Mayor Brian Bowman’s Executive Policy Committee (EPC) in Winnipeg centralizes power, excluding rural areas like Transcona while pushing a handgun ban—despite police confirming its ineffectiveness—after Yassin Abu Ahmed’s death, a Somali refugee. Councillor Sherry Rollins’ "social development" approach clashes with Constable Rob Carver’s skepticism, sparking backlash over failed urban bans. Meanwhile, anti-Semitic faxes like Schitler’s List (2019–2020) were exposed as personal vendettas, yet Winnipeg’s Jewish community faces rising threats amid media silence on Nazi imagery incidents and perceived federal inaction, driving demand for Shomrim patrols across Canada. Community vigilance, not institutional leadership, remains the key to safety. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello Rebels, I'm Sheila Gunread and you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
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Does the city of Winnipeg have its very own version of progressive mayor Naheed Nenshi?
Sure looks that way.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
I talk a lot about Edmonton and Calgary on the show, first of all, because they're closer to home for me, but also because I hate to see these great entrepreneurial metropolises destroyed by progressive municipal policies.
However, Alberta cities aren't the only cities suffering this swing to progressivism on the prairies.
Turns out Winnipeg just might be as bad.
Powerful Winnipeg city councilors are already advocating for increased spending on climate change policies, and a far-left-wing city councilor is also looking to replicate Toronto by calling for a handgun ban.
What the heck is happening to our prairie cities?
To discuss these issues and his ongoing coverage of Western Canadian Jewish issues, that's a hard one to say, is independent Winnipeg journalist Marty Gold from the J.CA in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon.
Now from Winnipeg, slightly less cold than it is here at home, is my friend, independent Winnipeg journalist Marty Gold.
Marty, thanks for joining me.
Let's talk about local stuff off the hop for you.
At the Rebel, we don't get to talk about a lot of local Winnipeg stuff, so I like to rely on you.
I talk a lot about Edmonton, a lot about Calgary, but Winnipeg is right in the mix with their own, I guess their own Nenshi, Mayor Bowman.
Yeah, he's he's developed a, and it should have been more of an issue in the last election, but he's managed to pervert the City of Winnipeg Act and that he's formed a political party without calling it that made up of his appointees to the committee chairs.
The committee chairs then form a committee of the, it's not of the whole, a committee of the powerful called the Executive Policy Committee.
So you'll have the chair of public works, the chair of parks and development, which involves the cops.
You get the idea.
And these chairs, six chairs, along with Bowman, form a caucus of seven that will then steer matters as they come up through the committee and other processes towards the city council agenda.
He has appointed what he's done towards the end of his last term and in this term is he appoints a deputy mayor and an acting deputy mayor, and they get to sit in on these meetings with these other chairs.
And it has created a caucus of nine, a majority of council, and the council has 16 members.
And this is controlling things.
And it's not just a question of controlling agendas.
It's also a question of access to information.
And so if your counselor is on the outs, your counselor is expected to ask a department head for information about some breakdown in your neighborhood.
And you may or may not ever get an answer.
And this is, of course, ridiculous.
You can't get answers through the committee heads, the committee chairs, but rather you're supposed to go back through the department like you're a glorified plebe.
And there are council members who've been on executive policy committee in the past who are now on the outs and who are very vocal about how about how discriminatory this is towards the voters of Winnipeg.
And the best example I can give you is, and I haven't made us think of this locally here yet because I really haven't done much journalistically yet so far this year.
The east side of the city, Transcona, East Kildona, North Kildonan, are not on EPC.
And there are repeatedly decisions that are being made that are contrary to the best interests of that entire district.
And not just in terms of the EPC side, but at committee where these EPC members are steering and guiding development decisions in neighborhoods.
So the counselors may, in one instance, voted against an amendment to the development plan in a particular part of the district.
And then at committee, Brian Bowman's acolytes decided to overturn it.
But if you did that in their own wards, they would crap themselves.
And one of them as much said so in a debate after the vote I'm referencing where something else came up and the counselor said, well, this would take away my authority in my own ward, and I don't like this.
And it's a bunch of hypocrites.
Bowman, like Nancy, is very big on the fluff, very big on the hand-holding, not very good when it comes to managing a pocketbook.
Bowman, you know, late in his first campaign began describing himself as a small businessman.
And I've made the point repeatedly, I've never heard of a lawyer with a small practice in the specialty field of privacy law.
There's no evidence that he ever made any kind of substantive dent.
I know myself that I've done things in using freedom of information requests that have changed government policies, changed government practices, that's exposed serious issues within government, whether it was the use of whiteout to change rules for entry to the boxing and wrestling licensing realm, or whether it was exposing Eric Robinson, the deputy premier's latent racism about white do-gooders.
I don't know that Brian Bowman ever did anything in the realm of privacy or privacy laws that affected any genuine social change, but he touts that as a way of saying, I'm a lawyer, or I was a lawyer.
And on top of that, he claims because he was a partner in a firm that somehow that made him a small businessman.
So he lives in a world of illusion, he does.
And part of this is the illusion of transparency with a budget process where meetings are scheduled concurrent to other committee meetings that counselors have to attend.
So, well, you can come to committee.
You can ask the department heads and the subheads about the budget line items for snow clearing or this or that.
But in fact, the counselors don't have equal and equitable access because they have other obligations they have to attend to.
Yeah, and you and I were talking yesterday.
Winnipeg has some very real problems that need to be addressed instead of this petty squabbling and arguing at the city administration level.
44 Murders and Counting00:14:54
44 murders in 2019 and two more already.
And instead of dealing with the, I hate to say root causes because it sounds like such a trudeau word, but instead of dealing with the reasons why there are 44 murders happening in 2019, you've got counselors in Winnipeg who are trying to replicate the lack of success dealing with the murder problem in Toronto by introducing a gun ban in Winnipeg.
And you and I, again, we were talking off camera.
This sort of stuff might fly in Toronto, where you can go your entire life without ever really leaving Toronto or the big city.
But people in Winnipeg, you're maybe one generation away from the farm.
You understand, you know, people who don't live in the city.
And so, you know, people understand that this kind of stuff really doesn't do anything to address the problem with gun violence and crime.
Well, this is, again, an example of one of these woke counselors.
Sherry Rollins was a Winnipeg school trustee who became chair of finance.
And if I'm remembering correctly, under her term as chair of finance at the Winnipeg school division, we saw the highest tax rates increases ever.
She's highly woke.
There isn't seemingly a minority group that she won't find a way of identifying with tangentially one way or the other in her so-called lived experience.
She's that kind of a person.
The murder that got Rollins deciding that she could plug a dime into her headline generator occurred at the Windsor Hotel.
Now, the Windsor Hotel, up until a couple of years ago, although it's an old hotel and it's getting run down, it's in downtown Winnipeg and it's Kitty Corner, literally Kitty Corner, the location of the new police station, the former downtown post office.
And the last couple of years, the Windsor has gotten to be a much rougher, it's attracted a much rougher crowd.
It always attracted a sort of a questionable crowd as a blue, became a, had achieved some fame as a blues bar.
And the hotel itself is like a, you know, probably the level one step above a fleabag.
But the last couple of years, it's become a more dangerous place to be around.
It's attracted more of a disreputable clientele.
That's also because gradually a lot of the previous hotels in Winnipeg that maybe had some of that kind of traffic go through it, that those places have disappeared.
And so there's fewer and fewer places for the schwutzim to show up.
So the Windsor's had a few problems.
Late Saturday night, as in early Sunday morning, around 2.30 in the morning, there was some kind of altercation.
Police believe that there was two larger groups.
I assume that they were in the bar and leaving.
And in the course of this altercation, somebody shot somebody.
And a fellow named Yassin Abu Ahmed was killed.
He's a 20-year-old.
And right away, people jumped at some conclusions based on the name of the deceased.
But from my research into the deceased and from what I've seen, this was an example of actually a success story in terms of a family that came from the proverbial war-torn Somalia, was dumped in, I think, Khartoum, emigrated to Canada as refugees.
And this kid was a basketball coach.
He was on basketball championship basketball teams.
I'm not familiar with his name.
I looked at his picture.
I can't say I recognize it, but he was involved in the Spence Neighborhood Association, the West Broadway Association.
So this was a really good kid.
Now, this part of downtown falls under the ward boundaries of Sherry Rollins, who represents Fort Rouge.
I don't even remember now if it's Fort Rouge East, Fort Gary still.
They might have changed that word boundary last time around.
So it falls in her ward.
So this gives her standing to flap her gums.
And so she decides that it's time to insist on a handgun ban and that she wants the feds to implement it swiftly.
Obviously, an intelligent thought has not gone through her head in regards to this matter.
And she's getting called out but good online.
Starting with the question of handgun bans.
Now, have they tried that somewhere like Chicago?
Yeah.
Baltimore.
The controversy wasn't so much her saying this, although she is the first Winnipeg politician to try to make hay.
I mean, Mayor Bowman has said he favors a handgun ban, but that was not in relation to any kind of municipal order or anything like that.
But yesterday at the police press conference, Constable Rob Carver, who's a hell of a smart cop and a good guy, Rob just shot this down immediately that this will make no impact on their workload.
They are not seeing murders committed with legally obtained firearms in the possession of the illegal owners.
There was, I think, six shooting deaths last year in Winnipeg.
And I'm not sure they were all handguns.
Some of these would have been shotguns or perhaps improvised devices.
It is simply not a big problem in Winnipeg.
And Winnipeg has recognized that a handgun ban is not responsive to what's going on on the streets.
Now, if Sherry Rollins wanted to demonstrate something other than political opportunism, which I realize might be kind of tough for her, given that she directly referenced John Torrey, if she was smart, she'd be calling for a ban on machetes.
Because when you've seen this raft of store robberies in Winnipeg, the liquor store invasions, there were machetes used in those.
Cab drivers threatened with machetes.
And Winnipeg does not have a machete culture.
If you want to talk about gun culture in the West and whatever, which I, by the way, believe certainly exists and is justifiable.
There's no machete culture in Winnipeg, not even among the Filipino community.
It's nonsense.
Now, there's something that Sherry Rollins could propose, a ban on the sale of machetes in Winnipeg.
I'm pretty certain that that would fall under the jurisdiction of city council.
They restrict the sale of spray paint.
The sale of rubbing alcohol is restricted in Winnipeg.
I don't know if that's by a civic convention or just something the police recommended.
But if you ban the sale of machetes, that would actually go a lot further to protecting public safety in Winnipeg.
And more Winnipeggers would get behind it because they understand that.
But Rollins, the money quote from the CBC interview was, I have a very different job than Constable Carver.
He deals every day with downstream impacts of gun crime.
My job is making sure I'm doing crime prevention through social development in the city.
How social development Is the main job of a city councilor is hard to identify.
And Carver's quote response was: it might make some people feel good, but it will not change the threat level one iota.
And so today there's, you know, some of the woke crowd continues to fall behind this great idea, and they're getting picked off on Twitter by some of the common sense crowd.
That if they aren't mentioning Chicago or Baltimore or some other place, they're pointing out that this is, you know, very much a stay-in-your-lane kind of situation.
Well, that's a good segue into the next thing I wanted to talk to you about because it is, you know, woke people wanting to ban things.
And it comes ironically from the Winnipeg Free Press, which I guess their name is also ironic because they wrote an op-ed that was unsigned, which I thought was kind of interesting.
That they want to censor so-called climate deniers, which I suppose would include me because I just don't believe that taxes change the weather.
It's unless it's for the world.
We've been waiting, but our taxes go up and the weather here hasn't changed to any great extent.
It was a bizarre editorial.
This editorial irked a lot of people because even people that are environmentalists, and there are a number of environmentalists in Manitoba who do not agree with various climate change practices and policies, some of these ideas are backwards, even with regards to Lake Winnipeg.
And Councillor Klein, Councilor Nason wanted steps taken that could more immediately reduce the phosphorus level in the lake.
And this met with opposition because immediate action isn't as sexy as the longer term built the taxpayers for a lot more billions.
So I'm surprised the free press didn't get even more blowback from that editorial than they did, but I think the fact that it became unsearchable very quickly might have helped quell the fires.
But again, coming from a newspaper that in the last 10 or 15 years has become increasingly attached to federal liberal governments, federal liberal causes.
It's just very disappointing if they can run an editorial, but if it isn't strong enough for you to let it stand, and it's also remarkable coming from a newspaper that again, 10 or 12, 10 years ago or so, came out strongly against the CRTC censoring a particular radio program in the Easter, I think in Quebec.
So they're all for free speech unless it's in their pages.
And then it's like we don't want to hear so-called climate denial in our newspaper and it shouldn't be heard anywhere else by our newspaper.
Fat chance.
That actually moves us into the next thing I wanted to talk to you about because it is a free speech issue.
Everybody has the right to protest.
And you also have, you have a secular life, but you also have a non-secular job with the J.C., I think Western Canada's leading Jewish journalism.
And you guys went down to cover the protest at the U.S. Consulate.
And when you sent me some notes and I was thinking, okay, yeah, yeah, they went to cover the protest at the U.S. Consulate.
They must be protesting for Iranian freedom.
They must be siding with the U.S. less of a protest and more of a rally.
But I'm dead wrong, aren't I?
I just want to make clear to the audience, I didn't go down there, but at least our publisher did with Some other individuals.
I was indisposed that day.
That was an interesting event in the way that it came together.
The Winnipeg Peace Alliance was at the forefront of it.
It's basically a wing of the Communist Party is a good way of putting it.
And they went to the police and city officials and said, we're going to be doing this.
We don't have money for permits.
We're going to do it anyways.
And they wanted to originally rent a flatbed and put speakers, you know, sound equipment on the flatbed and have speakers because you can't go in front of the U.S. consulate.
It's in a high-rise.
Let's be clear here, though.
They were protesting the American, well, Donald Trump.
Yes, American imperialism.
Yeah, turning Soleimani to hamburger.
One of the worst terrorists the world has ever known.
They were there to protest that.
Yes, that was their intention.
They were not there to protest.
There's no, you cannot find a mention in Winnipeg media of the same as you won't see anything in Winnipeg media about the Yellow Vest protests continuing in France.
You will not see a word in the Winnipeg media about the anti-regime protests that have gone on in Iran.
I don't know that a single Winnipeg newsroom mentioned the slaughter of dissidents, the implicit threat to the families of dissidents or people who are sympathetic to dissidents that you're going to be capped next.
You don't hear none of that.
And so you got these Mishigoim that are going to protest American imperialism.
But the problem is that the Iranians kind of spoiled it for them by attacking a civilian airliner.
And so it was scaled way back and ended up on the sidewalk with about 50 or 60 people, the usual suspects.
Ron East attended with a couple of other people.
It took about 20 seconds for a protest about ostensibly about Iran, about the will of the Iranian people, the independence of the Iranian government to make decisions, whatever they think they're in favor of or protesting.
Took about 20 seconds for some jackass to recognize Ron and say, hey, why don't you go bomb Palestine or something?
Every time.
Yeah, every time the Jew haters can't help themselves.
So, you know, the event on Saturday was remarkably unremarkable.
I think it would have been a very different scene.
There did not seem to be a people who were opposed the Iranian regime, but you can be sure in the broader context that, you know, our conclusion, and I say this in part because we were educated, Ron and I, by the best, that would be his father, Yoram Amizrahi, who knew a thing or two or three about intelligence gathering and analysis as, among other things, commander of Israeli forces in southern Lebanon.
It's pretty evident that this, how did I put this?
The evidence strongly points towards the notion there was somebody on that plane that needed to be eliminated from the regime's point of view.
Somebody caring whether it was a chip, whether it was knowledge between their ears.
This is, in our estimation, we're not experts, don't have any information on what we've gathered from usual news sources.
This is what was up.
Is there somebody on that plane they want out?
Canadians Targeted?00:04:02
Now, you look at the Canadians that died, of whom there's, and this has had a lot of reverb in our country, because the people that died, none of them have been identified as activists, rappel-rousers, protesters, political organizers.
Not one that I've seen so far from Edmonton, from the East, or from Winnipeg.
These were peaceful, polite, highly educated human beings.
The reverb is such that we know somebody who's related to there's a mother and son who died.
We know somebody who's related to them through marriage.
So this reverb around Winnipeg has been just Winnipeg, never mind Edmonton.
It's been extensive.
And this clearly is a chilling message.
Because frankly, anybody who leaves Iran to come to North America or presumably the European Union and comes here to be a woman scientist in one case, right?
And a lot of them were scientists and academics.
These aren't mullah lovers.
No.
These are not by any stretch the kind of Islamist, anti-Western, Christian and Jew-hating.
These are like, for lack of a better term, people that want to have normal lives.
These were Canadians.
For all intents and purposes, these were Canadians.
They came here to be free.
They came here to get educated.
They came here for a better life.
And they died leaving a Turin airport because the Iranians did it.
Yes.
And that anybody in this country, I mean, the one good thing about the conflict that emerged in terms of the U.S. flexing their muscles, so to speak, it has drawn a lot of the creeps out of the woodwork.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you've seen it where you are, obviously, and the broader national context.
But you can see who the imbeciles are that don't understand the difference between supporting the sovereign rights of a national state and supporting terrorism, supporting murderous ideologues.
Unlike Toronto, and the Winnipeg police were certainly concerned they didn't want to have a Toronto situation on their hands.
But unlike Toronto, you did not have the same degree of Hezbollah supporting signs.
It was much more muted here than in Toronto.
And it's especially shameful that the Jewish members of the Trudeau cabinet have not raised their voices publicly.
Jim Carr, what's the guy from Toronto?
Michael Levin, nice guys, I'm sure, but they got to speak up about this because this affects Jewish and Christian communities in Canada, too.
They need to show some leadership, and instead they're showing followership.
And it's a disservice to Canadian voters and a disservice to Canadians who, let there be no mistake, and this is not news to people that have followed this for decades.
This strain of Islamism in Canada is growing.
They are unchallenged.
And when they feel that they can parade in the streets of Toronto chanting death to America and chanting things about the Zionist entity and all that kind of hate, and the police stand by and defend it and portray anybody, even tries to cover it as being a provocateur.
Schitler's List Scandal00:08:44
You can see that clearly the police system in Ontario needs a thorough cleansing with bleach.
Yeah, no kidding.
No kidding.
I want to talk to you about something else that you guys have been covering at the J.CA, and that is this series of, well, you've done a series of stories, two stories, I think, about these anti-Semitic faxes.
So it's like going back in anti-Semitic time that are popping up, I guess, in Winnipeg.
Well, this was a bizarre story.
The root of it is in an incident in 2014 where a fellow who had some very legitimate concerns about the way things were being run at Winnipeg City Hall, and he expressed them, but he framed his concerns about sideways land dealings and favored sales and such things.
Legitimate concerns that are still being discussed, debated in Winnipeg to this day, including in a civil suit the city has brought up now in relation to the police headquarters.
But this guy framed everything through the lens of an anti-Semite.
I actually have the original Schitler's List.
I've never moved it from within arm's length of my desk here, strangely enough.
And it was a diatribe about, at the time, Mayor Cates, other people that he was linked to, and still is, presumably, a whole bunch of any Jewish name that came across anything at City Hall during that time period.
This guy put out something called Schitler's List.
Well, lo and behold, a fax had gone around to a number of law offices in Winnipeg where a fact has been sent around called the 2020 Schitler's List.
And this had many, a couple of the same names as the prior list going by memory.
But basically, if you were a Jewish lawyer and you run into trouble with the Law Society, which happens to lawyers of all religious background, your name's on the list.
And some of it was in the realm of gossip.
Lawyers' inappropriate behavior in their law offices.
And some of it was just factual.
Lawyer Mendel represented so-and-so recently in a court case.
Well, okay, that's factual.
People are entitled to a defense.
Sometimes you do draw judgments on the base of who defense counsel represents.
That's true.
But basically, it's a list of 10, like a top 10 list, like a Letterman list, with a variety of names mentioned, as I've illustrated.
You know, a lawyer represented some other Jewish guy.
And this went around Jewish law offices.
That's how we became aware of it.
Now, this was brought to our attention not only from the newspaper side, but because at the end of the year of last year, because of incidents, including things like what's going on in Toronto, Ron announced the formation of something called Shomrim, which would be community patrols.
And this would be a response unit.
So for instance, Sheila's garage gets hit with some sort of anti-Semitic graffiti.
You tell me, granted, you're not in an urban area, but what would you do where you are in Alberta?
So your instinct, you yourself, what would you do?
You call the cops.
What else?
I would check the trail cams first to see who did it.
Most people don't have that option.
I know.
Now, you can call Bene Brith, but that isn't really very effective.
They'll put out a report about the incident, but they don't do anything.
It's not the way they operate, is a good way of putting it.
You call the Jewish Federation.
Your case would be the Jewish Federation of Edmonton, I guess, or Calgary?
Edmonton.
If they aren't going to do anything, Shomrim would come out with a bucket brigade, would take steps to mitigate that, would examine the cameras, if there are, would look around the neighborhood for evidence of other graffiti, and would try to develop a profile.
So, Ron announced this at the end of last year, that this initiative, he was going to be undertaking this initiative for community patrols.
So, that at least there's some eyes and ears out there, not just from a synagogue looking out their door, what's going on, but they would go around Winnipeg at different points.
Not, it takes a half hour to get from one end of the city to the other in terms of where Jewish locations are, and just create a presence.
The next thing that happened was he gets contacted like 10 minutes later.
This is like quarter after eight in the morning by a Jewish organization that said they had received a Schitler's list in December that was called 2019 and sent us a copy, which I provided to you.
So, you were able, without knowing who every lawyer was, you recognize, I'm sure, some of the names and others you wouldn't have recognized.
I did not publish the list.
It turns out there was a 2019 list.
It was like a dry run.
Some of the names got moved around, they moved up or down in the rankings a little bit.
But what we determined was that either of these more recent Schitler's lists were a copycat.
It has nothing to do with the guy that put it out in 2014, who was sued for defamation and sanctioned by the courts, and who has been quiet as a church mouse since, from our estimation.
He was, you know, he's a very reactionary.
I think he would be called a far-right kind of guy, but he's kept quiet.
He doesn't want any more trouble with the cops or the courts.
And he went way too far.
So, this was designed to look like that original list.
And a lot of people thought, like, people literally thought, it's him again.
Well, it wasn't.
It's actually somebody from the Jewish community who is behind this, who's not had a good experience since immigrating here, has run afoul of various institutions and courts and whatever.
And so, following the Burmax principle.
Yeah.
And there's an awful lot of the Burmax Burmax syndrome going around right now, where you have false flags being raised by people that are Jewish, nominally Jewish, not necessarily involved in the Jewish community, involved in synagogues, involved with Federation, involved with Jewish organizations necessarily, but either as a false flag to stir up stuff, to make it seem like anti-Semites are on the run.
But really, what they're trying to do is settle a few grudges and stir up stuff and get their moment of glory without being named.
So I can tell you, I guess that sort of wasn't apparent to you from the look on your face in our correspondence that, in fact, the source is somebody who immigrated to Winnipeg and who's been on the outs in the Jewish community.
There's one of the longest lists of court litigation I've ever seen on the courts page.
And I've seen some long ones, but all sorts of altercations with private, not altercations, I mean physically necessarily, but civil disputes over money practices, eligibility.
Some of the looks, some of the litigation, this individual has been successful in convincing the court that they're aggrieved.
And they're clearly a clever individual, but they put this out and there's no real, you know, there's no positive purpose to it, but it upset a lot of, if I can use the term, old Jews.
The older members of our community were very upset by this Schitler's list going.
And so the first two stories led to an explosion of interest in creating Shomreen programs.
And there's more cities than that that have asked, that have started asking.
In this case, it seems likely that it's going to be established, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal within the next 90 days.
And so we got off in terms of the J.C., people go to the website, they'll be able to see those stories in terms of the front page, the news lineup of these facts.
And just to read it and realize not just how bizarre this is as an acting out exercise, but how bizarre it is for somebody to, you know, the police didn't lay a hate crime charge because the Winnipeg police don't, their interpretation is that a Jew can't commit a hate crime against the Jewish community.
Saskatchewan's Shocking Discovery00:08:41
And then as that was breaking out, the next story hit my desk, which was also a total head shaker.
Yeah, go ahead.
You may as well get right into it.
What was your reaction when you saw that, Sheila?
Because we haven't talked about it.
The picture was shocking to see.
It was, you know, in this day and age, I can't even believe that these pictures are being taken even as a joke.
I just, it's so, it was shocking to see it.
Friday afternoon, while we're still working on this copycat fact story a little bit, and there's other things, man, there's stuff going on here that we have not yet gotten to.
In the middle of this, Ron says, hang on to your hat.
I'm sending you a picture.
And he sends me the picture.
And I'm looking at it.
And it's like, here's this kid playing like Gestapo.
He's playing dress-up.
And then, and we've cropped that picture.
So it's in an apartment, and there were some things on the wall, nothing bad, but it was a normal, like very normal, nice-looking residential Christmas setting.
But when you look at the picture, you see there's somebody else with their hand, you know, on the kid's shoulder and the other arm like this.
You could see he's somebody's writing, putting seemingly another swastika on the kid's back.
So this child, who is, we've learned, barely teenaged.
Yeah.
He's given his camera to some other kid to take a picture.
Yeah.
He's got a swastika here.
The armband, which I thought was an armband, I think was actually drawn on.
I think that's crayon or coloring, like red marker with a very bad swastika on it.
So you can tell that the kid tried to do it on his own arm and it's upside down.
So now the other kid jumps in as artist.
Yeah.
To make a long story short, this child, seemingly without adult supervision, and we immediately, you know, Shomreem did its work in terms of research with on-the-ground in Regina.
I contributed background research journalistically, trying to put some pieces together.
There's no indication that any parents were involved.
The adults that seem to be around this children are well-respected coaches in the Saskatchewan amateur sports scene.
God, that's a shame.
We had to make a decision about what to say, what not to say.
Yeah, because it's still a kid, right?
Kids do stupid stuff.
The kid does it.
You know, he's, you know, look, you know, latch key child, Christmas time.
No picture.
Hey, I want to, let's do this.
And the next thing, you know, the kid is deckled in swastikas, like he's going to go in a march in Skokie or something.
Yeah.
This child showed, he got a picture on his phone and he snapchatted it to other children and to like his friends.
And then his friends showed it to their friends.
And one of their friends showed it to their mother, who went through the roof.
I guess.
And then the parent, now the parents were stuck.
And they actually went to Shomrim to Ron and asked him to get involved in terms of like calling the authorities.
And this was a long discussion among a lot of people, including us consulting with a child psychologist about, you know, what do you do?
As a reporter, am I going to phone up the father and go, hey, sorry to catch you, you know, before, you know, youth sports practice, but I can't do that.
Yeah, this is a family issue, I think.
Now, I think probably.
And you're handling it more carefully than the CBC would.
The CBC would have doxxed everybody in that entire family.
100%.
I agree with you.
We had this on the Friday and sat on it through the weekend.
And when we got more information about how this was spreading in Regina, the concern that was being raised, people talking to professionals there, should they go to the, you know, like, what's the order of operations?
You go to the school first, you go to the cops first, you go to the whatever child and family services is called, Regina.
This caused a lot of angst among parents in Regina.
I mean, this is a playmate of their own children.
But we learned that threats, as this started to spread and the reverb happened, we learned that how do I put this?
It wasn't a direct threat, but there was a suggestion that children attending other schools might want to tune up some kids who told their parents.
So, you know, at that stage, you can see that there's a little less childlike innocence behind this and maybe a little more malevolence.
Regardless, the matter was reported to police and to school authorities.
Ron is in communication with some of these parents in Regina.
And I've not yet contacted, although by the time, as we tape this, I've not contacted Jewish community officials in Saskatchewan.
Although you notice, no announcement as of yet from them.
CBC did not pick up on the story, although a CBC reporter was interested in it.
CBC, as of today, has not published anything as of this taping.
CTV, LeaderPost, Star Phoenix, I'm trying to remember what the media outlets are in Saskatchewan.
Gournished.
Haven't touched it.
Where did this come from?
He could have just watched a documentary about World War II.
Or a video game.
He could have watched a video game.
I watch all sorts of stuff now on YouTube that I wish I didn't watch from World War II.
And whether it's documentaries, home movie footage, that kind of stuff.
I mean, in some, it's very disturbing.
And, you know, for a kid, you know, around 8, 9, 10, and you don't have parental controls on, and they start seeing stuff.
Yeah.
I just am saying that even in our heyday, where World War II was always discussed, it was all over TV shows, whether it was shows like Combat or whether it was shows like Hogan's Heroes with the, you know, trying to put a comic spin on the war.
Nobody ever thought it would be a good idea to take a marker and start painting swastikas all over yourself and give the salute and pose for a picture and send the picture around to people.
It's so far removed from the realm of a joke that clearly there needs to be, and I'm not a fan of the unnecessary intervention in family business with this by the state.
But obviously, there's a need for something here.
And the media in Saskatchewan and across the country, across the country, is silent.
And a picture that's that shocking.
Yeah.
There should be stories about it.
Is this what's going on in other communities in our country where kids have this mistaken belief that it's a good belly laugh to emulate Hitler to the point of painting yourself up like him?
There should not be silence from the general media about this, let alone from Jewish federations, etc.
So that's how your 2020 started.
Let's talk about how your 2019 ended.
How was your New Year's?
I was getting the finishing touches on a story, on our year-end story, an editorial I wrote: Safety of Canadian Jews in Our Own Hands, Not Our Leaders.
And I went through last year about how our institutions in Winnipeg had been infiltrated.
The Limoud bringing in this If Not Now rabbi.
Call to Action00:09:37
And then the Social Planning Council bringing in Linda Sarsour and that Winnipeg had been identified as a soft target, right?
So that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism could be peddled here under the guise of human rights and justice and whatever.
And then the Nakba Day march that was intercepted and where there was a detente attempted with the BDS leaders, the Palestinian leaders in Winnipeg, and the attacks on Kheirut.
And I particularly focused on a tweet from Ben Freeman on December 29th.
The Western post-Holocaust golden age of Jewry is over.
This relatively peaceful period was an anomaly in our history of the Jews, and now we are back to normal.
We have to recognize this so we are prepared to deal with it.
And I firmly believe this.
And so the silence of Jewish federations and Sija, et cetera, this isn't going to serve our purposes.
And I went through, you know, some of my own family, my family history, my grandparents and my parents, and Jewish institutions and Zionist Federation.
And basically, it was a call to action.
And also in all the branches of Joe Laser and the Jewish Federation, that he thinks that Sija is the way to go.
And we think that institutional Jewish community organizational, you know, the way they approach these things, too much diplomacy, not enough action.
So at the end of my piece, I'm just finishing it up.
And my phone rings, and it's a name comes up on the phone, all in capital letters.
So generally, that's a spoof call when it's all capital letters.
Most people don't type their own name in in capital letters.
So I ignored the call and I looked the name up.
I thought, well, you know, just in case he's a local.
And the name hit with a unique spelling of a first name.
And it hit on Facebook of somebody who's a teacher in an inner-city Winnipeg school.
Well, okay, at the very least, that poor person's being spoofed.
And I'm not very comfortable with this, with the nature of this call.
And I phoned Ron and I played the call for him.
And he went through the roof, his wife Shirley, right through the roof.
And I said, look, let me, you know, they want me to call the cops.
And to me, the cops have, I know the cops have way better things to do on New Year's Eve than worry about a prank call.
And so I left it and didn't, I said, well, you know, let me think about it and I'll call you back.
And I thought about it and I phoned the number back.
And a person answered and I ascertained that the person had borrowed their phone, had lent their phone to somebody else to make a phone call.
And everybody involved had been drinking heavily.
The call said was like a polite female voice.
And it said, hi, I'm calling from the Society of Cheap Jews.
We're just taking a survey to see if you're a cheap Jew too.
Oh, and we've just got one reference on you.
So Marty, yes, you're a cheap Jew too.
You've been declared a cheap Jew.
Yay.
Take care of yourself now, you cheap Jew.
That was the phone call.
That was the end of my New Year's.
I'm writing a column about how the golden age is over.
Yeah.
And I get a phone call because of the leadership role I've taken in Jewish journalism, in reporting these things in our community.
And run, by the way, has gotten some action lately, too.
And this is what happens to those of us that put ourselves at the forefront.
And this is as good a reason as any to explain why this requires the support.
And I want to speak directly for a moment, Sheila, not to the broader community of your viewers, who know I'm aligned with you on many, many political issues, particularly as people in Western Canada.
Your Jewish viewers, in particular, I want to address.
We are treated as outcasts in the work that we do by the Jewish establishment in Winnipeg.
They are scared of anybody who draws attention.
I guess because they don't want to get a phone call where they're called a cheap Jew.
I guess because they don't want their families harassed.
I guess because they don't want to walk up on Portage and Maine to a rally and be accused of being a Zionist.
But between working on the expansion of Shomrim, which is obviously necessary for the safety of our Jewish communities in this country, including places where Shomrim is probably more needed in, I'll give you an example, probably more needed in Hamilton than it is in Vancouver in some ways.
The Jewish leadership of our country is not taking the bull by the horns.
They are interested much more so in building their own fiefdoms, building their own silos, feathering their own nests.
We're busy going broke doing this stuff for the last year.
For those of you especially, we've heard from some in Winnipeg who cut back their donations to the Jewish Federation because they aren't happy if Federation doesn't speak out on things and some of their programming.
You know, they're great at delivering services for old, you know, the old folks' homes.
I'm not arguing that.
They're in the social service delivery field.
They aren't in the keeping Jews safe and informed business.
That's our business.
And in 2020, for this to continue, I am beseeching you.
I don't do this lightly and I didn't tell Sheila I was going to do this.
But particularly your Jewish viewers, Jewish viewers of the rebel, which so often addresses issues.
David Menzies has more balls than any Jewish reporter in this country.
When you step over that line and you start exposing Jew hatred, you start exposing anti-Zionism for what it is, the intention to eradicate the Jewish people from the face of the earth yet again.
The Jewish establishment in Canada and America too, but in Canada will not tackle this.
And they won't support anything that doesn't have their own fingerprints on it.
And they won't put their fingerprints on anything that actually stands up on their hind legs and says, can I say this on your program?
Go screw yourselves.
You're not pushing us around anymore.
We're not going to be bullied.
We're not going to have our political beliefs, our belief in a democratic Jewish state assailed as being colonial, white, and all that other crap.
And so for this work to continue and to flourish, I'm asking you, especially those of you that have cut back in your favors to the Jewish Federation and the old-time organizations.
This is our future in our hands, as my editorial indicated.
And when you go backwards, what do you see?
Hitler youth, copycat facts, anti-Semitic facts sent to Jewish offices.
Our safety is in our hands.
That is the last four stories that we put up.
You can see them on the J.C. Your support is essential to this.
We're continuing.
And whether it's by advertising on the J.C., and we have readership outside of Winnipeg, it's across the world now, following these stories, understandably.
Whether it's through sponsorship, whether it's through a direct contribution, whether it's earmarked for the journalism side or for the organizing the chapters, the Shomreem chapter side, because there's going to be expense in terms of vest communication devices, handbooks, meeting with area officials, making sure there's good relationships with police, et cetera.
This is going to require backing.
It's going to require resources.
You may have resources available to you outside of, you know, I'm not saying, you know, write a check like it's my bar mitzvah, but if you've got resources that can help us aside from the finances, step forward, contact me.
Go through the newspaper website.
You'll see my email address.
You'll see how to contact myself and Ron East and get involved and get involved today.
So if you can help, if you can contribute, if you can make a donation, if you want to run an ad series, whether it's for your business or to just voice your support or to send a message to your local federation, a Jewish Federation or whatever, please, please, I'm asking you, contact me.
Well, Marty, I think what you do is such a valuable resource for the Jewish community in Winnipeg.
And, you know, my blood pressure, apparently.
No, but you know how I feel about people who tell the other side of the story.
Marty, I want to thank you so much for your time.
I've taken up a lot of it.
And we'll have you back on the show really soon.
No, I don't think the people of Winnipeg are as progressive as the rest of us are led to believe.
I just think they are vastly underserved by their mainstream media.
And we are vastly underserved by the mainstream media who are telling the stories of Winnipeg.
And that's why I think what Marty does is so great.
He fills a void on the secular side, but he also fills a void telling the other side of his story in his career as a Jewish journalist also.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.