In early December 2025 in the city of Ottawa, Canada a former City of Ottawa lawyer went on trial for painting ‘FEED ME’ on Canada’s ‘National Holocaust Monument’ – one wonders why Canada needs one but I digress – in a piece of anti-Zionist political graffiti and Zenith Wolfe writing the ‘Canadian Jewish News’ explained what happened as follows:
‘The former City of Ottawa lawyer who pleaded guilty to writing “FEED ME” and throwing blood-red paint on the National Holocaust Monument earlier this year told court on Dec. 1 that he made an intentional decision to link the tragedy of the Holocaust with “the current genocide and starvation in Palestine.”
“My message was not intended to provoke or incite hatred of Jewish people or anybody. My message was intended to shock, and disturb, and to disrupt Canadians because my belief is our silence is complicity,” Iain Aspenlieder said of his June 9 actions.
Ottawa police arrested Aspenlieder on June 27, and he pleaded guilty to one count of mischief against the memorial on July 25. It is the first time a sentence has been applied to this charge, which was added to the Criminal Code in 2014.
Aspenlieder has since been on bail living with his parents in Everett, Ont. He asked to return to police custody because he didn’t want his stay to keep impacting his parents, according to his lawyer, Michael Spratt.
Aspenlieder, 46, said he believes the millions of people killed in the Holocaust “would not be offended by me invoking them today” in condemning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He acknowledged that his actions made members of the Jewish community feel unsafe and scared.
“That was an unavoidable consequence, in my mind, of what I decided to do,” he said. “I have had months where I think about what I did and why, and my insight has crystallized. I’m not going to change my belief.”
Acting Deputy Crown attorney Moiz Karimjee recommended that Justice Anne London-Weinstein sentence Aspenlieder to two years in prison, with a three-year probation period. Karimjee said Aspenlieder’s actions were intentionally antisemitic by targeting the memorial, since he could have protested at the Israeli embassy or Parliament if he only meant to send a political message.
He said the defendant used the monument to maximize publicity, and used Canadians’ outrage as a means to that end.
“There needs to be a loud and clear message that no matter what’s your view on the foreign conflict abroad, you cannot harm Canadians for perceived grievances abroad. Because today it’s Jews. Next time it will be Muslims. Another time it will be Bahá’ís. Another time it will be Sikhs. Another time it will be Hindus,” Karimjee said. “It doesn’t stop with the Jewish people. It often hasn’t, historically.”
Spratt asked for a suspended sentence since Aspenlieder has already served time in jail, and his months of “very strict bail requirements” have been similar to house arrest. Aspenlieder lost his job and his standing in the law community, and has been unable to see his two pre-teen children.
Spratt said the Crown couldn’t prove Aspenlieder was motivated by hatred or antisemitism beyond a reasonable doubt. International court findings and media coverage about starvation in Gaza may have genuinely convinced Aspenlieder of the connection between the two events, the defence said.
He added that several factors show Aspenlieder may have been protesting in good faith: his guilty plea, the hunger strike he had undertaken, his messages to politicians condemning Netanyahu, his years of legal service, and his sensitivity to racial issues in past conversations with colleagues.
“A clear portrait emerges, and that’s of someone not motivated by hate, but someone who feels hurt deep and was motivated by an overwhelming grief – an undeniable tragedy on a human scale,” Spratt said.
The defence said the consequences of Aspenlieder’s actions “will stay with him forever.” Spratt added that he hoped this trial was the “first step” in Aspenlieder’s rehabilitation to understand the “damage that his crime caused” to the Jewish community.’ (1)
For the record the graffiti concerned looked like this:
Perhaps surprisingly the jewish judge Anne London-Weinstein didn’t throw the book at Aspenlieder but instead – much to the absolute spittle-flecked rage of her fellow members of the tribe – sentenced him to time served as Guy Quenneville explains in his article for CBC:
‘In her decision Wednesday to release Aspenlieder from custody, London-Weinstein said she didn’t believe Aspenlieder’s actions were motivated by hate but that they still caused harm.
She handed down a sentence of five months for time already served. Aspenlieder looked straight ahead, his head tilted slightly down, during the sentencing.
London-Weinstein concluded that Aspenlieder’s actions were motivated by his political views and the plight of the Palestinians.’ (2)
In other words: London-Weinstein believed Aspenlieder’s actions were not an ‘anti-Semitic hate crime’ but rather anti-Zionist political graffiti and because he had pled guilty; she decided for whatever reason to go easy on him and let him off with time served.
Predictably there was shrieking from London-Weinstein’s fellow Red Sea Pedestrians with a good example being afforded by Sheldon Kirshner writing ‘how upset he was’ in the ‘Times of Israel’ and shrieking how Apsenlieder was ‘treated too leniently.’ (3)
However pretty much the entirety of Aspenlieder’s ‘argument’ on this score was just one screech about ‘muh Holocaust’.
For example, he writes:
‘The memorial that Aspenlieder so brazenly violated is architecturally striking. Consisting of monumental walls of varying dimensions and angles, it is laid out in the shape of an elongated Star of David and sits across the Canadian War Museum. Inaugurated by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on September 27, 2017, it was designed by a multidisciplinary design team composed of Studio Daniel Libeskind, Claude Cormier + Associés, the photographer Edward Burtynsky, Lord Cultural Resources, and the University of Toronto historian Doris Bergen.
Aspenlieder, in a reckless act of solidarity with the Palestinians, defaced the monument as the Israel-Hamas war raged in the Gaza Strip. Like some supporters of the Palestinian cause, he conflated Jews in the Diaspora with the State of Israel and appears to have blamed them for the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians during Israel’s fierce but just military campaign in Gaza.’ (4)
The problem with this view – as Norman Finkelstein was pointing out (and sounding the alarm bells concerning this to his people) in the early 2000s – is that jews have systematically equated criticism of – as well as opposition to – Israel and its policies as being ‘hatred of jews’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ (remember the famous IHRA ‘definition of anti-Semitism’ which does just this) as well as used the ‘Holocaust’ as both a shield from criticism and a big club to mercilessly beat critics with to accuse them of ‘anti-Semitism’ that now the worm has turned and the inevitable has occurred – basically jews have memed the very type of anti-Semitism they were (and are) so terrified of into reality and more or less singlehandedly rehabilitated Adolf Hitler in the eyes of the world – they want to claim that it is a ‘mistake to equate the two’ (as well as vice versa) when it is to their advantage to do so.
That time however has passed and jews like Kirschner are stuck in the pre-2015 political paradigm where Israel and jews are the ‘light unto the nations’ and where they could just endlessly bring up the ‘Holocaust’ to deflect all criticism of Israel and its policies.
Now we are in a new age and while Aspenlieder seems to be just an overly emotional moralistic leftist; the reason he conflated Canada’s ‘National Holocaust Memorial’ and the state of Israel is perfectly valid and the fault of jews like Kirschner who have created that connection with their behaviour and rhetoric.
But then jews never want to take ownership of their own behaviour let alone is consequences: do they?
The truth however is simply that this was never an ‘anti-Semitic hate crime’ but rather an anti-Zionist political protest; it does however show what is on the horizon and you can tell that the jews in Canada and elsewhere are getting more terrified by the day.
References
(1) https://thecjn.ca/news/crown-asks-for-a-2-year-sentence-for-man-who-defaced-national-holocaust-monument/
(2) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/holocaust-memorial-defacer-sentencing-9.7036401
(3) https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/holocaust-monument-desecrator-treated-leniently/
(4) Idem.
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