Mr. Speaker, “Am Yisrael Chai. We are a Jewish nation that will stand tall.... Terrorism...will not take us down.” These were the defiant words of Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein this weekend after a gunman with an assault rifle opened fire at his synagogue, after he saw his friend Lori Gilbert-Kaye lying dead on the floor, after he saw eight-year-old Noya Dayan carried away bleeding, after he himself had been shot and wounded, and yes, six months after 11 other Jews were killed at another shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Before these murders, attacks on Jews at prayer did not happen in North America. Now, with neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us”, with an anti-Semitic cartoon being run in the New York Times and with B'nai Brith reporting that over 2,000 anti-Semitic incidents occurred in Canada in 2018, we need a national action plan on anti-Semitism, and we need it now.