Now, Hamas threatens to execute hostages should Israeli forces target Gaza residents. As though Hamas terrorists had been reluctant to slaughter Israelis during their incursion. Hamas issuing instructions to Israel on how to proceed, characterizing its defence as 'aggression'.

In this image from video obtained by the AP, Avinatan Or, second left, and his partner Noa Argamani, not pictured, are seized by Hamas during an attack on an Israeli music festival on Saturday, Oct. 7. Photo by AP Photo

"From this moment on, we announce that every targeting of our people who are safe in their houses, without prior warning, we will regrettably meet with the execution of one of the enemy's civilian hostages that we have. And we will have to broadcast that audio and visually."

"We will not exchange or negotiate on the file of the hostages while under fire, during aggression and battle."

"The hostage situation is a strategic file that has its own clear and known path, and its price will be paid by the occupation, there is no question about it."

Abu Obaida, Hamas spokesperson

The Hamas wildly successful operation from any point of view, theirs or Israel's, has left a dilemma. The terrorists who killed at random as many people as they could surprise, who mutilated and tortured men and women, who murdered entire families, who burned people alive in their homes, who slit throats and killed infants and babies, beheading some, incinerating others, think they have an ace of control in the number of hostages they've taken, abused, raped, threatened. Including infants they've placed in cages.

Israeli authorities are left with extremely difficult decisions to make. Carefully choosing what manner of response will ultimately achieve the purpose of destroying the threat that Palestinian jihadist terror continues to pose to Israel and its population. The safety of hostages has always been uppermost of mind and intention. Rescuing them will be beyond difficult should Hamas distribute them across the Gaza Strip for them to be positioned as a deterrence to Israeli strikes.

The question is, will the decision be forced upon Israel to finally abandon its pledge to first and foremost sacrifice everything in the interests of returning their own to safety in Israel from the hands of its enemies...In the now greater interests of preserving Israel's safety under the threat of an increasingly better-armed terrorist threat becoming increasingly emboldened. Deciding finally, and once and for all, to embark on a no-holds-barred extermination of that threat, allowing the inevitable, the abandonment of the hostages.