Iddo Moed: The hero of Belleville represents what Canada should stand for

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On Sept. 20, Yom Kippur eve, the holiest night of the Jewish year, Const. Jeff Smith put his life on the line to save Jews in Canada. Bravely, decisively and without indifferent delay or hateful rationalization, he placed himself in harm’s way, sustaining significant injury, to prevent the loss of innocent lives. At considerable cost to himself, Smith acted and averted the tragedy of Bondi Beach in Australia.

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The shooting and armed confrontation at the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Ont. was not, of course, the first of its kind for Canada, nor did it occur in a vacuum. It was just the latest hate crime in the inflation of such events to their highest level since recorded statistics in Canada. In the past year alone, 70 per cent of all religiously motivated hate crimes, nearly 800 incidents, were directed against the Canadian Jewish Community.

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For the Belleville synagogue, it remains to be seen if Israel and anti-Zionism, the most common excuse for such events, will emerge as cause or attempted justification. This is of no small concern, considering that the overwhelming majority of Canadian Jews support their right to self-determination in their ancestral land of Israel, what Zionism is. Anti-Zionism has become Canada’s new Jew hatred, antisemitism evolved for this digital age of disinformation and artificial realities. New tools have been applied and old libels resurrected to be heated by virtue-signaling, ignorance and malevolence into a drug to which the world has become addicted.

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These issues are foremost for Jews in Canada and everywhere as we observe the most solemn period of the Jewish New-Year and as we contemplate the year gone by and the year to come. We ask questions and we search for answers and like many others my mind turns to the event one year ago to this date. One year ago, on Sept. 21, 2025, Canada became the first free democracy to announce on the international stage that it would “post-conditionally” condone and reward the proceeds of terror with recognition. To Canada’s Jews and Jews everywhere Canada had broadcast to the world that it had chosen Palestinian self-determination over self-determination for Israel and the Jews.

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Formal recognition of one group committed to the destruction of the other. Condemnation of a free democracy, the one-and-only Jewish homeland and the majority of Jewish Canadians who support it. It sent the message that Canada’s values are extremist values, and in the year that has followed Canadian rhetoric if not policy has continued to single out and expose the one-and-only Jewish state to this double-standard of condemnation. Appeasement and capitulation to terror did not yield dividends of peace for Canada’s Jews or the Middle East. And despite Canadian leadership’s claim that recognition does not legitimize terrorism, in Canada and reinforced by inaction, it has permitted, emboldened and tacitly condoned rising violence against its Jews. The floodgates of hatred have opened upon Canadian Jewry of all walks of life, in public and in private, across institutions and in some places, at all levels of government.