“Oct 7 2023”

Amid Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, the Jewish voices offering nuance — and dissent — are more important than ever

On the morning of Oct. 8, the day after the deadly Hamas attacks in Israel, Eli Spiegel was reeling from the news of the massacre.

“What we were witnessing was horrific and intense,” he told the Star. Yet, when he opened Instagram, he didn’t find people talking about the violence that was unfolding, but instead expressing support for Palestinian resistance.

When he wrote a post suggesting that people leave space for others to grieve before waving flags and chanting slogans, he found a handful of people being hateful, mocking him.

I don’t know how many “Nuanced Jews” make up the diaspora in North America but there sure seems to be a lot of them.

The Israel-Hamas War has touched off a wave of antisemitic acts in Canada, including, threats, intimidation, vandalism and violence.

Cities with higher Jewish populations, including Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal are reporting higher rates of hate crimes following the Oct. 7 attack.

National Post is tabulating these incidents in a story that will be updated with the latest from social media and news reports.

It is the nature of the news cycle that huge things get passed over.

But what happened just over a month ago in Israel should not be passed over.

The scale and catastrophe of what happened is still becoming clear.

Yet the world seems to have moved on.

You decide! Is it Trudeau or Judah in their chant?

"Judah, Judah, You Can't Hide…"

We are horrified to see students at #Toronto's @MarcGarneauCI engaging in explicitly antisemitic chants at a recent anti-#Israel protest.

How are Jewish students supposed to feel safe when such hatred & threatening rhetoric is tolerated at… pic.twitter.com/oEGwJKBrki

— CIJA (@CIJAinfo) November 10, 2023

I think the wee Nazis are saying Judah.

The White House has just announced that there will be daily “four-hour pauses“, with eight hours’ notice, in northern Gaza.

As Israel maintains its military offensive to destroy Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, the biggest threat to the operation achieving its stated objective of wiping Hamas from the face of the earth comes not the Islamist fanatics desperately defending their network of underground tunnels but from the Biden administration’s obsession, possibly after seeing so many staged demonstrations, with having “ceasefires.”

Ceasefires have deteriorated into a form of virtue signaling.

National Public Radio’s “Public Editor” Kelly McBride dismissed complaints about NPR’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, examining it through a liberal prism and declaring it excellent, although even NPR’s uber-liberal band of listeners offered complaints the coverage was excessively pro-Palestinian.

Two major pro-Israel media watchdog groups, CAMERA and Honest Reporting, have also found much to criticize about the taxpayer-funded radio network’s coverage of the Palestinian terrorist regime.

Around noon on Friday 20 October, the residents of the upscale Gazan neighbourhood of al-Zahra stood in front of the rubble and dust that used to be their homes.

Fridays were supposed to be special: the Islamic day of prayer marks the start of the weekend and in al-Zahra it meant falafel and hummus, coffee and tea, all served in spacious family apartments or villas by the Mediterranean Sea. Residents here knew they were luckier than most in Gaza.

But overnight, Israeli bombs had flattened 25 apartment blocks, home to many hundreds of people. Israel had been bombing Gaza for days in response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October, but al-Zahra had not been hit until now.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

To some, it’s a cry for the repatriation of a people kicked to the outskirts of a land they call home. To others, it’s a genocidal refrain, verbalizing a desire to purge the Jews from Israel.

The Star assures us it’s not genocidy at all, well maybe a wee bit but that’s OK.

Israeli officials last night made the grim admission that they do not know how many Hamas hostages are still alive after being taken underground a month ago.

The officials, speaking at a screening of the Hamas atrocity at the Consulate in New York, made a public plea for ‘two way’ humanitarian aid to rescue the hostages while the world calls for a ceasefire to save remaining Gazan civilians.

Lt. Commander Jonathan Conricus, speaking from Tel Aviv via Zoom, said of the 1.1million civilians in Gaza, between 850,000 and 900,000 have fled northern Gaza. Yesterday, 50,000 evacuated the region between 9am and 2pm, he said.

For many years now, Israelis have been told that the biggest threat to the survival of the Jewish state is Iran’s quest to obtain nuclear weapons.

But another long-term trend could be eroding the foundations of Israel’s security: a generational decline in western voters’ support and sympathy for the Jewish state.

Public attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have seen dramatic swings following dramatic events. A Gallup poll conducted for Newsweek in 1982, just days after the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps of Beirut, registered a 17 per cent crash in Americans’ support for Israel.

If there is ever a time that calls for clear moral leadership, a moment in which evil acts committed by evil men should be unambiguously denounced, it’s when innocents are targeted by violence, at home and abroad.

Yet this is apparently too much to ask of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose wishy-washy statements about attacks perpetrated against Canadian Jews and commitment to false equivalencies about the Israel-Hamas War show he is more interested in appeasing certain voting blocs than defending the values he purportedly stands for.

Calgary police say that during a rally on Sunday a man took to the stage to speak to the large crowd in attendance and that he repeatedly used an antisemitic phrase while encouraging the crowd to follow along.

After consultation with the Calgary Police Service hate crimes coordinator, the man was charged with causing a disturbance and hate motivation has been applied to the charge.

On Tuesday, police announced Wesam Cooley was charged following the Sunday protests supporting Israel and Palestinians.

Seems destined to fail.