A Belleville synagogue could have been the scene of a massacre on Sunday, September 20th. On the scale of the largest Canadian shootings, such as the Montreal Massacre of December 6, 1989, when 14 women were killed outside the Ecole Polytechnique by a lone gunman. 

In 1989, the target was women who dared to study engineering. This time it was 25 Jewish people observing Yom Kippur.

The shooter, 29-year-old Sean Ward, brought to the Sons of Jacob a shotgun, multiple additional guns, gasoline, and explosives. Everything necessary for a mass murder and a conflagration afterward. 

He shot the OPP constable, Jeff Smith, keeping watch outside the synagogue, multiple times while he was still in his car. Constable Smith managed, nonetheless, to get out and hold Ward off long enough for another officer to arrive. Together, they brought him down, but not before he fired at least 24 bullets through the stained-glass windows of the synagogue. 

Those bullets, incredibly, never found their targets. 

I heard about the shooting early Monday morning. I stored the news away while I got ready for work. I had to drive one of my kids to his new school — he still had not been assigned a seat on the school bus. His school, Easthill Elementary, is in Belleville. I dropped him off and drove on along the century homes of Bridge Street. At every corner, I noted with approval, there were school-crossing guards. 

But at Bleeker, the road was blocked off with yellow tape and police cars. I was, I realized with shock, at the synagogue. The scene of the shooting I’d just heard about. Three or four blocks from my son’s school. 

I said to my Jewish cousin, just think. It could have been a school shooting. It could have been my son’s school. It could have been my son. I was rattled. It was too close to home. 

But it was an attack on a synagogue, she said. Not a school shooting. 

If you are depraved enough to shoot Jews in a synagogue on Yom Kippur, I said, aren’t you depraved enough to shoot anybody?

That’s not the point, she said. It was an attack on Jews. 

Of course, my cousin is right. But I’ve been thinking about it ever since. It’s been difficult not to; it happened right here, in our neighbourhood. Constable Jeff Smith is related to half of the County. One of my kids came home from PECI the other day saying the officer in the hospital is his friend’s uncle. 

In 1989, I was a student at McGill. It was no surprise at all then that that attack was on women. Women are always being attacked. The crime of the times now is against Jews. As though each and every one of them stands for the terrible times we are now in and must be made to pay for them. 

Last year, at Bondi Beach, 15 people were killed celebrating Hanukah. 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic violence across the Jewish Diaspora in over 30 years. It was, in other words, even worse than 2024. Since October 7, 2023, antisemitic violence around the world has doubled. In Canada, it has more than doubled. A baseline of 2769 incidents of antisemitic harassment, abuse, and violence in 2022 became 6000 in 2023 and close to 7000 in 2025. In 2026 it will be higher still.

This is important in part because antisemitism is the yardstick for the success of hate campaigns in general. Jew-hatred, in other words, is the lightning rod, the conversion therapy, the bait. Once you agree that Jews are inhuman and ought to be exterminated, you have become inhuman yourself. The accusation Sean Ward levelled at Officer Smith while shooting at him, “you are going to die for the Jews,” was a twisted projection.

In The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda, Warren Kinsella shows that the antisemitic vitriol flourishing on social media platforms around the world — Elon Musk’s X; ByteDance’s TikTok; Google’s YouTube, and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram — took on a new intensity on October 7, 2023. He documents an extraordinary surge of activity on that day, the start of a concerted and coordinated and continuing campaign to make Hamas-controlled Gaza the good guys in the war with Israel.

This propaganda campaign is the second front in Hamas’s terror attack: a concerted global effort to envelop and destroy Israel as the first outpost of the West. In the days and weeks following Hamas’s attack, hundreds of thousands of social media accounts suddenly came to life, each posting as often as 300 times a day, reaching hundreds of millions of viewers all around the world. 

In the week following October 7, to give just one example, the U.K.-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found more than 15,000 instances of antisemitic content on YouTube alone —an increase of 4,963 per cent from the days leading up to October 7.

Kinsella, an expert in both hate propaganda and political campaigns, identifies this reign of social media terror as coordinated by “Iran, Qatar, Hamas, Hezbollah, several far-left NGOs and non-profits and charities, and, increasingly, Iran’s allies in the Chinese and Russian regimes.” 

Its extraordinary success has only been aided over the past three years by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s horrific, ongoing attacks on Gaza. 

One story Kinsella recounts caught my attention. “In 2018, a Toronto neo-Nazi publishing a ‘newspaper’ mused in print about me being ‘bludgeoned to death’. His hate sheet included tributes to Hitler and Nazism; it advocated rape; it vilified gays and Muslims; and, more than anything else, it promoted antisemitism. After lots of effort, we got that man sent to jail for a long time.”

The social media platforms that do not just spread but profit from hate speech—at an order of magnitude beyond the reach of any print newspaper—operate unimpeded. Nobody is going to jail for inciting extremist terrorist violence in your neighbourhood, never mind publishing hate speech. The opposite is the case: we protect the right of American social media companies to incite violence on their platforms in this country.

In Canada, CUSMA (at sections 19.17.2 and 19.17.3) explicitly exempts them from any liability for third-party posts on their sites. 

It is difficult to describe the exponential reach of social media. It is equally difficult to understand why we are allowing this toxic scourge to destroy our country, our communities, and our people. 29-year-old Sean Ward, who is now dead, was recruited long ago into a concerted, global campaign. Antisemitism is the first point of entry to extremist and polarizing and radically destabilizing rhetorics designed to weaken trust and faith: in democracy, in institutions, in each other. 

Our shooter is just a symptom, another victim of what has become a national emergency. The same laws against toxic hatred and incitements to violence that apply to every other institution of civil society must apply to American billionaire tech platforms as well. Our lives depend on it. All of them.