If countries have hearts, and they actually do, then Israel’s heart was found – for more than 500 days – at a little place called Nir Oz.

That’s where an entire country’s wounded heart had taken up residence: at a modest single-story home, with a red roof and white walls, and a backyard full of kids’ toys. There were bikes and trikes, and a multicoloured soccer ball on the picnic table. There were Tonka toys, too, and a folded-up baby’s carriage on its side. It looked like play had been suspended for dinner, and then bedtime. Life, suspended.

There was a hammock strung between a post and the single kumquat tree that was in the backyard. If you stood there long enough, and I did, you could picture Yarden or Shiri Bibas in the hammock, smiling, laughing, watching Ariel running around, playing in his Batman jammies. Ariel, who looked like what an angel would look like, was just four years old.

Ariel will be four years old forever. His little brother, Kfir, was nine months old, and that is what he will be forever, too. Some monsters in the shape of men took them from their home in Nir Oz on the morning of October 7, 2023, and – shortly afterwards, no one knows for sure when – murdered them with their bare hands, and then crushed their tiny bodies with stones and concrete, to make it look like they had been killed by Israel, during an airstrike.

Someone has planted some flowers at the base of the kumquat tree, which Ariel loved. The flowers are reddish-orange, as if to recall the color of Ariel and Kfir’s hair. For more than 500 days, all of Israel, and millions of Jews and non-Jews around the world, held out hope that the Bibas boys were still alive. They would post online reddish-orange words of prayer, and everyone knew what it referred to: Ariel and Kfir. Those boys, and their home in Nir Oz, became Israel’s centre, its beating heart, for more than 500 lightless days.

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Canada could experience a lone-wolf terror attack soon, intelligence authorities have advised the federal government – and antisemitism is overwhelmingly the motivating factor.

“Amid [rising] anti-Semitic hate, an undetected lone actor could commit an act of serious violence in Canada at any time,” one June 2024 secret assessment reads. Multiple other secret assessments in 2024 similarly warned Ottawa about likely terrorist violence inspired by Jew hatred. 

The documents do not indicate what, if anything, the Trudeau government did to prevent such attacks from taking place, however.

The unsettling warnings are contained in a number of recently-declassified security reviews conducted by the Ottawa-based Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC), the federal organization tasked with assessing threats of terrorism in Canada. The documents were obtained under freedom of information laws by the University of Ottawa’s Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

Among ITAC’s disturbing findings:

• “ITAC continues to monitor the rising tide of antisemitism and violent rhetoric associated with the conflict in Gaza in Canada with concern…Online actors continue to share violent rhetoric and antisemitic content related to the conflict.”
• “There has been a significant increase in the number of demonstrations in Canada. The number of events from May 1to 17 was approximately triple the volume during each of the preceding months.”
• “Demonstration tactics have become more targeted and disruptive…Pro-Palestinian protestors have grown frustrated due to perceived government inaction on their demands…groups that are listed [terrorist] entities in Canada, namely al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah have voiced their support for the demonstrations…”
• “Violent extremists have been known to target large demonstrations for recruitment, networking and radicalization opportunities and will likely try to do so again in Canada.”
• “Criminal activities and intimidation tactics on campus and online are likely to continue.”

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As a starting proposition, I am grateful my parents are not alive to see any of this.

Babies and mothers abducted and murdered, for the sin of being Jewish, and much of the world shrugging. Monsters disguised as men, spraying schools and places of worship with bullets. Swastikas and symbols of death being paraded through places where ordinary people live, with impunity. Science being denied, democracy being denuded, ignorance being celebrated.

And, now, the most powerful man on Earth – in just one month – upending Western civilization, demonizing allies, and forming a Satanic alliance with the fascistic, genocidal Russian regime.

It is a cliché to say that we are living through history. But this? This? This feels like what my parents must have felt, observing the rise of Nazism and Hitler, and wondering if it was ever going to get better. Wondering if it could all be actually happening.

Now, as then, it is probably a waste of time to speculate about the motivations of madmen. Is Donald Trump mentally ill? Is he fashioning a dictatorship? Is Putin blackmailing him with some decade-old footage taken one night at the presidential suite at Moscow’s Ritz Carlton Hotel?

The same sorts of questions were asked about Hitler and his ilk, and no one had the answer. So, then – as now – politicians and pundits sought to defend the indefensible. All of us are familiar with the symptoms of that disease: asserting that Donald Trump is right on borders or fentanyl or dairy products or banking or military spending, or whatever lie he conjures up to justify his psychopathy. As long as he has the right ideology, these Vichy Canadians believe, Trump’s thuggery is justifiable.

Except it isn’t, not ever. Three years ago this week, Russia invaded Ukraine.

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