By: Tabitha Korol

It was brought to my attention that Westmount Temple Emanu-el Beth Shalom in Montreal hosted a Muslim-Awareness Interfaith Shabbat Dinner on January 25, 2019, to pay homage to the six dead and nineteen wounded from a lone attack on a Montreal mosque two years previously.  Such well-meaning, but naïve, efforts were hijacked by Muslim apologists to promote their false victimhood status to garner sympathy from others.

One might wonder why there was no outreach from Jews or Muslims for the desecration attack in March 2018 on a synagogue in Thornhill, and no homage paid for the October, 2018 massacre of eleven congregants of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, inasmuch as Canada and the US are connected in many ways.  Neither was there any form of condolence or apology offered when a small Canadian Arab newspaper, Al Saraha, published an antisemitic article that posited why Hitler killed the Jews, stated that the number of six million Jews killed during the Holocaust was severely inflated, and asserted that Jews are to blame for Germany’s economic collapse, sexuality, and promiscuity. 

Inasmuch as the Jewish-Muslim Interfaith Dinner so closely preceded Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day designated to confront the hatred and crimes against the Jewish people, it begs the question as to why that was not incorporated into the outreach, except that Muslims do not grant victimhood status to others, and they continue to deny the Holocaust as the systematic murder of six million Jews.  Our FBI records show that Jews still experience the greatest number, by far, of attacks and assaults, yet nothing was done to honor those victims and awaken the attendees to the dire situation of antisemitism that is once again upon us.