“Oct 7 2023”

How dare you call them hate marches?! So goes the commentariat chorus this week, as London braces itself for another ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstration on Saturday, controversially coinciding with Armistice Day. With the British government keen to look tough on the capital’s now weekly anti-Israel protests, which have time and again devolved into carnivals of Jew hatred, home secretary Suella Braverman has branded them ‘hate marches’ and piled pressure on the Metropolitan Police to ban this weekend’s instalment.

Israel’s right-wing, religious coalition government has passed a landmark ruling to give equal rights to the same-sex partners of dead soldiers.

The Families of Fallen Soldiers Law was amended to allow the partners to be recognised for the first time as Israel Defence Forces (IDF) widows, meaning they can now access benefits including pensions, financial and educational support for children, medical, funeral, wake and convalescence costs, as well as psychological support.

Those of us who believe in freedom of expression have felt mighty lonely this week. We have watched as, one by one, our fellow opponents of cancel culture have given into the temptations of censorship. Many on the right in particular appear to have fallen under the spell of suppression. Gone is their devotion to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ and in its stead comes a chilling cry for a literal police clampdown on speech they don’t like.

Support for Hamas originates in the heart of darkness of Western consciousness, There are more fans of Hamas in the West than in Gaza.

What is this strange evil that afflicts the West and for which the war in Gaza is both a pretext and a revelation? Self-hatred? Fascination with collective suicide?
Hamas is an Islamo-Nazi sect that intended to destroy Israel and its people before attacking the West when the time comes. But it found million of helpers among Western people. Sorcerers’ apprentices, new converts and useful idiots…

Their brainwashing is effective. Newsweek polls say that among young Americans, 48 percent are with Hamas. More than half – 51 percent – believe that the October 7 pogrom in which 1,400 Israelis were massacred was somehow justified. If we did the same survey in Europe we would get the same results.

OTTAWA – The head of the third-largest federal public service union resigned suddenly Monday, reportedly after a series of antisemitic social media posts allegedly written by him began circulating among members.

In a terse statement posted on its website Tuesday, the Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE) announced that its president, Camille Awada, resigned from the top job on Monday. The union represents 23,000 members, including civilian employees of the RCMP, and employees at Statistics Canada and in the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s department.

I imagine our public service at all levels is peppered with diversity just like this.

The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.

It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.

He’d been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.

He’d heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. “You need to escape,” somebody in the street shouted, “because they will bomb the towers”.

Levi Salomon has been documenting anti-Semitic slogans and acts at rallies in Berlin for 25 years, but never had he experienced such virulent expressions of hate against Jews in post-war Germany until October 7.

On that Sabbath day, Hamas gunmen stormed across the border into Israel, killing 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in their homes, on the streets and at a rave party.

The most deadly attack since the founding of Israel had led it to declare war on Hamas, with Israeli forces heavily bombarding Gaza before sending in ground troops to destroy the Islamist movement. The Hamas-run health ministry said more than 10,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the territory.

TORONTO — As a comment-section editor, I spent more time editing and fact-checking opinion columns than consuming news in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and constantly found myself coming across claims that seemed far-fetched.

Young women raped next to their friends’ dead bodies? That can’t possibly be true. But it was.

Infant babies mutilated and killed in cold blood? Holy hell.

France has seen an exponential rise in antisemitic incidents since the attacks by the terrorist group Hamas on Jewish civilians took place a month ago in Israel, the AFP reports.

The figures were announced on Sunday by French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.

“The number of anti-Semitic acts has exploded,” he told France 2 television, adding that 486 people have been arrested for such offenses, including 102 foreigners.

MONTREAL – The Montreal police department is investigating overnight firebombings at two Jewish institutions in the Montreal suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux.

Police spokesperson Sabrina Gauthier said Tuesday that incendiary devices caused minor damage to the front door of a synagogue and the back door of another nearby building that houses a Jewish organization.

Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada has identified the synagogue as Congregation Beth Tikvah. Across the street is the local office of the Federation CJA.

Toronto man arrested after police say a fight broke out over pro-Israeli posters being torn down

As if they read Phil Klein’s Corner post from October 25, progressive politicians and activists over the past few days have been on message, arguing that the phrase “free Palestine from the river to the sea” is, as Rashida Tlaib put it, “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”

The British are among the most mild-mannered people in the world. We apologise to the waiter when the food is not up to snuff; we say sorry when others mumble and we cannot understand what they’ve said; we even offer a mea culpa to those who career into us along the pavement, as though it were somehow our fault for getting in the way in the first place. But there is a line, for anyone foolish enough to seek it.