“Oct 7 2023”

Federal Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangeree says Ottawa will address complaints from Jewish groups about delayed funding for security measures and will tighten its hate laws, after bullets were fired at three Toronto-area synagogues over the past week.

“When they attack a synagogue, they attack Canada,” Mr. Anandasangeree told reporters on Sunday in front of the Shaarei Shomayim synagogue, which was shot at in the early hours of Saturday morning in the North York area of Toronto. Minutes earlier, a synagogue in nearby Thornhill, Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto, had also been targeted.

It happened. Shots were fired Friday night at my synagogue, Shaarei Shomayim. To be honest, I have been expecting this. It is not as if this area, like every other Jewish neighbourhood, has not had an increased police presence for over two years. Indeed, I wonder if the increased presence of security personnel may have made this neighbourhood seem like more of a target.

There is a sentence Canadian politicians repeat every time antisemitism erupts into public view: “Antisemitism has no place here.”

It is delivered after vandalism. It is delivered after threats. It is delivered after protests outside Jewish institutions.

Must be a cultural thing.

Toronto police are investigating after a synagogue in North York was struck by gunfire late Monday night.

Officers were called to Temple Emanu-El, which is just south of Bayview Avenue and Highway 401, for reports of gunshots being fired.

Shortly after airstrikes on Iran began on February 28, several Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), issued strong condemnations of Israel and the US and voiced support for the Iranian regime. They also called on Arabs and Muslims to stand united against Israel and the US.

Palestinian support for the Iranian regime did not come as a surprise. For decades, the Iranian regime had provided significant financial and military support to both Hamas and PIJ. This backing is a cornerstone of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” strategy, which aims to project regional influence to counter Israeli and US interests in the Middle East.

Three slogans were scrawled on a bathroom stall at McGill University’s faculty of medicine earlier this month: “Free Palestine”; “Jews out of McGill Med”; and “Kill all Jews.” Whether composed by one person or several, their coexistence in the same vandalized space shows how anti-Zionist rhetoric sits comfortably alongside explicitly eliminationist language. At first glance, they might look like disconnected expressions of rage. In fact, they are a logical sequence, one that reveals something essential about what it means to hate Jews today.

The Palestinian National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), established last month in accordance with US President Donald J. Trump’s plan to end the Israel-Hamas war, is about to assume its responsibilities in the Gaza Strip.

The NCAG’s main mission is to manage the day-to-day operations of the civil service and administration in the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the war, which erupted after the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led invasion of Israel.

While much of the world’s attention remains fixed on Iran and its Shi’ite axis, another geopolitical realignment is taking shape — more quietly, more pragmatically, and potentially just as consequential for the US, Israel and the Middle East.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has launched an ambitious diplomatic offensive aimed at unifying the Sunni world under Ankara’s leadership. The objective is not merely reconciliation with former rivals. It is the construction of a Sunni diplomatic and strategic “wall,” or “noose,” around Israel, replacing the Iranian “Shi’ite crescent” with a new configuration of Sunni power.

As the US is preoccupied with the crisis in Iran, the Palestinian terror group Hamas has again announced its rejection of President Donald J. Trump’s 20-point plan for ending the war in the Gaza Strip.

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.) has appointed three officials who cofounded a Muslim group that blamed Israel for Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack to prominent roles in his administration. One of them is serving as Mamdani’s head of faith-based partnerships, another as his chief of immigrant affairs, and the third as the leader of his judiciary advisory committee.