Amy Hamm: The West ignored the threat of radical Islam — now Jews are paying the price

Hide your kippahs and hide your rainbows, Germans. Berlin’s chief of police, Barbara Slowik, recently suggested that Jews and gay people should avoid — or hide their identities in — the city’s majority Arab neighbourhoods. It’s simply not safe to be openly Jewish or homosexual in one of Europe’s largest cities. In 2024. Germany is coming undone. 

Canada is not faring much better. 

In Germany: young Jewish soccer players were hunted down by a gang of knife-wielding Arab youth. In Canada: firebomb attacks on synagogues. In Germany: Jews warned by public officials that entire neighbourhoods are full of immigrants who “harbour sympathies for terrorists.” In Canada: designated terror group Samidoun shouts “Long live October 7!” and “Death to Canada!” on our streets. These are but a few examples. 

Jewish students at the University of British Columbia (UBC) this past summer hung posters throughout campus that read: “I am a Jew. I hide my identity because I feel threatened and unsafe,” and “Stop terrorizing Jews.” No police chief instructed them to hide; Jewish students could detect the tenor — and a mounting risk of violence — on campus.

Like Germany, Canada has adopted a policy of unfettered and incautious immigration, and with it have come some immigrants who are antagonistic toward western values. We stopped caring if our immigrants wanted to blend into our society — rather than upend its virtues entirely. It must also be noted that swathes of our own political left, and others born in Canada, hold a similar disdain for western values.

We have been so open and welcoming that we’ve changed the very nature of our society. We’ve changed on a molecular level. We are unrecognizable. That which makes the West an enticing place to live — our openness, tolerance and freedoms — has the power to destroy us, if left unchecked or undervalued. Our national goodwill must not include a tolerance of intolerance.

Among the victims of Canada’s failed immigration policy are those who came to Canada seeking an open, pluralistic society in which their families could thrive and integrate. These immigrants unfairly bear the brunt of a changing national sentiment that can include disdain or open hostility towards any and all “foreigners.” We are a country of immigrants–that, in and of itself, is not the issue.

For years, writers like Douglas Murray, the late Christopher Hitchens and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have argued that radical Islam poses a threat to the West: to our culture and values — and our physical safety. “You don’t have to be paranoid, racist or a bigot to take alarm,” Hitchens once said of radical Islam.

Canadian scholars, meanwhile, have largely mocked this idea, predictably insisting that it is born of nothing more than “Islamophobia” — that nebulous euphemism for what they really wish to say, which is “racism.” For decades, Canadian elites dismissed the threat of Islamic terrorism and portrayed immigration as our saving grace.

Take, for instance, the Canada research chair in global politics and international law, Michael Byers, who in 2007 wrote that America’s response to 9/11 was “excessive” (which is true in certain regards) and that, “Like all previous waves of terrorism, the current wave of Islamic terrorism will gradually fade away.”

The Arab immigrants living in Montreal, he said, “cringe every time a bomb explodes in the Middle East.” And Canada, Byers argued, “thanks to one of the highest rates of immigration in the world … has acquired a built-in sense of perspective and resilience concerning terrorism.” In other words: The more immigration from countries afflicted by radical Islam, the less radical Islam we will see in Canada. Nonsense.  

Byers’ attitude of overconfident complacency has suffused our government (until Trudeau’s very recent about-face on immigration, at least), along with our media and ivory towers for decades. They could not have read the situation more wrong. They have been smug with their luxury belief that immigration can only be a net positive.

The first two lines of Douglas Murray’s 2017 book “The Strange Death of Europe” reads: “Europe is committing suicide. Or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide.” Why? Because of mass immigration and an abandonment of western culture and traditions. Canada suffers from the same type of leadership — the same intellectualized nonchalance regarding the survival of western civilization.  

Post-war efforts to eradicate antisemitism are not just failing — they have failed. What nonconformist thinkers, like Murray and Ali, warned of has now come to pass. It remains to be seen if Canada can escape the clutches of this death spiral. 

Slowik’s warning for Berlin — hide yourselves, gays and Jews! — sounds so absurd as to be a thinly veiled political statement, a passive-aggressive expression of what our deluded and elitist immigration-pushers insist is nothing more than the nationalistic bigotry of the “far right.”

But it’s not a political statement. It’s a statement on the new reality for Jews, and sometimes gay people, throughout the West: what was fought for and won, with your own blood, has been lost.

National Post