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TORONTO – In a stark and urgent address delivered at Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has sounded the alarm that Canada’s social contract is failing Jewish Canadians, who are facing increasingly brutal, targeted attacks driven by rampant antisemitism across the country.

Carney emphasized that current levels of anti-Jewish hate have not been witnessed at any point since the end of World War II, painting a grim picture of the state of religious tolerance in the nation. Data shared by the prime minister underscores the severity of the crisis: while Jewish Canadians make up just 1% of the country’s total population, more than two-thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes committed in Canada last year were directed at members of this community.

“The horror and shame are global. Our actions must be local. They start with clearly admitting that Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians,” Carney stated during the address.

The prime minister detailed the escalating and violent nature of antisemitic attacks occurring across Canadian regions. Perpetrators have carried out brazen acts including firing bullets at Jewish educational institutions, throwing firebombs at Jewish synagogues, and launching assaults on Jewish community centers. Beyond physical violence, Carney noted that antisemitic harassment has pushed Jewish business owners to face targeted boycotts and attacks on their livelihoods, and has driven Jewish students away from shared public spaces on Canadian university campuses.

While Carney acknowledged that rising antisemitism is a shared crisis plaguing other Western nations including the United States, Europe and Australia, he stressed that the situation in Canada carries unique characteristics, is exceptionally severe, and requires tailored, targeted policy intervention. Global monitoring organizations have recorded a dramatic spike in antisemitic incidents worldwide since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, a surge that has impacted Canada as heavily as many other nations.

In response to the growing threat, Carney outlined concrete steps his administration has already taken and plans to implement in the coming months. Over the past year, the federal government has introduced new legislation designed to crack down on antisemitism and all other forms of targeted hatred. The prime minister also confirmed a $75 million Canadian dollar investment – equivalent to approximately $54 million U.S. dollars – that will go toward upgrading security infrastructure and hiring additional security personnel at faith-based institutions across the country, with a focus on protecting Jewish community sites.

“It pains me that we had to commit $75 million to this, any dollar to this,” Carney said, expressing regret that public funds need to be diverted to protect communities from targeted hate.

To build a long-term, evidence-based strategy to counter antisemitism, Carney announced the launch of a new Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion. This special body will be tasked with conducting a comprehensive review to map the nature, full scale and root causes of antisemitism in Canada. Following the council’s assessment, targeted investments in public education, hate prevention and community safety initiatives will be rolled out, according to a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office.

Carney took the opportunity to clarify the scope of upcoming policy measures, emphasizing that new interventions will not infringe on fundamental Canadian rights. “I want to be clear about what these potential measures are, and what they are not. They are not curtailments of freedom of expression. They are not constraints on legitimate criticism of any government on any subject anywhere,” he said.

Instead, the prime minister framed the actions as a defense of fundamental public values: “They are the basic standards we owe one another, in our shared public institutions, to ensure that no Canadian community is driven from those institutions by hatred.”

Ahead of Carney’s address, Noah Shack, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, reiterated that the Canadian federal government needs to go further to reinforce Jewish community security and systematically root out systemic hate, a call that the new policy package directly answers.

In a primary election result that underscores shifting currents within U.S. Democratic politics, Egyptian-American combat surgeon Adam Hamawy has secured a decisive victory in New Jersey’s 12th District Democratic primary, all but guaranteeing him a seat in the U.S. Congress next year.

With over 93% of ballots counted by 10 a.m. local time Wednesday, Hamawy captured more than 28% of the vote, outpacing his closest competitor by a substantial margin. The 12th District, home to the prestigious Princeton University, has been a reliably Democratic stronghold for at least 15 years, leaving little doubt that Hamawy will defeat his Republican challenger in the November general election. If he wins as expected, he will make history as the first Muslim to represent New Jersey in Congress; the candidate grew up in the state and still resides there today.

Hamawy’s political profile weaves together a rare combination of military service, frontline medical experience, and high-profile progressive and centrist endorsements. A veteran combat surgeon, Hamawy’s path to politics first intersected with current U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth in 2004, when he treated the then-soldier for life-threatening injuries in Baghdad that required a double leg amputation. Duckworth has long credited Hamawy with saving her life, and she repaid that debt 20 years later by supporting his campaign from its launch, marking a rare centrist endorsement for an candidate aligned with the modern progressive Democratic movement.

Hamawy catapulted to national attention earlier this year for his harrowing 2024 medical mission to Gaza, where he was deployed to the European Hospital in Khan Younis as part of a delegation organized by the Palestinian American Medical Association. When Israel closed the Rafah Crossing into Egypt, Hamawy and 19 other U.S. healthcare workers were trapped inside the besieged enclave. After the Biden administration negotiated safe passage for the 17 delegation members who held U.S. citizenship, Hamawy refused to evacuate until every member of his team was guaranteed exit. He eventually reached Jordan in late May 2024, and upon returning to the U.S., he repeatedly pressed congressional leaders to address the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.

ideologically, Hamawy runs on a progressive platform aligned with the wave of new left Democrats who have found electoral success across the U.S. in recent months, prioritizing cost of living affordability and universal equitable access to healthcare. His campaign earned early and widespread support from leading progressives, including the full Congressional Progressive Caucus, Senator Bernie Sanders, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. He also secured backing from climate advocacy groups, the national nurses union, and multiple veterans organizations. He entered the primary as the clear frontrunner in both polling and fundraising, with his campaign reporting a total haul of $1.4 million ahead of election day.

Democratic Party leaders welcomed Hamawy’s primary win. “Democratic voters throughout New Jersey have once again demonstrated that they understand the stakes of this moment,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a statement Tuesday night. “As a veteran, combat surgeon, and small business owner, Adam Hamawy has continually served his community and our country. He is a proven fighter for working families. We look forward to welcoming him to Congress.”

Progressive and pro-Palestinian advocacy groups framed Hamawy’s victory as a watershed moment for the Palestinian cause in U.S. electoral politics, noting that the crisis in Gaza has become a defining issue for young Democratic voters in 2024. “Voters were drawn to Dr Hamawy’s candidacy because he knows firsthand the reality of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza like few do – having worked to save the lives of Palestinian children under bombardment and unimaginable conditions. His experience is necessary in Congress now more than ever, as too many of the people meant to represent us continue to look the other way while our tax dollars fund injustices here and abroad,” the IMEU Policy Project and Justice Democrats said in a statement Tuesday night.

Jewish Voice for Peace linked Hamawy’s win to a growing global movement that is reshaping domestic U.S. politics. “Last night, Palestine was on the ballot – and won,” the group wrote. “We are on our way to solidifying Palestine as part of popular politics that is intertwined with the fight for working people across the country.”

Hamawy’s path to the primary win was not without conflict, as he faced sustained attacks from pro-Israel and right-wing political actors ahead of the vote. When asked ahead of the election about the criticism he faced, Hamawy downplayed the attacks, noting he had endured far greater adversity during his medical and military career. “I have done harder things than mount a political campaign,” Hamawy told Middle East Eye on the eve of the election. “What’s the worst thing they’re going to do? Call me some names, attack me? I have seen much worse.”

Last month, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed that drew a false equivalence between Hamawy’s values and those of Omar Abdel Rahman, the convicted “Blind Sheikh” who was found guilty of plotting terrorist attacks in the 1990s and died in U.S. prison in 2017. Notably, Hamawy himself testified as a witness in Rahman’s 1995 trial, the largest terrorism trial in U.S. history at the time, where he told the jury that while the cleric expressed anti-American views, he never explicitly outlined plans for a murder plot. Later, Jewish Insider published an article tying Hamawy to al-Qaeda, citing his 1994 volunteer medical mission to Bosnia with the Benevolence International Foundation, a Saudi charity that was not blacklisted by the U.S. or United Nations until 2002, eight years after Hamawy’s work with the group.

The attacks drew national condemnation from progressives, and even reached the Senate floor, where Montana Republican Senator Tim Sheehy, who drew international attention earlier this year for breaking the arm of a pro-Palestinian activist who disrupted a Senate hearing, tweeted, “Democrats are now running actual terrorists for Congress. Surprising? No. Disappointing? Yes.”

Escalating cross-border hostilities between the United States and Iran have sparked a sharp diplomatic rebuke from Tehran, which on Monday slammed the European Union for what it calls a blatant display of biased moral judgment in the group’s response to recent Iranian strikes against US military sites in the Middle East. The condemnation comes as the Trump administration carried out new offensive operations against Iran over the weekend, leaving tentative peace negotiations deadlocked.

On the surface, Leen Ezzeddine’s 2026 commencement address at Harvard Medical School could have fit neatly into the beloved narrative of immigrant achievement: a young Lebanese woman earning a medical degree from one of the world’s most selective elite institutions. But Ezzeddine rejected that sanitized script, choosing instead to center stark personal and political contradiction in a speech that quickly went viral and reignited long-simmering debates on U.S. campuses over Palestine, academic complicity, and the moral obligations of medical professionals.

Ezzeddine’s connection to the crisis unfolding in her home region is not abstract. Just 18 months before she crossed the commencement stage, a U.S.-supplied Israeli missile destroyed her family’s summer home in Arab Salim, a village in southern Lebanon. Her grandparents, who had lived in the home for decades, were forced to flee to Beirut, and the village has remained under repeated Israeli bombardment even as Ezzeddine delivered her speech. Standing in the sanctity of Harvard’s graduation ceremony, she drew a clear, unflinching line between her own privileged path to medicine and the experiences of equally ambitious medical students across Lebanon and Palestine, who are forced to pursue their degrees amid collapsing infrastructure, bombardment, displacement, and the constant threat of death.

“The only difference between me and students who shared the same dream, the same work ethic, and the same devotion to medicine is that they had to pursue that dream in conditions no student should ever have to endure,” Ezzeddine told Middle East Eye in an interview following her speech. She rejected the common narrative that her success at Harvard stemmed solely from hard work or merit, framing her position as the product of luck and circumstance, not inherent worth.

Ezzeddine’s speech entered a charged, long-running battle over Palestine that has roiled U.S. campuses for years, including at Harvard. Since the outbreak of Israel’s expanded military campaign in Gaza, student activists demanding university divestment from companies linked to the war have faced widespread disciplinary action, police raids, suspensions, and accusations of antisemitism. Just one year before Ezzeddine’s graduation, hundreds of Harvard graduates walked out of the commencement ceremony to protest the university’s decision to bar students who participated in a pro-Palestinian encampment from graduating. The university’s handling of Gaza-related activism has become a central flashpoint in a national debate over whether U.S. academia protects dissenting speech – or punishes it when it centers Palestinian rights.

Rather than delivering an abstract political address, Ezzeddine anchored her argument in personal testimony and the core principles of medical practice. Citing Black liberation activist Assata Shakur, she emphasized that dehumanization is a precondition for violence, noting that people affected by war in the Middle East are too often reduced to statistics or political talking points instead of being recognized as full human beings with their own dreams, families, and aspirations. “Lives no less full, no less sacred, and no less worthy than their own,” she said of those caught in the conflict.

For Ezzeddine, medicine cannot be separated from the political structures that determine who gets access to safety, shelter, clean water, and healthcare. “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale,” she explained. “Our work does not begin and end at the bedside. A patient’s health is shaped by whether they have housing, clean water, food, safety, freedom of movement, and access to a hospital that has not been bombed or defunded. So when political decisions determine who is allowed to live with dignity and who is denied the basic conditions of survival, doctors cannot pretend medicine and politics are separate.”

She also challenged the hypocrisy she sees embedded in modern medical education: while students are routinely taught to recognize structural violence, health equity, and the social determinants of health, those very principles are often abandoned when the lives at stake are politically inconvenient for institutional power holders. That contradiction has left countless students and faculty across the U.S. disillusioned since the start of the Gaza war, as universities navigate donor pressure, political backlash, and internal divisions over how to address the conflict.

When asked about the personal and professional risks of speaking out, Ezzeddine situated her choice within a long history of dissident activists whose moral stances were once condemned before being widely celebrated, including Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr. “Moral clarity is often most costly before it becomes widely accepted,” she said, echoing activist and thinker Audre Lorde’s famous declaration: “Your silence will not protect you.”

Beyond rhetoric, Ezzeddine has turned the attention drawn by her speech into tangible action. She launched a GoFundMe campaign to provide urgent essentials – including baby formula, diapers, medical supplies, mattresses, and blankets – to pregnant people, newborns, and displaced families in southern Lebanon. What began as a speech has already grown into a community-led response, with Ezzeddine noting that many people in the U.S. are hungry for concrete ways to support those affected by the conflict. Longer term, she plans to build a formal grassroots organization that meets emergency needs in Lebanon while creating pathways for more people from marginalized conflict-affected communities to enter elite institutions like Harvard and enter positions of power. “Because we need more of us in these rooms,” she said.

Ezzeddine’s speech did not resolve the deep contradictions she laid bare. Harvard remains an elite institution embedded in existing power structures, U.S. academia remains a deeply contested terrain over Palestine, and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and southern Lebanon continues unabated. But her address cut through the comfortable ritual of graduation to demand that medical professionals live up to the ethical principles they claim to uphold. At its core, her message rejects the idea that medicine is separate from the systems that decide which lives are worthy of care – and in a moment where silence too often passes for neutrality, she chose to speak.