“These Attacks Are on Canada’s Values”: CLARITy member Hadassah Goldberg in the National Post on Rising Antisemitism in Canada

The latest attacks on Jewish-owned businesses in Toronto should shock the conscience of every Canadian.

They should also force us to ask a difficult question: At what point do repeated, deliberat, and targeted acts of antisemitic intimidation, vandalism, and violence stop being presented as isolated incidents and start becoming seen and understood as a national crisis?

The answer should be obvious.

Jewish Canadians should not have to wonder whether their lives are at risk and businesses will be attacked, their synagogues targeted, or their communities threatened simply because they are Jewish. Yet this is increasingly becoming part of the reality facing Canada’s Jewish community.

Prime Minister Mark Carney, in a post on X, has condemned the recent attacks, as he should. But condemnation alone is not strategy or leadership in action. Nor is it enough to establish advisory committees while Jewish Canadians continue to face intimidation and violence.

As CLARITy Coalition member Hadassah Goldberg told Marty York in the National Post, these attacks are “not only on Jews but on Canada’s values and our democracy itself.”

She is right!

Antisemitism and it's current mutation of anti-Zionism are not merely problems for Jewish Canadians. They are critical warning sign for everyone.

History teaches us that Jew hatred rarely begins with its worst acts. It begins with the normalization of rhetoric, intimidation, vandalism, conspiracy theories, and the targeting of Jewish communities. When these behaviours are tolerated, excused, or politically and bureaucratically rationalized, they create an environment in which more and more serious violence becomes possible and actual.

That is why the recent attacks in Toronto cannot be dismissed as just another news story.

They are part of a disturbing pattern beginning on October 7th that have continued and massively increased that demands more than statements of condemnation. Canada needs political leadership willing to identify antisemitism and it's current mutation anti-Zionism wherever it comes from, enforce the law without hesitation, and confront the Islamist groups and prejudices that fuel hatred and violence against Jewish Canadian.

The Jewish community should not have to ask whether Canada still has their back.

The rest of us should not have to ask either.

Canada must answer, firmly and effectively, and then prove it.