Canada’s Cops Stand on Guard – for Hamas Bye Bye, Canada. Bruce Bawer

Yes, this is who “we” are as Canadians – we won’t arrest anti-Israeli rioters who are in our country illegally and who are threatening our citizens while committing blatant acts of vandalism, but we’ll arrest the Israeli leader in a New York minute for doing his best to protect his people from savages. (Netanyahu, by the way, was burned in effigy by the Montreal rioters.) And just as the British bobbies are always ready to slap the cuffs on Tommy Robinson, the valiant critic of Islam whose very existence makes him a walking provocation to its adherents, the equally cowed and cowardly Canadian cops are unafraid to arrest the reliably peaceful Ezra Levant, who for years, like Tommy across the pond, has long been persecuted by his country’s government (including its so-called human-rights bureaucracy) and its minions in uniform, for daring to call out jihad.

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Montreal. In the 1980s and 90s, when I lived in New York, I made several summertime trips to the Canadian metropolis. It was a beautiful city, pleasant and safe, with a great art museum, plenty of terrific restaurants, and fun nightlife along Rue St. Catherine. If the clerks and cabbies and waiters in Paris responded rudely to my entreaties, invariably delivered in my imperfect but earnest French, their counterparts in Montreal were as genial as could be, at least once it had been established that I was not that dreaded thing, an English-speaking Canadian, but rather an American whose French somehow came out sounding more like their distinctive dialect than like the original version of the language that was the pride of the City of Lights.

Speaking of language, I especially enjoyed walking around Westmount, Montreal’s upscale English-speaking neighborhood, where (as we all recently discovered) Kamala Harris lived when she was in high school. From there – this became an annual routine (or should I say ritual?) – I would walk up a forested slope to the immense St. Joseph’s Oratory, which loomed over the city from the top of Mount Royal. Inside the church, the air was always dense with the scent of hundreds of lighted candles. Nailed to a high wall and lit by candlelight were hundreds of crutches that had been left there over the decades by handicapped people who claimed to have been cured thanks to the prayers they had sent up from this sacred place. Leaving the church by descending its front steps, 283 in all, I would always encounter a sea of people, all of them at the ends of their pilgrimages, and all of them climbing slowly on their knees up to the great church doors, their hearts filled with faith and hope.

For those pilgrims, indeed, Montreal was a place of hope. Today it is a fallen place, a city that is in the process of being given over to a belief system that bears no relationship to the faith that still, I gather, draws penitents to the oratory on the hill. Promoted to naive Westerners in the years after 9/11 as a religion of peace, that belief system is anything but; it is, rather, an ideology of war, of conquest, of hatred and contempt. On Friday, November 22, as Robert Spencer wrote here the other day, disciples of that ideology and their bamboozled allies took to the streets of Montreal, “attacking police, burning cars, breaking windows, and in general displaying their profound understanding of Allah’s command to ‘strike terror in the enemies of Allah’ (Qur’an 8:60).” In all the melee, which was planned by a couple of groups called Divest for Palestine and the Convergence of Anti-Capitalist Struggles, a total of three – count ’em, three – protesters were taken into custody by police. Also arrested was Montreal native Ezra Levant, owner of the alternative journalistic outlet Rebel News, whose offense was being out on the streets reporting on the subhuman anarchy.

The occasion of this particular outburst was the 70th annual session of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, which the organizers targeted because of what they called NATO’s “complicity with Israel’s military,”. Of course, recent events have suggested otherwise: after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, several NATO countries readily announced that they’d be happy to snap up these two felons at the first opportunity and hand them over to the ICC so that justice can be done. Among the NATO leaders who were quick to sell out Israel in this manner was Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. “We are one of the founding members of the International Criminal Court, International Court of Justice,” Trudeau stated publicly. “We stand up for international law, and we will abide by all the regulations and rulings of the international courts. This is just who we are as Canadians.”

Yes, this is who “we” are as Canadians – we won’t arrest anti-Israeli rioters who are in our country illegally and who are threatening our citizens while committing blatant acts of vandalism, but we’ll arrest the Israeli leader in a New York minute for doing his best to protect his people from savages. (Netanyahu, by the way, was burned in effigy by the Montreal rioters.) And just as the British bobbies are always ready to slap the cuffs on Tommy Robinson, the valiant critic of Islam whose very existence makes him a walking provocation to its adherents, the equally cowed and cowardly Canadian cops are unafraid to arrest the reliably peaceful Ezra Levant, who for years, like Tommy across the pond, has long been persecuted by his country’s government (including its so-called human-rights bureaucracy) and its minions in uniform, for daring to call out jihad.

For that’s what the November 22 disorder in Montreal was, of course: not a rally, not a demo, but the latest wave of jihad by enemies within who – emboldened by Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7 of last year, as well as by the pusillanimous response of authorities in countries like Britain and Canada – have seized the day, ratcheting up the level of violence in cities across the West. Whatever one may say about these vermin, they’re a patient lot, understanding that as long as they keep pushing, the governments led by feckless fools like Justin Trudeau and Keir Starmer will keep retreating, a few inches at a time, until there’s nowhere left to retreat to.

Trudeau certainly proved them right on November 22. While Montreal streets were burning, he was elsewhere in the same city, attending a Taylor Swift concert, where, as Levant put it, he was videotaped “dancing like a teenage girl.” Unsurprisingly, critics compared him to Nero fiddling while Rome burned, a parallel I won’t go into here because Robert Spencer has already addressed it definitively and with his usual encyclopedic knowledge of history. For my part, I’ll merely point out that that this pathetic spectacle perfectly captured the preternatural feebleness of a purported leader who might well have responded to the public disorder by rushing to the scene of the turmoil, ordering mass arrests, and doing all he could to ensure that the punishment for all participants would be severe, but who instead behaved in such a way as to remind any devout Muslim warrior of a bacha – that is to say, a male minor who, in accordance with the common Afghani practice known as bacha bazi, is kept in slavery by an adult male for the purposes of sexual exploitation.

The image of Trudeau at that Taylor Swift performance also brought another act of jihad to mind – namely, the one that took place at that Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena on May 17, 2017 (exactly seven years to the day before the Montreal mayhem), where jihadist bombers killed 17 people and injured 1,071, many of them teenage girls like the ones surrounding Trudeau at the Taylor Swift gig. Both of these jihadist incidents were made possible by gutless governance. The horror show in Manchester, like so many other deadly terrorist acts in the West that came in waves during the years after 9/11, has been all but dropped down the memory hole by the media and by Western governments in the name of not rocking the boat – of maintaining public order in the short term. The result, however, has been the increasing empowerment of the forces of Islam – an empowerment that, needless to say, guarantees in the long-term the transfer of authority in much of the Western world from craven appeasers like Trudeau to the unblinking champions of Allah.

Frontpagemag/December 5, 2024