Europe has fallen and the only real question is will Canada be next?
The latest outbreak of violence against Jews in Europe occurred last week in Amsterdam.
That’s the city where Holocaust diarist Anne Frank and her family hid for two years until their cramped place of refuge known as the “secret annex” was discovered by the Gestapo and they were shipped to Nazi concentration camps, where Anne would die of typhus two years later in Bergen-Belsen at the age of 15,
The simple reality is that large parts of Europe have never been a safe and secure place for Jews — one of the reasons the state of Israel was created in the wake of the Holocaust.
This time, according the mayor of Amsterdam and the prime minister and king of the Netherlands, Jews were hunted down by antisemites in the wake of a soccer match on Thursday between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the Dutch team Ajax, sending five victims to hospital and prompting dozens of arrests, evoking memories of Europe’s shameful history of murderous “pogroms” against Jews.
While these attacks were widely condemned by European leaders, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as U.S. President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, there were also media reports that Jewish soccer fans provoked the violence by tearing down a Palestinian flag, shouting racist, anti-Arab slogans and attacking demonstrators protesting Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.
If that’s true, wrong is wrong on both sides.
But in the wider context of the global explosion of Jew hatred ever since Hamas launched its terrorist attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, it is painfully obvious except to those who refuse to see it that the world’s oldest form of hate — hatred against Jews — is on the march everywhere, yet again, and our politicians, while mouthing pious phrases condemning antisemitism for over a year now, are incapable of stopping it.
Attacks against Jews in Canada have steadily escalated from vandalism, to shots fired at Jewish day schools, to threats and intimidation aimed at Jewish Canadians where they live, where they work, where they learn and where they pray..
Sadly, the damage is permanent and there is no going back to what we once were.