Madam Speaker, there is one party that does want war. It is the Islamic Republic of Iran. This summer, I was in Argentina. It was the 30th anniversary of the bombing of the AMIA, the Jewish community centre in Argentina, which was the deadliest attack on Jews between the Holocaust and what happened on October 7. That attack in 1994 killed 85 people and wounded 300.
Who was the attack carried out by? An Argentinian court ruled this year that the attack was directed by the Islamic Republic of Iran and carried out by Hezbollah, an organization that has killed and terrorized people around the world, not only in Israel, where millions of Israelis are being terrorized by the Hezbollah rockets being fired on their country on a repeated basis, but also in other countries as well.
Why does Iran want this? It is because Iran wants division. Iran wants its horrible regime to be able to get away with human rights violations in its own country, so it creates chaos abroad. One of the ways that it creates chaos is by attacking what it calls the “Zionist regime”, a regime that the supreme leader of Iran believes should be eradicated. Iran finances terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, to rain rockets on Israel and to do things like the massacre of October 7, where over 1,200 people were murdered, hundreds were injured and hostages were taken, many of whom are still in tunnels in Gaza. That is the situation that Israel faces.
I do not think that there is anybody in the chamber, in any party, that has a monopoly on virtue. Everybody cares about the civilians who are going to be harmed in any country, whether it is Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Gaza or Iran. Nobody wants harm to happen to civilians. The issue is the moral clarity of saying who is responsible for what is happening.
There has been an attempt this evening by some speakers to blame Israel for all of the events that have happened, when Israel was attacked on October 7 last year and has had, for years, missiles fired upon it by Hezbollah from Lebanon, because the Lebanese government, which may very well be of good faith, is unable to fulfill its obligations under a UN resolution saying that Hezbollah has to vacate south Lebanon.
Israeli civilians would be killed in drastic numbers if it were not for Iron Dome. We keep forgetting that. We keep pointing to the mass casualties in one place and not another, but the reason for that is the Iron Dome. Israel is fighting terrorist organizations on every single front. It is not a country that has just suddenly decided to start bombing here and start bombing there. The idea that we can assign all of the blame in a conflict that has started more than any of our lifetimes ago, and not even in 1948, as it started before then, but let us say, going back to 1948, to one side is absolutely irreconcilable with factual history.
I decided to come back to speak tonight because I wanted to make sure that, on this side of the House, there were some people who would say that because it is not right to claim that Israel is entirely responsible for what is happening. In fact, I think it is pretty clear that Iran has a huge amount of responsibility for what is happening.
I also wanted to say in this debate that we all hate hate. Hate is a horrible thing against any group, whether it is against Muslims, Jews, gays, Christians, people of colour or anybody, but it has to be said that, over the last 11 months, the Jewish community in Canada has faced hate in epic proportions, which has not been seen in any of our lifetimes. Jews constitute about 1.4% of Canada's population, while more than half of hate crimes, in some cases up to 70%, are against Jews.
It does not make sense that we have people in our streets who are yelling support for and flying the flags of terrorist organizations, and who are telling Jews to go back to Poland. That is horrifying. The fact that the police are not enforcing the law when they see people crossing that line, flying the Hezbollah flag and screaming at people to go back to Poland, is absurd.
I want to propose some solutions that would make it a lot easier to say that governments at all levels are combatting hate because right now no government in the world is combatting anti-Semitism enough. In Canada, the federal, provincial or municipal governments have not done enough to confront the epidemic of anti-Semitism in our midst.
Policing is a municipal jurisdiction. Enforcement of the Criminal Code is a provincial jurisdiction. It is not right to blame the federal government for all this happening, as some are trying to do. However, that does not mean we cannot show leadership. It does not mean that the federal Attorney General and the Minister of Public Safety cannot convene the provincial ministers of public safety and attorneys general to have a discussion about hate and anti-Semitism, to say that we need specific hate crime prosecutors who are geared toward hate crimes, to ensure that police have proper training, to ensure hate crime units are set up across the country, to ensure that police know that politicians at every level in the country, federal, provincial and municipal, will have the backs of the police when they enforce the law. That is what we need.
We need the Samidoun and the Houthis to be designated as terrorist organizations, the same as we have designated the IRGC. We need the Parliament of Canada to create a new intimidation offence, what I would call bubble legislation, to say that, if someone were to try to block people from entering or leaving a school, community centre, community building or a place of worship, they would be breaking a very specific provision of the Criminal Code. Again, that does not mean it would not be better done by the provinces. The provinces and municipalities could easily create buffer zones around these buildings. It is a shame they have not done so.
Over the last summer, university campuses were my priority. Since last June, I have been talking to universities across the country. I worked with Deborah Lyons, Universities Canada, the U15 and university presidents to set out a group of things that universities needed to do. We worked together to make sure that universities are committed to enforcing their codes of conduct and ensuring Jews were included in DEI programs so that anti-Semitism programs are to be given by groups that are representative of the mainstream Jewish community and support the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. Even though it is a provincial jurisdiction, our justice committee has gotten involved. We have done hearings. We are going to do a report.
There are things that we can do to confront this problem. I call on all of us to work together to make sure that we have a fair understanding and balance of what is happening in the Middle East and that we confront anti-Semitism and hate in Canada.
