Antisemitism in Ottawa.

This past Tuesday there was an anti-semitic attack in Ottawa that involved several machete wielding young Arabic speaking individuals. The focus of their attack was two young Carleton students perceived by them to be Jews. Yet one of them wasn't even Jewish, he is the vice-president of the Carleton University Students' Association, but who happens to be openly sympathetic to Jews and Israel.

As someone with some Armenian ancestry in my family tree, I am very sensitive to the cause of both Armenians and Jews, both peoples from the Middle East, who both had to face premeditated genocide. As a child I grew up with horror stories, the Jewish experience still very fresh at the time. I did make a decision then and there that I will do whatever I can to support both nations in their efforts to re-establish themselves in their homelands. Israel became a Jewish country again in 1949, Armenia regained its freedom in 1991. Yet peace is still elusive in both cases. Armenians still have to iron out their differences with the Azeris, Israel still has to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians, and to at all gain the acceptance of a large part of the world.

Ideologies, memes do not die easily. Antisemitism survived under the ashes, particularly in Eastern Europe where the whole issue was swept under the carpet and not dealt with ever since WWII. In spite of some feeble efforts from the part of the state, young people there still get the old ideology instilled in them by their parents, by people around them who still believe the Nazi propaganda of Jews being responsible for all the ills of the World. As for the Muslim world...? That has even more issues piled on top of their inherited ones.

The events of the last few years make me really concerned. I keep meeting otherwise educated people, even university professors, who do not take the necessary effort to check the verity of what they read and hear. Very dangerous! We cannot allow baseless raw hatred to take hold of people's minds. We cannot sit around idly while the displaced Palestinians are still kept in squalid refugee camps, after 60 years(!), in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, even in the West Bank! Not accepted, even exploited by their Muslim brothers, who instead fill their heads and hearts with hateful propaganda, using them as living bombs against a country that they also refuse to accept.

I watch Israel with growing concern, a country that accommodated waves and waves of refugees, including those who had to flee from their ancient homelands in Muslim countries, and whose numbers were pretty much the same as the original Palestinian refugees, making up now roughly half of the country's present population. Who also lost everything when they fled, yet who never got any UN help. Israel feels more and more pushed in a corner, and as a result its despairing population chooses to elect more radical right-wing leadership, a fact which then whips the flames of antisemitism into an ever growing frenzy in the rest of the world. Very dangerous!

And now to have to read about incidents like what happened in Ottawa! Imagine a scenario in which Muslim students would get attacked in a similar manner. Wouldn't we react with utmost indignation? We cannot allow incidents like this to occur here in Canada! We cannot allow our streets to become battlegrounds! We cannot allow hatred of any kind to take hold of Canadian minds!