If the state and police won't protect Jews, who will?

Police inaction, pro-Hamas mobs, and Jewish leaders addicted to words... It’s pure luck a Bondi-like attack hasn't happened here. Yet

The Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration massacre, Australia’s deadliest terrorist incident, which resulted in 15 dead and 40 wounded, continues to dominate my thoughts. One particular witness account haunts me. A mother, separated from her three-year-old daughter, found some of the few police officers present. She told a journalist: “These police officers were hiding behind a car… I tried to grab one of their guns. Then one of them grabbed me and said ‘no.’”

Here, I see encapsulated diaspora Jews’ present dilemma in the form of a plea and response: Protect us, state law enforcement agent. No? Then allow us the means to protect ourselves. Also, no.

Our immigrant forebears believed that in democratic melting pots they would be entitled to the same protection from violence as any other minority. Bondi clarifies that our security in the West has always been contingent on their being no political downside to its provision. Fear of organized Islamism’s growing power outstripping law enforcement’s power to contain it activated the contingency in Australia.

Here, whether it’s police inaction on Al-Quds Day, where virulent Jew hatred streams forth unabated, or continually blocked roads by pro-Hamas protesters calling for a “global intifada” (a dog whistle for violence toward Jews), or the ongoing intimidation and harassment of Jews in Toronto’s Bathurst-Shepherd area by antisemitic mobs — all without consequence — police, in my colleague Fr Raymond De Souza’s words earlier this week, “have been allergic to any enforcement of existing laws that might give some relief to Canadians who are simply living while Jewish.”

It’s pure luck a Bondi-like attack hasn’t happened here. Yet.

Jews’ vulnerability to violence was the theme of a late-December episode of Breaking History, a podcast hosted by Free Press expert in national security, Eli Lake. Titled “A History of Tough Jews,” the segment posed the question of what Jewish self-defence should look like when security guarantees for minorities by the state prove illusory.

Lake revisits the 1930s, when Jews in New York were confronted by mass rallies of virulently antisemitic Hitler sympathizers, while police remained passive, not unlike the situation today. The only effective pushback came from Murder Inc., a crime confederation founded by alpha mafiosos Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. Murder Inc. never killed any Bund sympathizers, but they did bring baseball bats to the fight, and not just for show. (Rich Cohen’s book, Tough Jews, offers a gripping account of these unusual patriots.)

The link between today’s Marxist-Islamist brand of antisemitism to the 1930s is the role played by intellectuals. “It is truly shameful,” writes Stephen H. Norwood in his 2011 book, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, “that the administration, alumni, and student leaders of (Harvard), America’s most prominent university, who were in a position to influence American opinion at a critical time, remained indifferent to Germany’s terrorist campaign against the Jews and instead, on many occasions, assisted the Nazis in their efforts to gain acceptance in the West.” The Holocaust ended American academics’ heavy flirtation with Hitler, but the October 7 pogrom further inflamed the antisemitism of progressive intellectuals.

On his podcast, agreeing with Lansky that sometimes “you need a thug to stop a thug,” Lake advises Jews besieged in their institutions by pro-Hamasniks to “get in their face” or even in certain scenarios to “pack heat.” He also notes that the Jewish press at the time deplored the gangsters’ actions as “immoral.” Ah yes, our famous Jewish “morality.” Which never yet stopped a bullet.

Unlike American Jews, Canadian Jews won’t choose to “pack heat” to combat antisemitism. But how about some encouragement from our Jewish community leaders to at least “get in their faces”? That won’t happen here. Our Jewish leadership is wholly committed to words — so far a terabyte of them — words of explanation, persuasion and supplication to the powers that be for permission to access our Charter rights. The words aren’t working, but when Jews do try to “get in their face,” they are cold-shouldered.

In 2015, when BDS activism was already aggressive, the Toronto-based Jewish Defence League of Canada (JDL) — defunct since 2021 — wanted to open a Montreal branch. JDL Canada never carried any weapons. According to Meir Weinstein, former head of JDL Canada, whom I interviewed by telephone, his team never carried any weapons, and it was not their policy to mask. They wore self-identifying vests. Weinstein also told me they did not initiate physical confrontation. They helped organize counter-protests, stood tall, calm and unflinching beside timid Jews with Israeli flags, and monitored the behaviour of scofflaws, reporting them to police, who appreciated the help. They also penetrated radical cells, relaying information to security agencies that aided in their terrorism investigations. They did good work. But they were too … FAFO, shall we say, for liberal Jews’ taste.

Legally, they were mostly squeaky clean (a JDL member was arrested for assault in 2017), but were perceived as tainted through name association with the American JDL, which wasn’t. I urged JDL Canada, futilely, to change its name to “Shomrim” — “guardians” in Hebrew — and so discard the American JDL baggage. The Montreal branch never materialized because the Canadian Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) publicly accused them of “irresponsibly contributing to the creation of a climate of fear within the Jewish community.” “Creation”? No. There was already a justified climate of fear. JDL Canada deserved CIJA’s blessing. With it, JDL numbers and activities might have grown sufficiently to embarrass political leaders into responsible action.

In late December, perhaps triggered by a major terrorism and attempted kidnapping investigation (one of those indicted is already out on bail), and by the aggressive pro-Hamas Boxing Day protest at the Toronto Eaton Centre, Ontario Solicitor-General Michael Kerzner sent a sternly-worded letter to Toronto Police Services Chief Myron Demkiw and Shelley Carroll, Chair of the Toronto Police Services Board, urging “firm, consistent and visible enforcement of (laws against) hate, intimidation and harassment-motivated offences” by their officers. Or else…what? He doesn’t say.

Pleading Words ‘R Us. Stern Words ‘R Them. And the pogrom-in-waiting beat goes on.