Pro-Israel Municipality Claims “Discrimination”

A rich, exclusionary municipality is claiming persecution because Parliament passed a motion to lessen Canada’s role in a genocide. Hampstead highlights the moral abyss of large swaths of Canada’s Jewish community.

Last Monday the Montreal area municipality unanimously passed a motion demanding “the Council of Hampstead, hereby expresses its non-confidence in the Government of Canada for its distancing from the longstanding policy of support for Israel, which has resulted in a major spike in antisemitism across Canada; THAT the Town council calls upon the Government of Canada to reaffirm its commitment to supporting Israel and to take concrete actions to combat antisemitism in all its forms within our nation.”

Hampstead is fervently anti-Palestinian. An Israeli flag hangs outside City Hall and in November the municipality passed a law giving $1,000 tickets — with money raised sent to Israel — to anyone tearing down posters of the hostages Hamas took to Gaza on October 7. They’ve instigated multiple fundraising projects for Israel and in December Hampstead mayor Jeremy Levi told me he would continue supporting Israel even if they killed 100,000 Palestinian children since “good needs to prevail over evil”.

Despite promoting genocide, Hampstead claims egalitarian values and its statement calls for “solidarity with communities facing discrimination and persecution”. The first whereas in the recent motion claims “the Town of Hampstead, has historically upheld values of inclusivity, tolerance, and Support for communities facing discrimination.” But Hampstead is a wealthy, ethnically segregated, enclave. It traces its roots to Britain’s late-1800s Garden City movement, which was a move by London’s elite to move out of the city centre. Just west of Montréal, Hampstead was established by some of the wealthiest Canadians in 1914. The municipality doesn’t allow retail shops or industrial land in its boundaries and is one of the wealthiest municipalities in Québec. Until after the Second World War, it was almost entirely WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Today over three-quarters of Hampstead’s 7,500 residents are Jewish and it is one be the most ethnically homogeneous areas in greater Montreal. The median income of the 2,500 households was $150,000 per year in 2021 (almost twice the Montreal wide median). Over half of the homes have four bedrooms or more. The average home value in 2021 was $1,766,000 (three times the region’s average).

To live in the exclusive municipality, residents pay large sums in property taxes. With only residential properties covering the city’s costs, the average Hampstead house pays $15,393 annually in property tax.

To ensure a Zionist and Jewish centric outlook many residents put their kids in private Jewish schools and summer camps. The current ethnic segregation is stunning for a community that comprised seven per cent of Montreal’s population a century ago. (The larger adjacent municipality of Côte Saint-Luc is two-thirds Jewish.)

Hampstead is an exclusionary well-to-do community that promotes slaughtering and starving Palestinians because they aren’t Jewish. It is a bastion of Jewish supremacy that bemoans “antisemitism”.

It is beyond absurd for this wealthy, exclusionary, genocide promoting municipality to decry “discrimination” and “persecution”.

Yves Engler is the author of 12 books. His latest book is Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People's History of the Canadian Military . Read other articles by Yves.