“Another day, another arson” by Brian Henry

 

August 10, 2024, Toronto.

Twice a day, I walk by the Tiferet Israel Congregation, a synagogue on Sheppard Avenue West. Today, I saw that someone had tried to burn the Bring Them Home sign out front.

A week and a half ago, a guy pulled up on a motorcycle outside Temple Sinai and then the Kehillat Shaarei Torah synagogue and burned their signs, too. (The police have video.) For Kehillat Shaarei Torah, this was the fourth time it’s been vandalized since October 7 (more here).

A couple days before that a bus for a Jewish school was torched in the parking lot of my local No Frills grocery store. This No Frills is a three-minute walk or thirty-second motorcycle ride from Temple Sinai.

The media reported the bus "caught fire," as in spontaneously combusted – call in Scully and Mulder from the X Files.

Everyone around here in my very Jewish neighbourhood believes this was the same kind of spontaneous combustion that consumed those Bring Them Home signs at the synagogues. The same kind of spontaneous combustion as at the Schara Tzedeck synagogue in Vancouver (see here) or the arson of the Jewish deli at Steeles and Keele in Toronto, where the words “Free Palestine” were dabbed on the windows (see here).

No doubt this was also similar to the spontaneous gunfire directed at a Jewish elementary school in my neighbourhood (see here) or the gunfire directed at three Jewish schools in Montreal – one of them twice (see here and here).

Unlike these other incidents, we don’t know that school bus was torched because it served a Jewish school. Could be pure chance. Could be – I hope so – but it’s the kind of thing we’ve come to expect.

People wonder, how can they burn a Bring Them Home sign – a sign calling for nothing but the freeing of hostages, some of them small children?

This isn’t a new development. Right from the start of Hamas’s war, antisemites (or pro-Palestinians as the media calls them) have been ripping down posters of the kidnapped Israelis.

It’s shocking, but not surprising. For an antisemite, it’s not possible that Jews can be victims; only perpetrators, only criminals. To an emotionally committed antisemite, the very notion of a Jewish victim is an affront, an outrage! So of course, they rip down posters of kidnapped Israelis. Of course, they burn a Bring Them Home signs.

This is the same dynamic that prompts Holocaust denial and it’s the same dynamic that prompted the instant denial that Hamas committed any atrocities on October 7. The sheer irrationality of such denials become easy to understand when we realize they’re not at all about what did or didn’t happen – they’re denials that Jews can be anything other than villains.

Thus, Holocaust denial is rife with accusations: that the Jews invented this lie of the Holocaust to play on the world’s sympathy, to extort reparation payments from Germany or to steal Arab land (meaning Israel). On top of this, Holocaust deniers add the contradictory accusation that the Jews deserved it anyway, that Hitler was right.

Graffiti by Hwy 400, just north of Toronto

Holocaust denial even includes the accusation that Israelis are the new Nazis; that is, antisemites will both deny the Nazi Holocaust and deny the Nazis did anything terrible (because Jews can’t be victims; they deserved it), while simultaneously accusing Israelis of inheriting the Nazi mantle as the world’s most evil people.

Indeed, antisemites often make such contradictory claims, particularly in the Arab world where Holocaust denial dates back to 1945 and continues to today (more here). 

“Pro-Palestinians” make the same quick turn from denial to accusation. Thus, we have Ghada Sasa, a board member of the terrorism fan club called Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East claiming it was Israeli soldiers, not Hamas, who shot hundreds of young people at the Supernova Music Festival (here).

This is not just a lone Canadian antisemite who talks like this. Denial of Hamas’s atrocities – especially of the mass rapes and gross sexual violence – has spread across the world. (For example, see an analysis of the situation in the UK here).

Even more commonly, antisemites “contextualize” Hamas’s atrocities, which is to say, they justify them. Because to experience the pleasure of self-righteous hatred, they need to believe the Jews deserved it anyway.

Thus, they accuse Israel of every great evil of the modern world: genocide, colonialism, and apartheid. Plus, they accuse Jews of being Nazis.

Tweet from former BBC journalist and Palestine specialist (more here)

For example, the far left magazine Canadian Dimension (supported by our tax dollars) has published numerous pieces by Chris Hedges who goes so far as to compare Hamas to the Warsaw Ghetto fighters.

But the Jews of Warsaw did not go rampaging through Germany, raping, torturing, and murdering. Nor were Warsaw Jews holding some 250 innocent Germans hostage. When they revolted, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters did so to avoid being shipped by cattle car to the Treblinka killing centre (history here). In contrast, Hamas’s motivation is the same as the Nazis: to kill Jews.

These “pro-Palestinians” are saying what antisemites have always said: Jews are criminals – everywhere and always. To kill them, to rape them, to torture them, and to kidnap them is no crime. To committed antisemites, the very notion is an outrage.

Thus, at every anti-Israel rally the world over you will hear the claim that Palestinians have “a right to resist by any means necessary” and the slogan, “Resistance is justified when Palestine is occupied.”

By “Palestine” they of course mean the country the rest of world calls Israel, and by “resistance,” they mean what the rest of the world calls terrorism, atrocities, and crimes against humanity.

This is why it’s no surprise when the “pro-Palestine” crowd rips down and burns posters of men, women and children held hostage. Because after all, they’re Jewish. It’s still shocking – seeing that burned Bring Them Home Sign while out on my daily walk shocked me. But a surprise? No. It’s always been like this.

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This piece was originally published on the Canadian Zionist Forum.

Read more of my pieces here (and scroll down). ~Brian