Terry Glavin: The antisemitic nightmares are not stopping

It was three years ago, October 7, 2023, at 6:29 a.m., that the nightmare began. A bloody convulsion of barbaric mayhem roared out of Gaza. It swept through Israel’s southern kibbutzim and tore through a music festival on the holiday of Simchat Torah, the celebration that concludes the autumn festival days at the close of the month of Tishrei.

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Before nightfall, the death toll was greater than any single-day event in Jewish history since the time of the Nazi death camps. When the counting was done, at least 1,195 people were slaughtered, most of them gunned down as they ran in panic, or riddled with bullets along with their children or burned alive in their homes. Another 3,400 people were wounded, and 251 people, including the elderly, were taken into captivity.

There was another nightmare that began that day. Within hours of the massacres, throughout the English-speaking world and beyond, there were celebrations. From Vancouver to New York, and from Los Angeles to Istanbul, the killers mobilized by Ḥarakat al-Muqawamah al-ʾIslamiyyah, otherwise known as Hamas, were praised as gallant resistance fighters. Heroes.

Columnist Jesse Kline keeps you up to date with what’s happening in Israel and the effects of antisemitism on life here in Canada. Friday mornings.

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An upwelling of antisemitic depravity burst its banks from the universities, the “social justice” milieu and all the activist networks that so routinely summon protesters into the public squares. The grisly mutation of Judenrein to Judenstaatrein — the denial of a Jewish right to life to the denial of the right to a Jewish state — was all of a sudden out in the open, jubilant and positively gleeful at the news of what had happened.

Across Canada, by the morning of Sunday, Oct. 8, banners were already being hung from freeway overpasses, placards were already being hoisted and slogans were already being chanted at rallies exhorting solidarity with the heroic Palestinian “resistance.” And so it went, week after week, month after month.

Campuses became sites of semi-permanent “protest” encampments demonizing Israel. A coordinated bomb threat targeted more than 100 Jewish institutions across the country. Synagogues were firebombed and vandalized. Shots were fired at Jewish schools in Montreal. Jews were besieged in their own neighbourhoods in Toronto. Jewish students were afraid to attend classes. Over the past two years, Statistics Canada has counted 1,731 hate crimes targeting Jews that were reported to the police.

The Israeli military’s response to October 7 was devastating. While the death toll remains hotly contested, tens of thousands of non-combatants in Gaza were killed or wounded in a campaign that has left the enclave a wasteland of rubble and misery.

But Israelis didn’t just wake up on October 7 to find themselves under assault from a ground incursion of the Hamas military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. The murderers of October 7 also came from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — the PFLP, particularly, is deeply embedded in “anti-Zionist” networks in Europe and Canada. And almost immediately after October 7 Israel came under a steady bombardment of thousands of rockets and guided missiles from the Hezbollah-controlled territories in Lebanon.

Within the year, nearly a quarter of a million Israelis had been displaced from the “Gaza envelope” along with more than 40 communities near the Lebanese border.

The Houthi militants of Yemen, meanwhile, began a reign of terror targeting shipping in the Red Sea. The Khomeinist Islamic Republic of Iran, the key sponsor of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and about a dozen other terrorist proxies in the Greater Middle East, soon began targeting Israel directly. The “12 Day War” between Iran and Israel last year ended up drawing the Trump administration into a catastrophic and erratic operation that has spread through the Gulf states and dramatically disrupted global oil supplies.

Into this grim state of affairs, there are some small mercies worth noticing, and some aren’t even that small: Weakened by the tribulations endured by its Khomeinist and Hezbollah allies, the gruesome Baathist regime in Damascus finally fell. After having waged a brutal decade-long war on the Syrian people that cost perhaps half a million lives and made refugees of another five million Syrians, the mass murderer Bashar Assad decamped to Moscow, and the new government in Damascus is well on its way to stabilizing the country.

Also good news, even it was mostly good luck: The co-pilot of an Israel-bound Flydubai Airlines flight who attempted to commandeer the aircraft last week is alleged to be a “lone wolf” jihadist who had intended to crash the airplane at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, but he was subdued by passengers, averting what might have been an atrocity on the scale of September 11, 2001.

In Canada, antisemitic hate crimes appear to be on the decline, although Statistic Canada reports that last year, 71 per cent of anti-religious hate crimes targeted Jews, who represent less than one per cent of Canada’s population. According to a report from the “J7” group (representing Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the U.K. and U.S.), more than 23,000 incidents involving Jew-hatred occurred in 2025, including 20 killings.

Canada is “one intelligence failure away from a mass casualty event,” the report found. And right on cue: In Belleville, Ontario, the Jew-obsessed 29-year-old Sean Ward who shot up the Sons of Jacob synagogue last month was thwarted in his apparent intent to carry out a mass shooting at Yom Kippur services, only by the bravery of a local police constable, Jeff Smith, who was gravely wounded in the encounter.

Ottawa’s unaccountable inattention to the predicament facing Canada’s Jews may be subsiding, at long last. For whatever it might be worth, as of two weeks ago Public Safety Canada has now clearly identified “anti-Zionism” as a form of antisemitism. The finding has triggered “anti-Zionist” complaints, petitions and protests, as you would expect.

“Anti-Zionism” remains a disfigurement of much of the NATO capitals’ popular culture and activist set. Israel’s diaspora ministry counts 262 anti-Israel events organized to coincide with the anniversary of the October 7 massacres. Most of them are planned for next weekend, including at least 14 events scheduled across Canada. Worldwide, the diaspora ministry counts 87 of the events as medium or high risk, owing to their proximity to Israeli diplomatic missions.

Another small mercy: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump have fully retreated from their dead-end ideas about establishing a “Gaza Riviera,” and Netanyahu will face the Israeli electorate later this month, defending his role in the worst and most catastrophic intelligence failure in Israeli history. And President Trump’s idiosyncratic “Board of Peace” agenda is moving along. It’s at a snail’s pace, but it’s moving. It’s more or less the same as the French-Saudi New York declaration constructed last July, but with more caveats and off-ramps and ambiguities about when and whether Hamas will disarm, and which weapons Hamas will place in some sort of depot. Rockets and mortars, or kalashnikovs, too?

It’s certainly no “two-state solution.” But for now it will have to do.

National Post

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