A wave of strange property attacks targeting Jewish sites in Canada is attributed to 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 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.
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