My latest: why aren’t the police doing their job?

The street my parents lived on – and where I was born – was Coolbrook Avenue in Montreal. It was previously home to poorer Irish Catholics, but is now home to many Hasidic Jews, the Lubavitchers. It’s a nice area. Lots of trees, little parks. The Jews and the Irish got along, there.

In the early hours of Monday, someone threw a bomb – a Molotov cocktail – into the entrance area of the Jewish Community Council of Montreal, which is just on the other side of the Decarie, at Vezina.

The bomb went off and there was plenty of damage. But, thankfully, no one was injured. Police and fire fighters were there quickly.

The Suburban newspaper reported that security footage showed the bomber “arriving by car, exiting, breaking the front window and throwing the Molotov.” He or she hasn’t been caught.

So, here’s a question, specifically for Montreal police. But it also applies to police forces across Canada, too. Here it is.

What are you doing, if anything, about the explosion in anti-Semitic crime in your city? Because, everywhere, things are very, very bad.

• A Montreal Jewish school has been shot up – with actual bullets – not once, but twice. You can still see the holes on the facade of Yeshiva Gedola, days later. The police haven’t caught the perpetrator(s).
• A Jewish community centre and synagogue in the Montreal suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux were both the targets of firebombs in the middle of the night. The police haven’t caught the perpetrator(s).
• An imam appeared at a pro-Palestine/pro-Hamas rally in Montreal, and said the following about Jews in Arabic: “Allah, count every one of them, and kill them all, and do not exempt even one of them.” The police haven’t arrested him or charged him.

And, now, another bombing of another Jewish institution in Montreal, and no one has been arrested.

That’s the common element in each of those terror attacks: the bad guys haven’t been arrested, let alone detained. They still walk the streets, free as birds.

And, so, there’s been another attack, early on Monday, and right on the Decarie Expressway – which is as busy as the Gardiner in Toronto, or Granville in Vancouver, or the Deefoot in Calgary, or the Queensway in Ottawa.

How can that happen? How can Jews be targeted, over and over and over, in busy neighbourhoods and locations, and no one gets caught? How can that be?

Now, before any of you who live outside Montreal start patting yourselves on the back for doing better? Well, don’t.

On the very same day the Montreal Jewish Community Council was bombed, the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre in Toronto – on the edge of the University of Toronto, and on one of the busiest and best-lit streets in the city – was targeted, with foot-high graffiti blood libel: ISRAEL FUNDS GENOCIDE.

And, just days before and down the same busy street, a bookstore that happens to be owned by a Jewish woman, Indigo, was similarly attacked. Eleven adults, among them a paralegal and a music teacher, were later arrested for splashing blood-red paint on the bookstore and postering it with more madness about “funding genocide.”

Across the country, there has been an explosion in other anti-Semitic crimes – and anti-Muslim crimes, too. And, with the exception of the attack on the book store owned by a Jew in Toronto, there hasn’t been much in the way of arrests, has there?

That, despite the fact the crimes have often been committed in areas where there are many people around. That, despite the fact – as with the bullets fired at a Jewish school in Montreal – identical attacks had happened just days before.

Police agencies may be doing their best, but it’s clearly not enough. The Jew-haters (and the Muslim-haters) are getting more bold every single day. When they see that they can shoot guns or toss tombs and get away with it? Well, they’re going to keep going.

We repeat: law enforcement in Canada needs to start enforcing the law. They need to prevent more hate crimes.

Because they’re not doing that.