So much for “Fly the friendly skies”…

On July 29, Israeli-Canadian Odelia Kapon flew with her husband and three young children on an Air Transat flight from Tel Aviv, Israel to Toronto. This involved a stopover in Rome. And that’s when the nightmare began.

Namely, two of Odelia’s three children (all of whom have disabilities) did not have their Electronic Travel Authorizations up to date. Of note, all of the passports were valid.

Apparently, an ETA can be updated online in a matter of a few minutes. But Odelia says the customer service representatives in Rome refused to accommodate this procedure.

Even though there were hours before the connecting flight to Toronto was scheduled to take off, the inexplicable reluctance to update a simple paperwork issue caused the Kapon family to miss the flight. This led to much stress as well as the added expense of thousands of dollars in hotel accommodation costs in Rome as they could not fly out until four days later.

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We recently met up with Odelia in Vaughan, Ont., just prior to her flying back to Israel. To say that her family suffered a customer service nightmare is an understatement. Check out our interview with Odelia for all the gruesome details.

In the meantime, we did reach out to Air Transat’s spokesman, Andrean Gagne.

Our questions: Why did such a simple procedure as updating ETAs not accommodated?

What is Air Transat’s policy regarding ETAs? Will Air Transat compensate Odelia for the extra expenses incurred?

Odelia’s family is visibly Jewish. She has speculated that perhaps this issue occurred because the person she was dealing with might be antisemitic. Is this indeed a matter of fact?

So far to date, it’s been radio silence. Shameful.

Disturbingly, Odelia’s experience is not a one-off.

Case in point: last year, Renana Reuveni flew from Israel to Toronto, hoping to take in the sights of Hogtown as a tourist. But her visit began on a most sour note when she touched down at Pearson International Airport (a.k.a., the world’s worst airport).

But this time around, Pearson didn’t live up to its dubious distinction due to hopelessly long lineups as well as numerous delayed and cancelled flights. Rather, Renana, who was travelling with her infant daughter, Angelica, was inexplicably detained for five hours and treated rudely by a Canada Border Services Agency guard.

Says Renana:

I felt like they were treating me like a terrorist or a criminal. They hassled and humiliated me for hours while my baby was crying. They searched my suitcase and even checked my tampons. It’s clear to me it was because I’m Israeli. The immigration officer yelled at me and said, 'You’re in a foreign country and you’ll do as I say.' He had hate showing in his eyes and seemed determined to humiliate me.

Renana feels she was singled out for this humiliation given that she was the only person on the flight from London who had an Israeli passport. She feels that the agent who traumatized her was either anti-Israel or antisemitic — or both.

When Rebel News reached out to the CBSA, the agency said it could not comment on the matter due to the Privacy Act.

Even so, airline and airport officials discriminating against Jews and/or Israelis would appear to be a most disturbing trend indeed. And is this really a stretch, given that visibly Jewish people are actually being physically beaten up in broad daylight in Canada these days?

Indeed, it would seem that if a law-abiding tourist has the wrong identity politics in the eyes of a customer service rep or CBSA employee, they are treated as if they are a potential risk to national security.

Yet we have illegal aliens coming into Canada and RCMP officers not only fail to guard the border, but rather, reimagine themselves as bellhops so that they can carry their luggage.

What the hell is going on?