Raymond J. de Souza: In France, the armed forces protect synagogues. Perhaps they should here, too - National Post

Bullet holes are seen in the stained-glass windows at the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Ont., following an attack on the eve of Yom Kippur, Sept. 20, that left the shooter dead and a police officer critically injured. Photo by Ernest Doroszuk / PostmediaArticle contentDuring the decades I lived in Kingston, Ont., I visited Belleville countless times. It’s on the way to Toronto and was a favourite place for a road-trip milkshake. I often stopped at the imposing St. Michael’s on the hill, where a good friend was the pastor. It’s a friendly place.

I doubt I ever passed the Sons of Jacob Synagogue, where the Yom Kippur shooting took place. It’s not far from the imposing churches nearby, but it is rather modest. It’s not a prominent synagogue in a prominent place. Which made the shooting rather more ominous still.

The congregation that gathered on Sunday night was small, some 25 pious souls at prayer. This was not a grand, historic house of worship in Montreal or Toronto. There is a not a large Jewish population in Belleville. The congregation does not have a full-time rabbi. And yet, even here, antisemitic violence has arrived. And if it has arrived at a little synagogue in a quiet city, then the toxin has spread far indeed.

Columnist Jesse Kline keeps you up to date with what’s happening in Israel and the effects of antisemitism on life here in Canada. Friday mornings.

A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.

The next issue of Channel Israel will soon be in your inbox.

We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again

That spread is not only geographic. Over the past several years, as antisemitic attacks on synagogues — as well as on Jewish schools, community centres and businesses — have spread, the source has usually been radicalized elements of Arab and Muslim diaspora communities. Indeed, as news of the shooting broke, but before the shooter had been identified, some media sources immediately raised the spectre of immigration as the likely culprit.

It wasn’t. The shooter was Sean Ward, who died on Monday from wounds suffered in his gunfight with Belleville police. Ward served for five years in the Canadian Armed Forces; he was discharged in 2022 over his objection to the COVID vaccine mandate. He later joined a lawsuit against the CAF in relation to that.

That is quite a long way from the cultural space of the protesters, agitators and harassers that we have become accustomed to seeing in the Jewish neighbourhoods of our big cities. It is a manifestation that antisemitism is not restricted to the extreme left, as it were, but also the extreme right. More menacing still, it is seeping in from the extremes toward the mainstream.