Rebel News journalist Ezra Levant warned that the ongoing church arsons in Canada threaten to move the country toward the sort of systematic persecution that afflicted Jewish people in pre-war Germany.
Levant spoke to Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, who observed that Canada increasingly resembles a communist country.
“I’m reluctant to use the word ‘Kristallnacht,’ because we’re not there yet,” Levant said. “That was the ‘Night of the Broken Glass’ in pre-Holocaust Germany, where they smashed and burned and killed Jewish synagogues. It was a precursor to the Holocaust.”
“Obviously we are not that far gone yet,” he continued. “But what do you call it when literally dozens of churches are being systemically vandalized, torched?”
Several churches have been burned and some completely destroyed in Canada since hundreds of unmarked indigenous graves have been discovered at the sites of residential schools in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and British Columbia.
Often run by churches, the residential school program was a government-funded program in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that forced indigenous children into boarding schools to assimilate them to Canadian culture. Canadian churches and politicians have since apologized for the program.
Related: Trudeau Demands Papal Apology On Canadian Soil For Unmarked Indigenous Graves
Levant went on to blast Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for his apparent reluctance to condemn what Levant described as an explicitly “anti-church hate crime wave.”
“Justin Trudeau, who is normally the first and the wokest, waited a week before saying anything. And he literally said, ‘That’s not the way to go.’ That was as tough as he got,” Levant said.
He noted Trudeau seems more concerned about criminalizing mean tweets than he does addressing the desecration of churches, which have mostly been Roman Catholic and Anglican but have also spread to include a Protestant congregation of Vietnamese refugees.
“I think these are dark days for religious freedom in Canada,” Levant added.
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Levant’s warning echoed that of Jenn Allan-Riley, an assistant Pentecostal minister who is indigenous. “This is not our Native way,” Allan-Riley said, who is the daughter of a residential school survivor as well as a Sixties Scoop survivor herself. “We do not hate people. We do not spread hate. We love people. We do not destroy other people’s places of religion. We’re asking for people who are setting these fires to stop now.”
Admonishing the arsonists that their actions are not helping the indigenous community, Allan-Riley said, “We can see this being much worse and worse, and what’s going to happen is if this keeps up, whoever is doing this, you’re going to wake up a very ugly, evil spirit in this country. And it’s going to spread across this country, and it’s going to destroy it.”
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"Violence begets violence, so we're asking people who are lighting churches on fire to stop … whoever's doing this, you're going to wake up a very ugly evil spirit in this country, and it's going to spread across this country, and it's going to destroy it" #cndpoli pic.twitter.com/CQGU9294W1
— Pundit Class (@punditclass) July 5, 2021
In addition to the destruction of churches, Christian pastors in several Canadian provinces have faced exorbitant fines and even imprisonment for continuing to meet for worship despite strict COVID-19 lockdowns. Alberta made international headlines for jailing several pastors, including Pastor Artur Pawlowski, who grew up in Poland under the jackboot of the Soviets.
Pawlowski, who potentially faces four years in prison for conducting church services in defiance of Alberta’s Public Health Act, has repeatedly warned that the communist tactics against religion that he experienced behind the Iron Curtain as a young man have since moved to Canada.
In June, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) urged the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) to consider adding Canada to its watch list because of how the country has been treating Christians.