The Swastikas in Cedarvale

Yesterday the Free Press published an eye-opening account of the rise of anti-Semitism in Canada. It’s a lengthy story but what it describes will be recognizable to anyone who has been paying attention to the pro-Palestinian protests that have been taking place here in the US, only moreso. A report issued by the Israeli government last month said anti-Semitic incidents in Canada had gone up 670%.

Last month, a report by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism found a 670 percent increase in antisemitic incidents in Canada since October 7, 2023, including “violent attacks such as shootings targeting Jewish institutions and arson attacks targeting schools, synagogues, and other community institutions.” There are about 40 million Canadians and roughly 350,000 of them are Jewish—representing less than 1 percent of the country’s population.

Since last October 7, there have been several drive-by shootings at Jewish schools in Montreal and Toronto. A coordinated bomb threat targeted more than 100 Jewish institutions from Halifax to Victoria. Synagogues in British Columbia and Quebec have been firebombed. One synagogue in Toronto, Kehillat Shaarei Torah, has been vandalized seven times since April—its doors and windows smashed; rocks thrown through the windows. The most recent attack happened just last week.

And just to be clear, the people carrying out these attacks aren’t white supremacists. They are a combination of progressives and recent immigrants.

Almost none of these verbal or physical assaults are coming from white supremacists or antisemites of the right-wing variety. They are being carried out by self-described progressives, Arabs, and, often, recent immigrants who are operating inside an ideological framework of “settler colonialism,” which casts Canada, the United States, Australia, and, most of all, Israel, as irredeemably illegitimate constructs of imperialism, capitalism, genocide, and racism. It’s an ideology that has found a comfortable home in Trudeau’s Canada…

Statistics Canada reports that Canada’s Jews were the targets in 70 percent of religiously-motivated hate incidents reported last year. That’s four times as many incidents as those in which Muslims were targeted, who now number 1 in 20 Canadians. Even so, it’s a rare thing for a Liberal politician to utter the word antisemitism in any statement without saying Islamophobia alongside it.

But even more than the litany of incidents what struck me was one woman’s description of how Toronto changed after the 10/7 attack last year. Sarah Rugheimer is a professor of astronomy who grew up in Montana but who has lived in various parts of the world as part of her career. She is currently teaching at York University in Toronto and lives in a neighborhood called Cedarvale.

It was a few weeks after the Hamas massacre of last October 7. Rugheimer, 41, was walking in a park near her home in the city’s quiet Cedarvale neighborhood when she saw a poster of the Israeli hostage Elad Katzir, a 47-year-old farmer from Kibbutz Nir Oz, covered with swastikas.

In the days that followed, as the war raged in Gaza, swastikas turned up all over Cedarvale. They also started appearing on the York campus, where Rugheimer serves as the Allan I. Carswell Chair for the Public Understanding of Astronomy. As fall turned to winter, a swastika showed up in the snow outside the campus building where she works.

It should go without saying but people leaving swastikas aren’t merely anti-Zionist. They are anti-Semites making reference to the mass murder of Jews. In any case, what was happening on campus was even worse. There the barely concealed rage wasn’t anonymous and unfocused it was specific and people were eagerly attaching their names to it.

York’s student unions issued a declaration just after the attack calling the barbarism of October 7 a “justified and necessary” act of resistance against settler colonialism, genocide, and apartheid. The student groups found widespread support among York’s professors—some of whom Rugheimer considered friends.

A politics department faculty committee demanded the university enforce a definition of “anti-Palestinian racism” that encompassed any expression of sympathy for the right of Israelis to exist within their own state: “Zionism is a settler colonial project and ethno-religious ideology in service of a system of Western imperialism that upholds global white supremacy.”

There’s a lot more to this article including an examination of why this is happening Canada. At least part of the answer has to do with the country’s very liberal immigration policies under Justin Trudeau and, along with that, a very permissive view of anti-Semitism reminiscent of the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. It’s not a problem that is going to be fixed overnight, but as in the UK fixing it probably starts with a change at the top. Canadians need to get rid of Trudeau and the Liberals.