Alan Kessel: Canada's silence after Judih Weinstein Haggai's murder has been a national shame
Judih Weinstein Haggai was a Canadian. A teacher, a poet, a peace activist. She was also a victim of Hamas's October 7 massacre, murdered — alongside her husband Gadi Haggai — by terrorists who violated every principle of humanity and international law.
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Her death should have shaken this country to its core. Her name should have been remembered in our schools, our Parliament, our streets. Instead, Judih was nearly forgotten.
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There is a quiet shame in how Canada responded to her murder. While she and Gadi lay dead, their remains taken into Gaza — our leaders equivocated. When it mattered most — when Canadians were kidnapped, raped and slaughtered — Canada's political voice was cautious, hedged, and absent. And now, after that moral failure, we watch in disbelief as the government moves to restore funding to support a 'reconstructed' Hamas-led Gaza under the guise of humanitarianism, and to recognize a Palestinian state without a single assurance that terrorism will cease or that Canadian lives will be protected.
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Judih had devoted her life to peace. Her work as a teacher reflected a belief in dialogue, education, and coexistence. She was everything we say we value: compassionate, thoughtful, engaged. But her Canadian identity and her Canadian death were treated as inconvenient. Her story didn't fit the narrative that had taken hold — one in which nuance is unwelcome, and moral clarity is drowned in political calculation.
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Her body and that of her husband were finally recovered from Khan Yunis in a special operation by the Israeli military — retrieved from the territory of their murderers, where they had been discarded and hidden for over 600 days. The terrorists who held their remains were members of the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement — the same group that kidnapped and murdered Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir. That is who we are dealing with: not freedom fighters, not a resistance, but sadistic murderers who hold the bodies of grandparents and babies as bargaining chips in a depraved game of political leverage.
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We are right to feel profound sorrow, and we are right to feel anger, not only at the terrorists who killed Judih, but at the silence that followed. When a Canadian peace activist is murdered by genocidal extremists, and our government cannot even summon the decency to name the crime, or the courage to defend her memory, we have lost more than lives. We have lost our compass.
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