Pro-Palestinian activists at an encampment set up on McGill University's campus, in Montreal, on April 29.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
There is a point at which the gaslighting becomes genuinely insulting. When meek attempts to blame a rogue few for hateful or antisemitic speech, or the repeated insistence that such displays of bigotry have “no place in Canada,” are so disconnected from reality that they become offensive and belittling.
People can see with their own eyes that this sort of bigotry clearly has a place here. And they can hear with their own ears as choruses of people – not just one or two outliers – sing about sending Jews “back to Europe.” It happened during pro-Palestinian protests in Ottawa on April 15, in Toronto on March 8 and April 13, and just days ago, in Montreal, at the encampment set up at McGill University.
At different times, in different cities across Canada, crowds have openly celebrated the slaughter of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. They cheered in Ottawa on April 20, when a speaker proclaimed “October 7 is proof that we are almost free.” They cheered in Vancouver on April 26, when another speaker exclaimed, “Long live October 7!” Some in the crowd echoed that in reply.
Jewish Canadians are being told that these antisemitic expressions occur in isolation – that they are just “a few individual protesters engaged in problematic speech,” to borrow the words of Amira Elghawaby, Canada’s special representative on combatting Islamophobia, who released a statement in response to pro-Palestinian protesters in Ottawa celebrating the Oct. 7 attack. No need to worry: they’re an anomaly. An aberration.
Yet these aberrations started from the very beginning. Toronto4Palestine, one of the groups that has gone on to organize regular protests in the city, announced a banner drop in a since-deleted Instagram post to “honour and celebrate” the resistance the very day that Israeli concertgoers had been slaughtered and families were being burned out of their homes. The group said people would be handing out candy.
And the anomalies keep on happening: on Oct. 28, Imam Adil Charkaoui stood on a balcony in Montreal and called on Allah to “kill the enemies of the people of Gaza and to spare none of them.” The crowd cheered. That same day, in Vancouver, college instructor Natalie Knight spoke at a pro-Palestinian rally, where she called the Hamas attack “amazing, brilliant.” The crowd there cheered, too.
In Toronto on Jan. 14, a crowd chanted “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud! Turn another ship around!” in celebration of the Houthis, a group whose official slogan is “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam.” And on Apr. 13, a crowd in Toronto cheered when a speaker announced that Iran had launched an attack on Israel.
Rogue actors don’t have crowds of people celebrating their supposedly errant speech. And rogue actors aren’t actually so rogue when they show up, week after week, in all different cities around the country.
Of course there are participants at these pro-Palestinian marches who simply want to bring awareness to the horrible suffering Gazans are currently enduring, and who want to demonstrate against Israel and the actions of its allies. That is perfectly legitimate. But after more than six months of regular “aberrations” involving antisemitism, praise for terrorist groups and glorification of Oct. 7, it’s ridiculous to try to profess that hateful rhetoric isn’t an integrated part of these demonstrations. People aren’t stupid; they can see what’s plainly in front of their faces.
This is not a commentary on the war in Gaza, but an observation about what is now tolerable on the streets of Canadian cities. No other minority group would be expected to endure such open displays of bigotry, and no other group would be told that what they’re consistently seeing is just deviant, one-off behaviour – certainly not when the current social-justice orthodoxy is all about understanding how systemic, institutional forms of prejudice manifest and are maintained. Jews are particularly sensitive to the normalization of antisemitism, for obvious reasons, and they instinctively understand what is now happening.
With pro-Palestinian encampments now popping up at universities across the country, it is likely these displays of bigotry will only proliferate. It’s already happening at UCLA, at Columbia University, at Yale and at other American universities where encampments have been set up for a week or more, and where Jewish students describe being denied access, harassed or intimidated. There, we’re seeing students who would never, for example, block a Chinese student from attending classes because of Beijing’s repression of its Uyghur minority and make excuses for their abject discrimination, supported by faculty and others who see these actions as justified for the cause. If that happens here, too, we will be told that’s unacceptable – a one-off, not to be tolerated. And then it will happen again, again and again.