Post Tagged with: "yom kippur"

Yom Kippur by Thomas Hawk https://flic.kr/p/2r9wPZk CC BY-NC 2.0

The Wrong Target: Why the CBC Should Be Asking About the Yom Kippur Protesters, Not the Journalist Who Reported on Them

Last week, CBC journalist Neil Herland was reportedly pulled from the air and brought before a disciplinary hearing after posting a tweet thread about being taunted on his way to the Song Shul’s Yom Kippur services at the Meridian Arts Centre in Toronto. The thread included video of the protesters shouting “Zionist alert,” “you’re going to hell” and “baby killer” at people walking in to pray as well as context on the rise in antisemitism, the terror attack at the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville the night before, and the presence of a guest speaker at the service. Herland’s tweet thread sparked opposition, with some defending the protesters on the grounds that the location is a public facility and not a full-time synagogue and that the speaker was Mark Regev, who once served as a spokesperson for the Israeli government. I tweeted about the response last week, noting that the thread was accurate and that I did not understand the concern. That tweet has been viewed over 280,000 times, leading to plenty of angry responses. This post unpacks the arguments and explains why I still don’t see the issue with the tweet thread. If anything, the focus should be protesters who may have violated the Criminal Code.

Not If, But When: The Yom Kippur Terror Attack in Belleville

I came out of Yom Kippur services on Monday evening to the news of a terror attack on Sunday night at the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ontario. Reports indicate that the shooter drove up in a truck and fired on a police officer stationed outside the synagogue, leading to several minutes of gunfire. The officer was shot and is now in hospital. By sheer luck, the congregation was ten minutes late starting their service, meaning that the gunfire that left roughly 20 holes in the sanctuary window missed its intended target.

The good fortune that a massacre was averted does not lessen the impact of gunfire targeting a synagogue packed with congregants on the holiest day of the year. Shootings and firebombings at Canadian synagogues have become commonplace over the past three years. When I said in March that many in the community had come to view a Bondi Beach-style attack in Canada as a question of not if, but when, the comment garnered surprise, yet six months later it has happened, with a police officer averting a disastrous loss of life.