MONTREAL — “Our community has 250 years of history in Quebec. We are proud, we are Quebecers, we’re not going anywhere. This campaign of terror against us will not succeed,” Eta Yudin, Quebec vice president at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, told a press conference here Nov. 9.
She was referring to a series of attacks against Jewish schools, institutions and students. These included the firebombing of the Congregation Beth Tikvah synagogue and the offices of Federation CJA, a Jewish organization, one month after the Hamas Oct. 7 pogrom killed over 1,200 Jews in Israel.
The National Council of Canadian Muslims condemned the “cowardly and appalling” shots fired at two Montreal Jewish schools Nov. 9. One of the Jewish schools was hit for a second time on Nov. 12.
Yudin said that the Nov. 9 attack on the schools is even more traumatic because it came on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-organized anti-Jewish pogroms in Germany in 1938 that marked the beginning of the Holocaust.
On the same day, pro-Hamas students at McGill University demonstrated, calling for a cease-fire by Israel. They publicized it using an image of a crowd kicking in glass windows, a crude antisemitic reference to Kristallnacht.
The day before, several Jewish students at Concordia University put up a table with displays calling for the release of the 240 hostages held by Hamas. They were physically attacked by a group of anti-Israel students and others. Some attackers shouted Jew-hating slurs. One yelled at a Jewish woman, “Go back to Poland, whore.” Two students were injured.
At an Oct. 28 anti-Israel demonstration organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement, the notorious Jew-hating Imam Adil Charkaoui called for the killing of Israeli citizens and the destruction of Israel.
“Allah, count every one of them and kill them all, and do not exempt even one of them,” he said in Arabic. Many in the crowd responded with cheers.
At a Militant Labor Forum attended by 20 people here Nov. 11, Communist League member John Steele explained the international campaign led by many capitalist governments and the middle-class left for a cease-fire by Israel is a way of giving support to Hamas.
“It’s outrageous that Ottawa is pressing Israel to carry out a ‘pause’ and ‘negotiate’ with an organization that openly declares that its goal is the physical extermination of the Jews,” he said. “Working people instead need to support Israel’s drive to crush Hamas to prevent that from happening.
“The history of the Nazi Holocaust, the second imperialist world war and imperialism’s current drive toward World War III show that the only way to eradicate Jew-hatred is to overthrow the capitalist system and replace its rule with a revolutionary workers’ government,” Steele explained.
“The examples of the 1917 socialist revolution in Russia led by Vladimir Lenin and the 1959 Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro prove this is the only way to do this.
“This requires the building of mass revolutionary workers parties led by a tested Marxist cadre. This is the objective of the Communist League,” Steele concluded.