A wave of strange property attacks targeting Jewish sites in Canada is blamed on apolitical youth paid in crypto. The violence follows the same playbook seen in Australia and the UK. While Iran and Palestine solidarity campaigners are blamed, Israel gleefully exploits the tension.
Canada is the latest in a string of nations to attribute a wave of high-profile but mostly low-consequence attacks to a mysterious online “gun-for-hire” plot. If Canada follows the pattern set in Australia, Europe and the UK, the “foreign entity” its government is already blaming for orchestrating the petty violence will be identified as Iran.
According to the Toronto Star, “Police believe that several young people have been hired to carry out shootings throughout the city and the wider GTA, including the U.S. consulate shooting, shootings at synagogues and Jewish schools, as well as shootings targeting the waste management company GFL Environmental.”
But there’s another nation with a history of hiring locals to perpetrate crimes, employing low-level violence to poison third-party bilateral relationships, fanning anti-semitism to justify its own carnage, and using local Jewish populations as pawns.
It is Israel, which happens to be the only nation to have extracted any political benefit for the growing wave of pay-for-play attacks on Jewish targets in the West.
Canadian police say consulate, synagogue shootings are linked to shooter-for-hire network
Canadian police recently announced that they believe many of the recent attacks on synagogues and other apparently unrelated targets are actually the work of paid criminal elements.
On June 16, police in Toronto said at least 27 shootings in the Greater Toronto Area appeared to be the work of a gun-for-hire network, in which mostly young men were recruited over encrypted messaging apps like Whatsapp to commit disparate acts of violence for which they’d be paid $1,000 in cryptocurrency. The gunmen film themselves committing the crimes as proof for their paymasters, they say.
Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw declared, “What we know is that bad actors are using criminal elements in our city to carry out these dangerous incidents” and that “it is clear that some of the people hiring these criminals want to create a sense of fear in our communities, including in the Jewish community.”
According to Demkiw, the identity of the person or group behind the attack was still a matter under investigation. However, Canadian Secretary of State for Combating Crime Ruby Sahota seems to have narrowed it down somewhat. She said on June 17 that “the shooters were paid and hired by a foreign entity.”
This is not the first time a foreign entity has been accused of orchestrating small scale attacks in a Commonwealth nation.
Tip from Israel leads Australian authorities to blame Iran for 2024 fire bombings
Last year, Australia came to the conclusion that a foreign entity was behind two fire bombings that occurred in late 2024, one at a kosher restaurant in Sydney and one at Adas Israel Synagogue in Melbourne – one of the few non-Zionist congregations in the country. The attacks generated outrage and were immediately attributed to antisemitism.
However, Australian authorities soon determined that “overseas actors” were instigating the attacks, and that the perpetrators were not antisemites, but paid dupes.
Two men were arrested last summer in connection with the attacks, and a third on June 19.
In August 2025, the Australian government declared that Iran had been behind the attacks, with the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization investigation saying a “painstaking investigation” had “uncovered and unpicked the links between the alleged crimes and the commanders in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC.”
This was difficult, as ASIO Director General Mike Burgess said Iran had used a “complex web of proxies to hide its involvement” in both antisemitic attacks.
Only later did it emerge that Israel had provided a tip that pointed Australian investigators in Tehran’s direction. The Australian intelligence service insists they arrived at their conclusions independently, but have so far been unwilling to present any hard evidence to back that assertion up.
The young men allegedly hired to commit the crime probably won’t be much help with the international side of the investigation, as Australian police say the actual perpetrators of the crime might not be aware of who had ordered it. So far, though the men are being charged by the Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team, none have been charged with terrorism. At least one was released on bail, which prosecutors argued against because of what they called an extensive criminal history, including armed robberies and violent assaults.
A third man was charged with arson on Friday in connection with the synagogue attack. He was already in jail for other offences the police so far won’t comment on.
If these men are anything like the pair arrested in connection with a caravan packed with explosives and a list of synagogues, they’ll turn out to be criminal ne’er-do-wells with debts and perhaps disabilities, who “wouldn’t have the brains” to plan an attack on their own – hardly a dangerous, organic surge of anti-semitism.
That hasn’t stopped the Australian government from using the bombings as justification for expelling Iran’s ambassador and declaring the IRGC a terrorist organization, paving the way for the US-Israeli assault on Iran this February 28.
Australia’s decision to blow up its relationship with Iran came just a week after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on social media, calling him “a weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews.”
Ironically, a recent mass casualty attack which directly targeted Australian Jews, the Bondi Beach shooting at a Hanukkah celebration, was carried out by sympathizers of ISIS – a Salafi extremist group which Iranian forces helped snuff out in Syria and Iraq. In the rare instance when ISIS attacked Israel near the occupied Golan Heights, it immediately issued an apology, which the Israeli military kindly accepted.
This February, as Israel began mobilizing support for its plans to attack Iran, Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited Australia. While there, he met in secret with Burgess, the ASIO chief who had recently expelled the Iranian ambassador. The encounter violated Australian government protocol, and was only exposed when Australian Senator David Podock learned of it weeks later.
Israeli-led intel firm fingers mysterious ‘Iran-backed’ group for wave of minor damage in Europe
Following the suspicious attacks by “paid actors” in Australia, it was Europe’s turn. Shortly after the United States launched its attack on Iran, the group “Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI),” or the “Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right,” emerged in Europe to take credit for a blast in front of a Belgian synagogue that caused minor damage and no injuries. HAYI managed to be “shadowy” and previously completely unknown, but also immediately identifiable by the for-profit Israeli-let private firm SITE Intelligence Group, as The Grayzone pointed out.
Joining the rush to establish this new group’s bona fides was a senior research analyst working at the neoconservative DC think tank the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), which was founded around the same time as SITE, with a stated goal of working to “enhance Israel’s image.”
Following its arrival on the international scene, HAYI would take credit for burning a vehicle in a Jewish neighborhood in Antwerp – a car which happened to belong to a local Moroccan woman – arson at a synagogue in Rotterdam, explosions near a Jewish school and financial office building in Amsterdam and other instances of property damage.
Read The Grayzone’s report on HAYI, Who’s behind the mysterious ‘Iran-backed terror cell’ haunting Europe
Murky ‘Iran backed’ group claims responsibility for torched ambulances, stabbing attack by mentally unwell in UK
This April, HAYI took credit on its Telegram account for an arson attack and a stabbing in the UK by a mentally unwell Sudanese immigrant with a long history of random violence. Prior to stabbing two Jews, that perpetrator attacked a Muslim man living in his own building.
London police glossed over the perpetrator’s past and recent criminal history in favor of fear-mongering about antisemitism and sinister foreign plots. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer was quick to point the finger at Iran.
Despite the obvious indications that the crime was not political, the UK government and London police have insisted without evidence that the attacks were proof of rising antisemitism and possibly international terrorism linked to Iran.
Earlier this year, on March 23, HAYI’s Telegram account claimed credit for the torching of several ambulances belonging to a community-run Jewish emergency service. Seven people were arrested over the arson attack, with two middle aged men released and five men 20 years old and younger charged in connection with the incident. All have been released on bail, an unusual move when investigating an international terror cell.
Who benefits from scattered, low-grade violence?
So far, little evidence demonstrating Tehran’s links to HAYI or to scattered acts of violence on three continents has been provided. It is also unclear how Iran might benefit from any of these attacks. Rather, Iran is presented as a government that irrationally hates Jews and enjoys tormenting them in largely inconsequential ways (again, as opposed to ISIS and Al Qaeda-claimed attacks), and is willing to isolate itself internationally to do so.
But there is only one nation that clearly benefits from the specter of antisemitism. It is the one which consistently uses the threat of anti-Jewish prejudice as both a justification for its own existence as a supposed sanctuary for the world’s Jews, and as a shield against public criticism for the sundry war crimes it’s committed.
A supposed surge in antisemitism around the world helps Israel disguise its genocide and land grabbing as self-defense. It also enables Israel to dodge criticism, as any effort to condemn its continued siege of Gaza, its assault on Lebanon is treated persecution of not just the Jewish state, but of Jews as a whole. This is precisely why so many incidents claimed as antisemitic attacks have turned out to be hoaxes spread by pro-Israel zealots.
Indeed, Israel is notorious for staging false flag attacks to undermine regional foes and frighten Arab Jews into migrating to the so-called “Jewish state.” In 2017, an Israeli man was arrested for orchestrating a massive wave of antisemitic threats against Australian Jews. Under the cynical logic of Zionism, the Israeli army has even implemented a so-called Hannibal Directive authorizing its personnel to target and kill Jewish Israeli citizens to prevent them from being taken hostage by Palestinians.
Given this long and sordid history, it is unsurprising that so many are questioning the official story around the latest wave of “gun-for-hire” attacks on Jewish sites in the West.