The CBC won’t call it this, but let’s be abundantly clear: on Sunday night, Canada suffered a terror attack.

As congregants gathered at Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ontario for Kol Nidre, the opening of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, a 29-year-old with a shotgun opened fire on the building and the police officer stationed outside. He came, almost certainly, to murder Jews who were strangers to him. The man who stopped him was one of the people this country trusts to protect them: Constable Jeff Smith of the Belleville Police Service, a hero who is in critical but stable condition at the writing of this article. Without him, there would surely have been a much higher casualty rate. And if there’s one thing we can guarantee, it’s that the Jewish community will support and show up for him. A GoFundMe for the officer was started late Monday night, and the campaign has already blown past its goal. Raising money via donations is just the beginning of that support.

Every single Canadian should consider providing that same support. Because make no mistake, while this was a terrorist attack on Jews it was also a terrorist attack on every single Canadian.

Over the course of their history, Jews have often been the canaries in the coal mine of whatever society they happen to live in. Miners used to bring canaries down the shaft because the birds were so much more sensitive to gas leaks. It impacted them first. If the canary stopped singing, you got out, you made a change, because something was wrong. Something systemic. It’s such a salient allegory that last week in Toronto there was an entire conference on antisemitism and Jew hate titled exactly that: A Canary Song.

No one in the Jewish community is surprised by what happened. Our institutions have had to switch their framing, from preventing incidents at all to minimizing the damage when, God forbid, they do happen. It’s why some are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on security. It’s why there was a police officer parked outside a tiny synagogue in Belleville. “We never would have thought it could happen here” left the Canadian Jewish lexicon decades........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)