With an ‘Iraqi intifada’ gathering steam and Iraqi insurgent leader Moktada al-Sadr openly declaring an alliance with Hamas and Hizbullah, the global war on terror is becoming indistinguishable from Israel’s anti-terror war. Yet while media reports on terror attacks in Madrid, Istanbul, Bali and elsewhere recognize Islamist perpetrators, reports on attacks on worldwide Jewish targets regularly omit the Islamist element.
On April 5, a few hours before the beginning of Passover, a Montreal Jewish school was firebombed.
The perpetrators left a note on the school door and contacted a local TV station, stating their attack was in response to Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. They added: “this is just a beginning. If your crimes continue in the Middle East, our attacks will continue.”
Curiously, the content of these messages – which ties this heinous act to Islamic terror in Israel – was not reported in some major Canadian media outlets, such as the Toronto Star and CBC. Though local police have yet to confirm the perpetrators’ message, this was certainly a central aspect of the story that required mention.
Moreover, HonestReporting is disturbed by the fact that the Montreal attack received very little coverage outside of the Canadian media. This, despite the fact that this bombing was only the latest episode in a troubling surge of anti-Semitic acts in Canada: A Jewish cemetery was vandalized and a synagogue was defaced with swastikas last month in Toronto, and B’nai Brith recently reported a record 584 anti-Semitic incidents in Canada in 2003 – 27 percent more than in 2002.
This omission of a global Islamic threat against Jews recalls the controversy over the recently-released EU report on European antisemitism. The EU report found a sharp rise in anti-Semitic acts over the past two years, but its authors surprised everyone when summarizing the source of most attacks, stating: “The largest group of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activities appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans.”
This summary contradicts the very body of the report, which finds that most of the 193 violent attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher shops, cemeteries and rabbis in France in 2002 were actually carried out by Muslims of Northern African descent. European Jewish leaders were shocked by the EU’s ‘white Europeans’ summary, as the UK Telegraph reported:
The European Jewish Congress accused the EU watchdog of twisting data from the 15 member states to suit its own ideological bias, describing the report as a catalogue of “enormous contradictions, errors and omissions.”
“We cannot let it be said that the majority of anti-Semitic incidents come from young, disaffected white men. This is in complete contradiction with the facts recorded by the police,” it said.
The reason for this ‘data twisting’ is apparently the same reason for the shelving of another anti-Semitism study by this same organization four months ago – concern that Europe’s large Muslim population would be ‘inflamed’ by its findings. Needless to say, local Muslim sensitivities should not interfere with political accountability or accurate reporting.
The Montreal school bombing is the latest effort of Islamists to strike Jewish targets worldwide: from Jerusalem to Paris, Tuninia to Kenya, North America and beyond. As this highly troubling terror wave grows, HonestReporting encourages subscribers to contact your local editors, encouraging them to publicize its growth and the Islamist source of nearly all recent anti-Jewish acts worldwide.
Thank you for your ongoing involvement in the battle against media bias.
HonestReporting
(Hat tip: Stefan Sharkansky)
