What happened in Belleville? This attack wasn't an isolated act by one hateful individual — it's the predictable endpoint of a rhetorical climate Canadians have let fester. I'm Jacob Citron and here's what you need to know. This Sunday in Belleville, Ontario, a person brought a shotgun with the express purpose of trying to kill Jews who were praying on the holiest day of the year. Now we as Canadians are not responsible for the actions of this hateful person. But many of us have done things or have not done things that have contributed to the enablement of this kind of atrocity. And that is what is so important here to discuss. Now, before I get into anything else, I want to take a moment to recognize the heroism of Constable Jeff Smith of the Belleville Police. I'm recording this video on Tuesday morning, and at the time of recording, Constable Smith is in stable but critical condition. Thank God he's still alive, and we are all praying for his recovery. I've seen there's a GoFundMe that has started. If there is one thing I can guarantee, it is that the Jewish community will show up for Constable Smith, it will show up for his family, it will show up for the Jewish community in Belleville, and it will show up for Belleville as a whole. We know that this is not the vast majority of people. but I'm here to tell you that if we don't. take action and make serious changes to how we are approaching some of these matters, that this will get worse, not better. so for those of you who are not from Southern Ontario, Belleville is a town, a city of about a hundred thousand people, about ninety minutes east of Toronto, which is Canada's biggest population center. There are very few Jews living in Belleville. It is not a place where Jews tend to congregate. There's a very small synagogue there, and that synagogue is small enough that they don't even have A full time rabbi. They actually brought one in from overseas. So why were they targeted? Surely this group of twenty five people didn't do anything. And the answer is hate. Pure and simple. We live in these conditions where hate has been allowed to congeal and focus on this one population. We have let ourselves rationalize it because of things going on on the other side of the world. Now, last week in Toronto, there was a conference on anti-Semitism, and it was entitled A Canary's Song. Now, the reason it's called that is a reference back to miners, coal miners. In the nineteenth century, who would bring canaries into their coal mines and the canaries would be singing, but the canaries were also very sensitive to the gases that might be in the mineshaft. So when the canaries stopped singing, that was a signal to the miners that hey, something's wrong here and we have to get out or change what we're doing to avert a larger disaster. Now, the comparison has often been drawn between canaries and Jews. That when something starts happening to Jews in whatever society in the world it is, whether that's today, whether that's 100 years ago in Germany or 500 years ago in Spain, that's a signal that there's something wrong with the foundations of the community. But it's also a signal that there's an opportunity to change and to be better. So let this be the canary song for all Canadians because we have an opportunity now to correct course. so I said that we are not responsible for the actions of this person, but there is an enablement baked in to the casual way we talk about very serious geopolitical matters on the other side of the world. there is a sequence here, a sequence of hate that has started with words and has now morphed into action. That starts with Hey, Israel is a villainous racist enterprise. That starts with Israel is committing a genocide. That starts with Israel is an ethno state.
