Last week a Brockville Ontario man travelled to Ottawa, a distance of over 100 kilometres, and stabbed an elderly Jewish woman he didn't know in a grocery store. The act appears premeditated and we have to assume that the woman was dressed in a way that reflected Orthodox Jewish customs regarding apparel and easily identified by the cowardly assailant, a man also in his 70s. Police arrested the perpetrator and have charged him with a hate crime.
A few weeks ago a Jewish man in his 30s was violently attacked while in a Montreal park with his children, again an unprovoked and cowardly assault.
Reports from authorities across the country identify a rise in hate crimes directed toward Jewish individuals and instituitions, including shots fired at schools. This is horrendous and leaders immediately condemn these anti-Jewish attacks, yet they persist.
Those of us who are Christians and part of Christian communities need to be vocal in expressing our disgust at these acts of terror and the senseless conspiracies that motivate them. Our support for Jews and Judaism is imperative, especially in a time when misguided people conflate the actions by the state of Israel in Gaza with the Jewish religion as a whole.
I'll note that there have also been several incidents in the past months of Muslim women being attacked in public places, easy targets for the cowardly and hateful. These too must stop.
Do we need to introduce tougher sentences for hate crimes as Pierre Poilievre maintains? We hear this every time such an incident occurs but we have laws in place and police forces are more than willing to enforce them. We do need to be vigilant in every sphere of daily life because hatred is a poison.
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