By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — Maybe it’s because this travesty happened in the very heart—literally—of Canada, a land where I once lived and in which my first daughter was born.
In the second such jihadist-driven act of murder there in one week, an emotionally-poisoned gunman invaded the halls of Ottawa’s parliamentary plaza and killed a veteran national Canadian peace officer. It is completely and painfully a new reality in that capital city of flowers and festivals and in a land so wonderfully lacking in guns and violence.
Meanwhile, Toronto, that jewel of a metropolis where I began my professional career, has also been stricken with Islamic terrorism and fear and a shattering of what might have been a little too much innocence.
Canadians will not cower, however. A quiet, stoic people, they have nonetheless again committed troops and munitions to the struggle against jihadism—just as they entered World War II at its very outset, in 1939. [The US did not directly join the alliance until December 7, 1941.]
Something about even Canada bleeding makes me feel especially indignant and outraged. It’s not that any country (including, of course, the United States) deserves any of this madness. But here is a nation that is the model of cultural tolerance, a mosaic of histories and languages, a paragon of environmentalism, a principled civilization with clean, gleaming cities and shimmering mountains. It’s a beautiful place to live and explore—successful and egalitarian in spite of its unwieldy confederation of provinces.
The 3000-mile border adjoining the United States and Canada is the longest undefended frontier between nations in the history of this planet. Canada is about serenity and sustenance, clean water and protected forests. The jihadists, who revile America as the infidel and our homeland as their satanic playground, have picked up on the scent of this long link of tranquility that united us with Canadians.
And so in marches the horrid face of the proselytized jihadist. This global indoctrination, or its brutish enforcement, was recently gruesomely enacted In Iran: a 26 year-old woman was hanged because she tried to indict the man who had raped her.
Like our brothers and sisters in Canada, we are weary of being told that Islam is a religion of peace, when its manifestations bring horror to our hearts, beheadings to our brethren, and, assuredly less important, security disruptions and doubts to what we used to enjoy as travel and discovery of the world we barely remember before 9/11.
The fact is that, from Tacoma to Toronto, from Lisbon to London, we read endless accounts of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives, and daughters for their family “honor.” Day and night on television, we observe Muslims rioting over some perceived offense. We suffer Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren’t “believers.” We know that Muslims are incinerating schools for girls. We gasp from Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for alleged adultery and of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls—all because a skewed and insipid version of Sharia law is now held higher than what true Muslims are able to protest.
The silence of the peaceable Muslim is the architect of the persona whom most recently defiled the noble quietude of Canada.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer based in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com