WINNIPEG — I was writing a Sunday column for the first night of Chanukah this year, but local public affairs issues requiring follow-up reports from me meant I had to set that column aside.
Had my Chanukah column been submitted and published, I would now be typing up this column with the lede: “I told you so.”
The slaughter of Jews at a religious celebration by Jihadists was entirely predictable. The difference between our country and Bondi Beach is that the terrorist attack happened there first.
Like Australia, the policies of our governments in Canada- federal, provincial and civic — have been taken over by jet-setting globalists with an agenda of “diversity equity and inclusion” that labels Jews as “oppressors” and piles on wholesale unvetted immigration from third-world cultures that despise Jews and Christians. Opponents of their agenda are labeled “bigots” and “racists” for daring to suggest societal cohesion and public safety was being put at risk by their self-serving visions for our future.
Government and police officials defend the coordinated radical protests launched after the October 7th Hamas invasion of Israel, which target Jewish businesses and neighborhoods with blood libels about a “genocide/famine in Gaza” and chants of “globalize the Intifada.” They pretend the rhetoric is merely “anti-Zionist” free speech and not antisemitic.
We hear that rhetoric, intended to incite hatred and violence, loudly repeated in Winnipeg too. It even happened inside Health Sciences Centre as Jewish medical staff tried to light the menorah. Despite surveillance cameras everywhere inside the HSC facility, as I compose this column, somehow no arrest has been made.
Exactly a year ago the Winnipeg Sun published my profile of a former Winnipeg broadcaster who pulls no punches in her fight for Jewish survival in Canada. Dahlia Kurtz tagged Justin Trudeau as “2024 Jew-Hater of the Year” because “he has done absolutely nothing to help our community or Canada, (and) he has done everything to help people who want to take Canada down.”
Days after the Bondi Beach attack, Toronto police announced a gang of Muslim thugs, already charged with serious weapons and ammunition charges, were “hate-motivated extremists” who had attempted to kidnap three Jewish women to confine as sex slaves. One of the perps, now also charged with supporting ISIS, came from Pakistan on a student visa in 2023 on Trudeau’s watch.
The arrests have shattered the illusion that Jews are still safe in Canada. “Our enemies want us dead. They say this. More and more loudly. And here is why I am afraid to continue living here,” a musical producer wrote to Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow. “What we live with here in Toronto is exactly what the Jewish community of Australia has been experiencing since October 7th, culminating in the Bondi Beach Massacre.”
In a social media post, Professor Gad Saad of Montreal described the downward spiral, hastened by the policies of Trudeau and his successor as Prime Minister, Mark Carney:
“My family came to Canada in the mid 1970s. Over the next 25 years or so, we lived in complete security. I also studied, worked, and travelled extensively in the United States and also recognized the beauty of the American spirit (which is imbued in the fibre of my being). But now, I don’t recognize the West. It feels daily as though it is the place from which we escaped (and worse).”
“Millions of other immigrants who fled the same religion as we did share similar sentiments. People born in Canada and the US are now waking up but it is extremely late in the process. We did this to ourselves.”
As discussed by Lawrence Pinsky in the Winnipeg Sun, “This is not just a Toronto or Montreal crisis; it is ours.”
“I am concerned about what I see in Winnipeg and authorities are taking our safety for granted,” Kurtz said last year. “I see it escalating faster in Winnipeg than I expected.”
The statistics from the Prairie region, including Manitoba, saw 447 antisemitic incidents in 2024, up 33.4% from the previous year, proving her point.
A Winnipeg resident told me after this past year, he now shares the same concerns that Kurtz expressed:
“Even as a non-Jewish person, I found your reports on the soccer field attack, your personally experienced anti-semitism, and the horrible protest allowed at the Israeli Folklorama pavilion so unsettling. It was mind boggling to me that the politicians from the various levels of government that had their little ‘welcome to Winnipeg’s celebration of cultures and diversity’ blurbs in the (Folklorama) guide were basically silent after the abhorrent display outside the Rady Center on the last Saturday of the festival. Can you imagine such behaviour and hate being tolerated outside any other pavilion?”
He continued, “The rise in unchecked anti-semitism in our city also made me realize our elected officials are at best financially beholden to, or intimidated by, certain vocal groups and voting blocks (or worse actually share their hateful outlook and false twisted narratives). Regardless, their lack of action only emboldens the groups that look to intimidate the Jewish community and everyone else… Strange how the Jews in Israel are somehow the only indigenous group on the globe that are viewed as victimizers rather than victims. Once again indoctrination masquerading as education.”
Premier Wab Kinew brags about enacting “Never Again” education about the 1940’s Holocaust that sent six million Jews to their deaths. But Kinew has done nothing to mandate education about the modern-day Islamist threat to Jews and civil society in Manitoba and worldwide. Instead, lessons about “Islamophobia” will be taught.
Pinsky explained that Kinew promised a special Crown prosecutor to handle antisemitism cases, yet hasn’t provided proof anyone was hired. Kinew failed to adopt safety-zone legislation protecting Jewish institutions from targeted harassment, honoured activists who describe Zionism as “a disease” and — during Grey Cup week — raised the Palestinian flag at the Legislature.
“Australia’s recent experience showed what happens when leaders ignore intimidation, hate and calls for violence,” warned Pinsky. Why did that country fail to protect their Jewish citizens?
As Catherine Perez-Shakdam explained on the Forum for Foreign Relations website, western leaders continue “to treat intimidation as “activism” (and) treat the targeted minority’s fear as a public relations inconvenience.”
“Jewish history is the story of what happens when protection becomes discretionary… (That’s) how an external threat actor extracts strategic value from domestic social dynamics: it does not need to convince everyone; it needs to make protection politically expensive.”
“Never Again” used to have meaning. Now, for leaders like Wab Kinew and Mark Carney, it is a political calculation. The consequences of it in Australia was paid in the blood of innocent people on Bondi Beach. Never again.
— Marty Gold is a Winnipeg journalist and a guest writer for the Winnipeg Sun. You can find more of his work at The Great Canadian Talk Show
This article was first published by The Winnipeg Sun.
