The Palestinian Narrative in Canada

"Targeting Mount Sinai Hospital to incite intifada against Israel and the Jewish people is flagrantly antisemitic and undermines the health and safety of the patients and medical professionals who work there."

Member of Parliament Macro Mendicino

"[The] demonstrators were actually protesting [the] indiscriminate killing of any and all innocent men, women and children."

"Anyone who condemns one but not the other is demonstrating to all of us how Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism operate to devalue the lives of those deemed less than human and unworthy of protections, including those afforded by international humanitarian law."

"Many have joined the hundreds of peaceful protests that have taken place across the country. And many report being silenced and/or having faced repercussions for standing up in solidarity with the Palestinian people."

Amira Elghawaby, Canada's Trudeau-appointed Islamophobia representative

 

"The demonstration at Mount Sinai Hospital yesterday was reprehensible. Hospitals are places for treatment and care, not protests and intimidation."

"I strongly condemn this display of antisemitism."

"In Toronto and across Canada, we stand with Jewish communities against this hate."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

A screenshot from video posted to X of protesters outside Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto on Monday, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo by @DrJacobsRad /X

On Monday, Canadians and Torontonians in particular were treated to yet another now-predictable spectacle of pointed Jew-hate in a triumph of pro-Palestinian public relations when hundreds of committed Hamas admirer/supporters were out marching for the Palestinian 'cause' of a final, decisive intifada that would excise the State of Israel from the Middle East geography and lavish love on the Palestinians by affirming its state from the '(Jordan) river to the (Mediterranean) sea'.

Following the demonstration, social media posts showed a Spiderman-clad protester scaling the hospital to mount a Palestinian flag over Mount Sinai's identifying logo, a stylized Star of David. This was a hospital established in 1923 to allow for a medical system that would treat Jews, responding to the practices of antisemitism of the day restricting university admittance to Jews in medical faculties and from practising in the hospitals of the day. 

 

The protest, organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement Toronto and toronto4palestine, drew their route with its final destination, the Israeli Consulate in Toronto, through University Avenue's "Hospital Row", where five hospitals are situated. Mount Sinai, the sole institution with the Star of David logo, established to serve a growing 1900s Jewish population facing discrimination at other facilities and where Jewish doctors, barred from other hospitals could find employment. Now a public hospital, it serves the medical needs of all.

 

These are people marching for justice for Palestinians, and who deny justice for Jews. Justice for Palestinians equates with disrupting Israel in every conceivable manner, claiming it an apartheid state where puzzlingly to that claim two million Palestinians living as Israelis enjoy citizenship in the country, with opportunities to sit in the Knesset as full parliamentarians, to sit as justices on Israeli courts, and teach in Israeli universities. But to march in protest against Israel in Canada it is mandatory to deny the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7.

"They are using these made-up acts of cruelty and barbarism to tell the world a mini Holocaust just happened to them again."

"Is it possible that if they are lying about these events and creating a false genocide, it is likely they may have lied about certain details of a previous big genocide that may have occurred?"

toronto4palestine social media post

Emergency physician Raghu Venugopal along with a colleague, witnessed the protest and recorded a video in front of the hospital "to witness and to counter-protest any kind of protest in front of a hospital". Introduced in the House of Commons in 2021, Bill C-3 outlines protections for health care workers under Canada's Criminal Code, making it illegal to intimidate health care workers or whose assisting them from performing their duties, or attempting to prevent someone from obtaining and accessing health services. Ironically, that Bill arose from problems related to COVID, the pandemic that conspiracy theorists indulging in race hate attributed to Jews.

Canada's special envoy on Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism announced her office's intention to call "Toronto's Mayor and Chief of Police today to discuss how they will put a stop to this despicable targeting and attempted intimidation of Mount Sinai Hospital and Jews across Toronto and Canada". While she's at it, she might consider contacting the Liberal-led government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to talk about his appointed Islamophobia expert whom he touted as helping to fight "hatred in all its forms" to build "a country where everyone feels safe and respected".

"Palestinian Spider-Man," or spiderman4palestine on social media, has become a "fixture" at pro-Palestinian protests in Toronto for climbing up various structures. On Monday, he was widely condemned for climbing up historically Jewish hospital Mount Sinai. Social media