The Jewish community in Canada is furious and scared. They have every reason to be. Their schools are being shot at, their synagogues are being firebombed, and their cemeteries are being desecrated while the government calls it vandalism and moves on. Canada keeps proving that it can write laws but not enforce them. Every time Jews are targeted, the response is the same: press releases, condemnations, and no action. The laws exist, the evidence is there, but the courage to use them never existed.
In Ottawa, a seventeen-year-old who plotted to bomb Jews at a rally was granted bail under sealed conditions. Police say he had the makings of an explosive, acetone, oxidizer, and ball bearings, and discussed targets. He was charged under Canada’s terrorism laws, but the court still released him. The public cannot see the bail terms, and the people he planned to kill are told to trust a system that protects his privacy over their safety.
For years, protestors have taken over the streets of Montreal and Toronto calling for the globalization of the Intifada. The Intifada was a terror campaign that indiscrimitately attacked Jews in Israel with the sole intention of inflicting terror on the population. It was a perverse orgy of murdering innocent men, women and children that was supposed to somehow “free Palestine”. What they don’t tell you is that the Intifada has been globalized, at least in Canada, for a long time.
In Toronto, the Bais Chaya Mushka Girls Elementary School has been shot at three times within a year. Bullets ripped into the building in May, again in October on Yom Kippur, and again in December. Police called it a series of shootings and promised investigations. Parents called it what it is, a campaign of terror. These were not random drive-bys. They were deliberate, repeated terror attacks.
In Montreal, bullets tore through the front doors of Yeshiva Gedola and Azrieli Talmud Torah, two schools struck the same night in November 2023. Three days later, Yeshiva Gedola was hit again. Police said it was hate-motivated but stopped short of terrorism charges. Months later, arrests were made, and still the word terrorism was avoided, as if acknowledging motive would make it harder to close the file.
The city’s synagogues have been firebombed repeatedly. Congregation Beth Tikvah was hit in November 2023, and again in December 2024, along with the Federation CJA West Island office. In Vancouver, a man tried to burn down the Schara Tzedeck Synagogue, pouring fuel on its entrance and setting it alight. In Halifax, swastikas defaced synagogue walls. Cemeteries have been desecrated in Winnipeg and Montreal, gravestones toppled, memorials defaced, and swastikas scrawled on the dead. It is the same message over and over, Jews are not safe.
This is not new. In 2007, Omar Bulphred and Azim Ibragimov planted a propane tank bomb outside Montreal’s Ben Weider YM-YWHA and threw a Molotov cocktail at the Skver Toldos Boys School. Letters found in their homes praised jihad. They were sentenced for arson and threats, not terrorism. In 2004, Sleiman El Merhebi firebombed the United Talmud Torahs library on the eve of Passover, destroying fifteen thousand books and leaving a note about Hamas’s revenge for Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He was convicted of arson and served about two years. His mother, convicted as an accessory, received probation. Irwin Cotler, then Minister of Justice and architect of Canada’s anti-terror laws, presided over a department that never applied them. The pattern was set. When the victims are Jewish, the motive becomes irrelevant, and ideology is reduced to vandalism.
The law itself is not weak. The Criminal Code defines terrorism as violence carried out for political or religious reasons with intent to intimidate a community. It criminalizes facilitating, instructing, financing, and planning. It applies even when no one dies. Yet again and again, prosecutors and the Justice Department refuse to use it. They choose to call ideological attacks hate crimes or property offences. They prefer a conviction on paper to justice in reality.
Montreal has a long history as a staging ground for extremism. Ahmed Ressam, the Millennium Bomber, lived and operated there before driving across the border to blow up Los Angeles International Airport. Fateh Kamel ran a network from Montreal that financed and supported terrorism abroad. The city that once sheltered plotters is now the same one where schools, synagogues, and community centres are shot, burned, and defaced. The geography has not changed. Only the excuses have.
And still the poison spreads. In Victoria, Imam Younus Kathrada preaches that Jews are plunderers and calls on God to annihilate them. Tareq Al Suwaidan is invited to Canadian stages despite telling mothers to raise their children to hate Jews. Mohamed Elmasry once told national television that every Israeli over eighteen was a legitimate target for suicide bombers. Across Canadian cities, protesters chant for the death of Jews and call to globalize the intifada while police stand by to protect the chanters. Hate speech becomes standardized and the cycle continues.
Officials claim terrorism cases are complex. They say Attorney General consent is required, that evidence must meet a high bar. Meanwhile, Jewish families reinforce doors and windows, install bulletproof glass, and hire guards for their children’s schools. Bureaucrats talk about balance and restraint while parents pray their children come home alive. This is not restraint. It is capitulation.
The Jewish community has watched for decades while firebombs, bullets, and swastikas are explained away as isolated incidents. They are not isolated. They are a pattern, a campaign of intimidation carried out under the complacent watch of a government afraid to call it what it is. Canada has the tools to stop it. It refuses to use them. The police have the evidence. The prosecutors have the law. The judges have the authority. What they lack is the courage to say that the war against Jews is not a misunderstanding. It is terror.
Until Canada begins calling these crimes what they are, terrorism, the violence will continue. Every burned synagogue, every shattered school window, and every desecrated grave is a reminder that the country’s moral compass has failed. Laws mean nothing when prosecutors are too timid to use them and leaders are too afraid to offend. The next attacker is already watching, already learning that in Canada, hate carries little consequence. The next act of terror will not be a surprise. It will be the inevitable result of a nation that confused tolerance with weakness and justice with silence.
Leave a Reply