Antisemitism in Canada > Courts are beginning to convict Hamas-friendly assaulters, but what will their sentences be like? I'm guessing, pretty light.

 

Assaults, bomb threats, Nazi salutes: Canada’s courts are starting to convict those targeting Jews

The surge of crimes against Canada’s Jewish community that began after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and Israeli military response in Gaza has resulted in the first handful of criminal convictions.

In February, Omar Elkhodary was convicted of assaulting a woman as he tore down the posters she was putting up on a Toronto street showing children held hostage by Hamas.

Waisuddin Akbari, the owner of a Newmarket, Ont., shawarma shop, was convicted of threatening to bomb Toronto’s synagogues and “kill as many Jews as possible,” Global News revealed in March.

And on Thursday, Kenneth Gobin was to face sentencing for doing a Nazi salute, spouting Hitler rhetoric and spitting on a Jewish couple walking home from their synagogue in Vaughan, Ont.

The trio of cases has caught the attention of national Jewish organizations, which said they would be reading victim impact statements at the sentencing hearings of all three men.

A hate crime is more than an attack on an individual, said Richard Marceau, vice-president of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. “It is made to send a message to an entire community, to make that community feel unsafe.“

Antisemitic incidents spiked across Canada after Hamas members attacked southern Israel 19 months ago, killing 1,200 people and taking hundreds more hostage.

Since then, Jewish schools, places of worship and businesses have been shot at, torched and threatened, and the RCMP disrupted an alleged plot to bomb a pro-Israel rally on Parliament Hill.

“Caustic protests” have also targeted Jewish institutions, B’nai Brith Canada wrote in a letter last week to Prime Minister Carney, urging him to address the “crisis of antisemitism.”

According to Statistics Canada, incidents of hate crimes against the Jewish community jumped to 900 in 2023, from 527 the previous year. Last year, the number remained high at 816.

Although comprising just 1 per cent of Canada’s population, Jews are by far the top victims of hate crimes against religious groups, accounting for more than two-thirds of incidents, StatsCan data shows.

“The situation has created an atmosphere of fear for the Jewish community that is untenable,” said Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, senior policy director at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

More stories and details follow on the link below.

The Poster Ripper

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Antisemitism > Why is Ireland so virulent against Israel?

 

Another Grotesque Attack on Israel from Ireland

Jan 5, 2025 10:00 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

A straight line can be drawn from Irish President Éamon de Valera, who paid a visit to the senior German diplomat in Dublin to express his condolences to Nazi Germany on the death of Adolf Hitler, to the deep anti-Israel animus, grading into outright antisemitism, expressed recently by Ireland’s current president Michael Higgins, its prime minister Simon Harris, and its foreign minister Micheal Martin. Now Eamon Martin, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, has come out with his own spittle-flecked message of hate for the Jewish state here:

Irish Catholic Archbishop: Israeli response to Hamas

‘merciless and disproportionate'

by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, January 2, 2025:

Irish Archbishop Eamon Martin has decried the Israeli response to Hamas attacks as merciless and disproportionate in a New Year’s Day message, delivered at a time of increased criticism by Ireland and the Catholic Church toward Israel’s prosecution of the multi-front Levantine war.

The Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland said on Tuesday that while the Hamas-led October 7 attacks were “egregious” and hostages were still being held in Gaza, the IDF’s response was “merciless and disproportionate.”

Hmm. Does that word “egregious” seem to you to be the right word to describe the Hamas attacks on October 7, in which 6,000 Hamas operatives, accompanied by a few hundred delirious civilians hoping to join in the homicidal fun, smashed into Israel and proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis? No, of course not. The Primate of All Ireland then said that while Hamas’ atrocities may have been “egregious,” Israel’s response was far worse; it was “merciless and disproportionate.”

Was there any sign of mercy in the October 7th display of unbelievably, inhuman evil by Hamas? Was there any sign of shame and disgrace by the Gazans who elected those monsters? Why does Martin expect mercy from Israelis and not from Hamas?

Over 45,000 people, including 17,000 children, have been cut down; two million people forcibly displaced; almost the entire population of Gaza is living in extreme hunger, and despite the reality of catastrophic famine conditions for hundreds of thousands of desperate civilians, humanitarian access is effectively blocked,” said Martin.

Archbishop Martin is wrong. He is mindlessly repeating Hamas propaganda about casualty figures. Let’s go into those numbers for the nth time. Hamas has claimed, through its puppet, the Gaza Ministry of Health, that 45,000 people have died in Gaza in 15 months of war. It deliberately does not distinguish between civilian and military deaths. The IDF has said that it has killed 20,000 Hamas fighters. We also know that before the Gaza war began, 800 Gazans died each month from diseases and accidents. Assuming that figure holds steady, in the fifteen months of the war, 800 x 15, or 12,000 Gazans have died of non-combat related causes. And that means the total number of civilian casualties as a result of the war amount not to 45,000, as the archbishop claims, but 25,000-12,000, or 13,000. Where did Archbishop Martin come up with that figure of “17,000 children” whom, he claims, have “been cut down,” a figure that is 4,000 more than the total for all civilians — men, women, and children — killed in the war? Why, like so many other credulous and biased souls, he took it from Hamas propagandists who incessantly repeat that figure.

Archbishop Martin claims that two million people were “forcibly displaced” by the IDF, and that must be a wicked thing. He has completely missed the point. Gazans were not “forcibly displaced,” but rather, encouraged to move out of certain areas — from cities to neighborhoods to individual buildings, in order to avoid being harmed if they remained in areas about to be targeted by the IDF. “Two million people” were not moved all at once, as Martin claims. The largest move was from the city of Rafah, where 900,000 people were encouraged to move to the safe zone set up by the IDF on the Mediterranean coast at Al-Mawasi. Most of the other warnings were directed at far fewer numbers — thousands or even hundreds of Gazans at a time. In every case, once an area was declared “cleared of Hamas terrorists,” civilians were allowed back in. This tremendous effort by the IDF to move Gazan civilians to relative safety is presented by the Primate of All Ireland as an evil act; he refuses to recognize that those warnings that led to those temporary displacements saved lives. Can he really be unaware of the fact that the IDF by March had dropped nine million leaflets, sent fifteen million text messages, and made sixteen million robocalls in Gaza, not to harm civilians, but to urge them away from danger?

Nor does he seem to be aware that it is not Israel that is preventing the food from entering Gaza. Food trucks that do enter are immediately hijacked by Hamas or criminal gangs. The food is stolen by Hamas, or resold by criminals at exorbitant prices to the hungry Gazans. Israel has offered to accompany the trucks but that has been refused.

If you have read the article just previous to this on this blog, it may colour your thinking about the validity of the Catholic Church in Ireland. On my other blog, the number of stories about Ireland's Christian Brothers sect, may add a few more shades of grey.

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