Late last year I sat down to breakfast in Ottawa, Ontario, with Dr. Einat Wilf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She had come to Canada’s capital to speak about the war in Israel, what Palestinians really want, and the future of a possible two-state solution. Near the end of our chat, I asked if she had seen any of the “pro-Palestinian” rallies that had become a weekly occurrence in the city. “One of them went by my hotel last night,” Wilf said. “There’s a very dark energy to them. Serious pre-pogrom vibes.”
The word pogrom is the Yiddish word for “devastation” or “destruction.” What it refers to, historically, are the mob attacks that were a regular feature of life for Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries—attacks that most often were passively or openly supported by the state.
Wilf chose it deliberately.
In the roughly six months since we sat down together, the situation in Ottawa and across the country has only worsened. Canada has become one of the most antisemitic countries in the Western world.
If you doubt that assertion, it’s important to note that’s how others have described it, too.
In a report released on May 6 by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, it states that from October 7, 2023 through the end of 2024, antisemitism in Canada skyrocketed an astounding 670 percent. Further, between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2024, there were 1,500 pro-Palestinian rallies in Toronto alone. That’s over four a day—every day—for a year straight.
While the outbreak of antisemitism throughout the West has been precipitous in virtually every country—the tenor, violence, and extremist nature of Jew-hatred in Canada has ratcheted up in a way few other places on Earth have experienced.
Consider the following—much of which has gotten scant media attention.
Targeting Jews in Their Backyards
In September 2024 protesters sympathetic to Hamas and the “resistance” jubilantly rallied outside a Jewish retirement facility in Ottawa where several Holocaust survivors live, and where 60 percent of the residents suffer from dementia. Chants of “Go back to Europe” and “We want bullets and missiles!” in Arabic could be heard from their bedrooms.
On Remembrance Day in 2024 at Sir Robert Borden public school in Ottawa, where there is a large Jewish student body, a Palestinian protest song was the only song played during an event to honor Canadian soldiers. When pressed on the choice of music, Principal Aaron Hobbs said it was chosen to add some diversity and inclusion to a day usually about “a white guy who has done something related to the military.”
There have been numerous instances where, in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, protesters have dressed up like Palestinian terrorists, including the October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar.
Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protests surrounded the Holocaust Museum in Montreal in March 2024, where they shouted, “Death to Israel” and “Death to the Jews.”
At a softball game for teenage girls between Canada and Israel as part of last year’s Canada Cup Women’s International Softball Championship in Surrey, British Columbia, protesters stood on the sidelines wearing keffiyehs, holding signs that read “Israel is a genocidal state,” with another equating Israel with Nazi Germany.
In April, a pro-Hamas rally was staged in Winnipeg, just steps from a Jewish community center where children attend school and day care.
During Israel’s official day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism on April 29, protesters stood in front of Beth Emeth Bais Yehuda Synagogue in Toronto waving Palestinian flags. One man wore a sweater that read “Palestinian Holocaust: Never Again Is Now.”
Earlier this month in Montreal, protesters were filmed chanting “All the Zionists are racists” through megaphones at a school for students ages 4 to 16 with intellectual disabilities and autism-spectrum disorders.
These activities aren’t normal protests. They aren’t in front of the Israeli embassy in Ottawa or the Israeli consulate in Toronto. They aren’t directed toward a specific Israeli policy, law, regulation, or act, and they certainly make no mention of Hamas, Hezbollah, or any other terrorist organization that has brought immense death and destruction upon the Palestinians. These are belligerent acts of aggression designed to intimidate Canada’s Jewish community, to coerce them into silence, and ultimately, to extinguish their public presence.
Open Antisemitism and Valorizing Terrorism
In October 2024, men masked with keffiyehs took to the streets of Ottawa, calling for Jews to “go back to Europe”—a phrase they’ve repeatedly used everywhere from flag-raising ceremonies to synagogues to university campuses.
In Vancouver, British Columbia, protesters gathered on the one-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023 massacre and declared “We are Hezbollah, and we are Hamas” while burning the Canadian flag.
Protesters have also gathered outside hospitals, such as Toronto’s Mount Sinai—a hospital founded by Jews—where patients could hear screams for an “intifada” from inside the building.
Last March, in downtown Ottawa—on the same streets where former prime minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act in response to the trucker convoy in 2022— a young man dressed as a Hamas terrorist taunted shocked onlookers, the flags of Lebanon and Palestine blowing in the wind behind him.
In November 2024, an estimated 50,000 students, as well as faculty, from universities including Concordia, McGill, and Dawson College took to the streets and campuses, where they overran buildings, destroyed property, and led schools to close. Chants of “Long live the intifada” could be heard, with one protester saying on camera, “The final solution is coming your way.”
In April, a man wearing a keffiyeh in downtown Toronto climbed onto scaffolding, lit an Israeli flag on fire, and doused it with gasoline, while chants of “All Zionists are racists; all Zionists are degenerates” could be heard in the background.
Violent Attacks
Since October 7, 2023, there have also been nearly a dozen terrorism-related incidents in Canada or abroad involving Canadians. These include:
A father-son duo, who had been planning a violent attack in Toronto, were arrested in July 2024.
Two Ottawa youths, plotting to attack the city’s Jewish community, were arrested in February 2024.
The September 2024 arrest of a Pakistani man studying in Toronto who was planning an ISIS-inspired attack against Jews in Brooklyn, New York.
The April arrest of a Yemeni man in Canada planning to join a terrorist organization in the Middle East.
An attack on Edmonton City Hall in January 2024.
And this list does not include the Jewish girls school in Toronto that was hit with gunfire on three separate occasions, the multiple shootings at a Jewish school in Montreal, the firebombing of a synagogue in Montreal, the firebombing of a synagogue near Montreal, the endless vandalism of Jewish-owned businesses, the vandalism of homes with swastikas, and the destruction of campaign signs for Jewish politicians running in the 2025 federal election.
Nor does it capture the anti-Israel indoctrination occurring at public schools, universities, and unions across the country, among many other things.
What all of this has led to is the suppression of open Jewish life in Canada, the hiding of Jewish symbols, the need to host Jewish events in secret or with even more intense security, and even some people fleeing the country. Students at Toronto Metropolitan University who recently shared that they “can’t be openly Jewish” on campus aren’t the exception. They’ve become the norm. “I went in with people hating me right off the bat and me not being able to make any friends who are non-Jewish in my classes or in my program,” one student said.
What is unfolding in Canada is not a grassroots, spontaneous expression of solidarity for Palestinians, although the press covers it that way.
This is an orchestrated effort to normalize antisemitic incitement under the guise of political activism. The days of exclusionary signs at golf clubs have been replaced by open calls for jihad and terrorist cosplay—all animated by an obsession with intimidating Jews, including in their own neighborhoods.
Pogroms rarely begin with organized massacres; typically, they start with tolerated incitement, with mobs unpunished, and with authorities hesitant to act decisively for fear of political blowback.
And that is perhaps the most alarming thing of all happening right now in Canada.
On more than one occasion, protesters clad in keffiyehs, inciting violence, intimidating Jews and non-Jews alike, and calling for the erasure of Israel have been met with equivocation.
Too often, authorities have hesitated to enforce laws against harassment and incitement when masked by the rhetoric of “resistance.” Political leaders have downplayed the extremist nature of these rallies. Universities and unions have wavered in condemning overt Jew-hatred cloaked in the language of activism, righteousness, and progressivism.
On one occasion, for instance, police officers in Toronto handed out coffee and baked goods to protesters. On another occasion, they allegedly arrested a Jewish man, in a Jewish neighborhood this month, for confronting the terrorist supporters who have taken to the streets every weekend since October 7, 2023. For nearly 600 days, Jews in Canada have been asking themselves: Is the state still on our side? Is law enforcement willing to do what it takes to shut this down?
In this sense, Wilf was perhaps more right than she could have imagined.
Canada now faces a moral test. Our institutions—from police and prosecutors to politicians and civil society—must decide whether to confront antisemitic threats firmly or equivocate and excuse them as protest.
This is not a Jewish issue. It is a Canadian one. A society that allows a vulnerable minority to be openly menaced cannot claim to be safe or just for any of its citizens. Antisemitism is often the first sign of broader social decay. If mobs can intimidate Jewish schools and hospitals today, what do we expect they’ll do tomorrow?
Everyone with eyes is bracing for the explosion.
Dr. Casey Babb is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Center for North American Prosperity and Security, a fellow with the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, and an adviser with Secure Canada in Toronto.
https://www.thefp.com/p/a-pogrom-is-brewing-in-canada-antisemitism
