On Monday, Canada officially declared the Houthis a terrorist group, just a day after they launched yet another ballistic missile at Israel. Commendable as this step is, it only calls to attention the fact that Ottawa is at least ten years too late in taking it. This tolerant attitude toward terrorism abroad—much like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement that he will arrest his Israeli counterpart should he set foot on Canadian soil, or the decision to end arms sales to Israel—has done little to stymie the local anti-Israel movement. Just a few days ago, protesters blocked streets while blaming their government for Israel’s imagined crimes.

On November 23, the Toronto Sun published an editorial on the disorder and anti-Semitism that the protests bring:

By the Trudeau government’s own logic, by now it should be considering invoking the Emergencies Act in response to the growing lawlessness of so-called “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations Canadian authorities [have seemed] powerless to stop . . . for more than a year—the latest example being a riot in Montreal on [November 22] while Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was attending a Taylor Swift concert in Toronto.

Canada’s tiny Jewish community—less than 1 percent of our population—is under growing threat from these hate-filled protests, where some demonstrators have gone beyond calling for the destruction of Israel to advocate for the extermination of Jews in Canada and around the world. Police say hate crimes against Jews have skyrocketed. While all this was happening, too many political leaders ran for cover, apparently hoping it would all go away.

So bad is the situation that a Toronto synagogue has been vandalized seven times since April. The fecklessness of Canada’s elected officials in the face of these assaults, including the firing of shots at schools, prompted a second editorial in the Sun two days later, with the apt headline, “Canada Reaps What Politicians Have Sowed.” Among much else, it mentioned that “a rabbi in Montreal said police asked him to leave the site of a ‘pro-Palestinian’ protest because his presence alone was a provocation to the demonstrators.”

The Sun columnist Brian Lilley elaborates:

In Toronto, police have been protecting the pro-Hamas protests since they started their marches immediately after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. They have allowed them to take over city streets at will without permits to block traffic and block street cars. At times they have even shut down major roads to pray in the middle of the street. Last Sunday, as a group of pro-Hamas types gathered at Bathurst Street and Sheppard Avenue West—a predominantly Jewish neighborhood—it was a Jew who was arrested.

The message is clear, there are different rules for Jews in Canada. Take the example of the Jewish National Fund, a charitable organization in Canada for over a century that had their charitable status revoked this past summer. . . . It’s very different approach from the one taken by [the tax authorities] after their audit of the Muslim Association of Canada determined the organization was working with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria.

Add to that the attack on kosher meat by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency after hundreds of years of being allowed in this country and you really see what is going on. Canadian officials are making it clear: Jews aren’t welcome in Canada and they will harass you until you get the picture.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”