Pali-Protests: Any War Where Israel Defends Itself Is Illegal

"They sell their weapons to Israel, or to the Philippine government, to other governments that are carrying out genocide." 

"They fuel dictatorships, and every deal made here at CANSEC is a death sentence to a colonized person, to working people all around the world."

"This is their playground. This is their marketplace."

Rosie Lucente, spokesperson, Shut Down CANSEC campaign

 

"We take care of patients, we think about community well-being, we think about healing."

"What's happening behind us at this conference, CANSEC, is the buying and selling of weapons and technologies that fuel an industry of war, terror, and genocide."

Yipeng Ge, family doctor, Ottawa Healthcare Professionals for Palestine 

Anti CANSEC demonstrators tangle with police. The demonstrators were organized by Shut Down CANSEC,demonstrated against Canada’s largest weapons show held in Ottawa, May 28, 2026. Photo by JEAN LEVAC /POSTMEDIA

 

Held on Wednesday and Thursday of this week at the Cohere convention centre in south-end Ottawa, hosted by the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI), this year's CANSEC arms trade show turned out to be the largest of its kind of the annual event yet held, bringing together those involved in the arms industry and those who are interested in their wares. 

 

There were about 20,000 registered delegates,  with 320 exhibitors and 100 delegations from 60 countries. In contrast, 2025 saw 285 exhibitors, and 2024, 265 companies displaying equipment and military systems. The trade show attendance is limited to the industry, military and government staff.

 

Also in evidence were some 200 demonstrators protesting the trade show, who gathered in front of the centre by 7:00 a.m. blowing whistles, banging drums and jeering at CANSEC attendees entering the conference. Minor tussles broke out between police and protesters when an attempt was made to block a crosswalk.

 

Banners held by protesters included one with the names of children purportedly killed in Gaza. Large images of Prime Minister Mark Carney, Minister of Foreign Affairs Anita Anand and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were carried by other demonstrators.  

 

Anti CANSEC demonstrators were organized by Shut Down CANSEC,demonstrated against Canada’s largest weapons show held in Ottawa, May 28, 2026. Photo by JEAN LEVAC /POSTMEDIA

 

There are brutal wars being carried out in many parts of the world, from Sudan to Yemen, Syria to Libya involving 45 armed conflicts taking place in the Middle East and North Africa. These are Muslim countries in their tribal, sectarian wars, killing, maiming, raping, displacing populations, creating humanitarian crises with malnourished children forced to live in tent encampments. The protesters have no interest whatever in the plight of the hundreds of thousands of people being killed, the millions displaced from their homes, the children dying. Their focus is entirely on Israel.

 

 

One tiny nation forced by ongoing attacks by terrorist groups backed by the very protesters who decry Israel's military, fighting the genocidal Muslim terror groups that target Israeli civilians and the Jewish state for total annihilation. That is genocide, yet these hate-indoctrinated minds whose brains have been completely addled by antisemitism inherent in their upbringing and convictions, relish slandering Israel for genocide against Palestinians, the very source of terrorist-central. 

 

Their rage against the manufacturers and purveyors of military equipment is entirely predicated on their certainty that all those arms are destined for the Israeli military. The only military with which these locked minds find fault with, for responding to lethal attacks geared to destroying their nation, with the due force required to put a stop to the never-ending acts of war it suffers from its neighbours. Although groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are on Canada's terror list, the pro-Palestinian protesters defend their deadly violence as acting from a just cause. 

 

Anti CANSEC demonstrators tangle with police. The demonstrators were organized by Shut Down CANSEC,demonstrated against Canada’s largest weapons show held in Ottawa, May 28, 2026. Photo by JEAN LEVAC /POSTMEDIA

 

The Liberal government's decision to respond to NATO's injunction requiring all its members to step up their defence spending by doing just that, represents the impetus of weapons manufacturers' anticipatory presence at a massive show where their offerings can be influentially showcased for future sales to a country that has authorized massive expenditures in military gear. In lock-step with Europe, North America realizes the threat to democracy and national security represented by Russia's President Vladimir Putin in his ambitions to enlarge the geographic reach of Greater Russia, emulating the late lamented USSR.

 

All countries of the world are aware of the need to 'walk softly and carry a big stick'. To own and stockpile weaponry that will assist their militaries in defending their nations against hostile nations' aspirations to territorial expansion. It represents the single most important, and mostly unused counterthreat to invasion by foreign forces that all nations are obligated by history to respect and prepare for. In Israel's case, it has never known peace with its neighbours, and not because the Jewish state did not yearn for that peace, but because since its re-appearance in 1948, neighbouring states threatened its presence and wrought wars they always lost.

 

Now that those neighbours, for the most part, have finally accepted the fact that Israel lives and will always live on its ancestral geography, some among them prepared to live in peace and trust, it has been left to the fundamentalist totalitarian ideologues of Islamist diehards dedicated to jihad to continue to violently harass, threaten and attack the Jewish state. Forcing that Jewish state to retaliate and to destroy those continued threats against its sovereign rights and its peoples' safety. The 'pro-Palestinian' Jew-haters decipher reality and historical accuracy in their warped minds to suit the venom of their hatred. 

 

Anti CANSEC demonstrators were organized by Shut Down CANSEC,demonstrated against Canada’s largest weapons show held in Ottawa, May 28, 2026. Photo by JEAN LEVAC /POSTMEDIA

 

Canada's Universal Medicare in Crisis

"ER [emergency-room] 'chair medicine' in Ontario [the awful cousin of hallway medicine] is unacceptable. Full Stop."

"We need to get rid of it. We must fund hospitals and fix the problem of critically ill patients put in a chair."

"There is zero exaggeration here. I am sounding the alarm. Hear it."

Toronto emergency physician Dr. Raghu Vengopal

 

"It would have been very easy to say, 'Well, if things get worse, come back later'. Who knows how long she could have sat there? And what if that stretcher hadn't become available, and her bleeding had gotten worse? She shouldn't have been assessed in a chair in the first place."

"Unconventional spaces [can include any carved-out space. Hospitals are converting ambulance bays into patient wards.] No heating, no plumbing, but, 'Hey, it's great -- we're taking care of our patients by sticking them in a cold garage'."

"More and more we're recognizing that we just want to see the patients. We want to try and find those ticking time bombs. We want to get people out of the department [ER] that have been there for 12 hours." 

Dr. Fraser Mackay, chair, Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, rural, remote and small urban section 

“Chair medicine" and "waiting room care" have become routine and common, default responses to Canada's severely gridlocked emergency rooms. Photo by Peter Power /Postmedia

 

In hospitals across Canada, wait times at emergency rooms have become brutal. People arrive at hospital emergency rooms for the purpose their names suggest; they have a medical emergency and urgently require care. These are people for whom some kind of accident, a malady accelerating, inexplicable pain onset or any number of medical events from heart attack to kidney stones or a burst appendix, that occur beyond their doctors' normal office hours, on odd night or weekend hours, having no option but to rush to emergency rooms, only to be triaged by worn-out nurses and told to take a seat in the emergency waiting room alongside hundreds of others that one on-call emergency doctor will eventually get around to seeing, one by one. 

 

Wait times began to extend from an average of five hours to as long as 12 hours and longer before a physician is free enough to thoroughly examine and then determine a course of action for a presenting accident victim, a kidney patient, someone internally bleeding from a catastrophic fall. Because of an acute scarcity of beds, even of gurneys set up in hallways, many emergency rooms have taken to placing desperately ill people on chairs where attending emergency doctors have no option but to examine them there and then.

 

“If a physician … lets the public know that you are in an unsafe environment right now, that we’re doing the best we can, that overcrowding puts you at risk, that we have people dying in our waiting rooms across the nation — those are facts,” says emergency physician Dr. Trevor Jain. Photo by Logan MacLean/Postmedia/File

 

Canadian hospitals have reached the point where 'chair medicine' and 'waiting room care' are now common, routine default responses, driving doctors to absolute distraction in distress over the kind of low-access, low-level care that is made available to vulnerable people in medical distress. Dr. Venugopal in Toronto spoke of witnessing people in "extremis from pain" but "put and kept in a chair", when extremis is a word describing people doubled over-in-agony kind of pain. That represents cruel and unusual punishment for anyone desperate for medical care.  

"It slowly becomes normalized -- the frog in the boiling water. 'We just wanted to see them to get things started or get things moving along', and then it becomes two patients, then eight, then ten."

"You've normalized a patient population through one of these zones that isn't appropriate for them. That can be risky with 'undifferentiated' patients: Is the chest pain acid reflux, pneumonia or an evolving heart attack?"

"That's the five-alarm fire situation many of us worry about every day."

"You cannot appropriately examine a patient in a chair, physically, or from a patient privacy perspective. You have to lift up shirts, take off pants, put on monitors, get your stethoscope out."

Dr. Michael Herman, Ottawa-area emergency physician 

In a lawsuit against B.C.'s Fraser Health Authority, emergency doctor Kaitlin Stockton alleged she was threatened and harassed for speaking out about critical overcrowding. Photo by Tiga Ivsins

 

This is what medical care in Canadian hospitals has been reduced to, as the population base continues to increase through unprecedented levels of immigration, refugee and migrant intake, on an already-overburdened system with a steadily aging population. Hospital emergency rooms have been 'coping' for years, with steadily increasing wait times, overburdened medical staff and greater demands than ever before for universal health care service. 'Unconventional places' never designed for patient care have become the back-stop for patient care.

 

These are spaces where emergency medical care is reduced to looking after people with no access to oxygen or suction, no nurse call bell, no ready access to a washroom or a sink, and not a whit of privacy. In desperate coping reaction, patients are examined in closets and washrooms, with doctors directing ill patients into corners and cubby holes, blankets hung off IV poles for makeshift curtains in chaotic hallways. Doctors have had to depend, more than ever, on their physician-instinct in many cases, to ensure that people they examine in such circumstances are not given short-medical-shrift.

 

The exterior of the Windsor Regional Hospital emergency department photo. (Jennifer La Grassa/CBC)

 

"[The pressure to provide treatment in whatever space they can is creating a moral] damned if you do, damned if you don't [dilemma for emergency staff across Canada]." 

"You don't want to watch suffering and see patients not doing well and lingering in the waiting room. But you also know that, when you walk out there, you don't really have a nurse, you don't have monitoring, you don't have the standard things you would have if you had a normal care space."

"You, by definition, are basically kind of MacGyvering-it and giving suboptimal care to a degree."

Dr. Paul Parks, emergency physician, Medicine Hat, Alberta, former president, Alberta Medical Association 

On any given day in Ontario an average of 1,390 people in 2023-24 were given care in an unconventional space. Emergency departments over the years have designed 'minor treatment' spaces where for example, three chairs separated by office dividers in a public hallway outside the waiting room gave birth to 'chair care'. Then 'rapid assessment zones' designed for the 'less acutely unwell' arrived on scene where people with sprains, cuts requiring stitches, sore throats, ear infections could be tended to. 

 

Where danger enters the picture is when the emergency department gets 'jammed up with admits'; every cubicle or hallway stretcher filled with people requiring hospital admission, but no empty beds are available; scarce beds used for people who no longer require hospital care, but there is no space in nursing or long-term care homes, no home care or rehab bed available to them. Known as 'access block'.  A system in free fall lacks the capacity to adequately assess, treat and discharge acutely ill patients.

 

The growing practice of boarding -- admitted people kept on a hallway stretcher for one, two, three days awaiting an open bed has become inevitable under these circumstances. Recently, a systematic review discovered notable evidence that links boarding with higher hospital death rates, longer hospital stays, more medication errors and burdensome staff burnout. There is a chronic hospital bed shortage in Canada, with an obvious obligation for hospitals to be able to discharge patients once their need for medical care is completed. 

"None of this has anything to do with the emergency department. That's the frustrating part."

"But it's a huge burden on staff and a huger burden on the patients, because they're not getting the care they need in the place they need it."

Dr. Fraser Mackay  

“Chair” and “waiting room” medicine have become routine and common, default responses to Canada’s severely gridlocked emergency rooms, doctors say. Photo by Peter Power/Postmedia

 

 

In Conversation with the Author of Suicidal Empathy

"I love Canada but there comes a point where the abject antipathy that you experience from Canadian society forces you to look elsewhere to a place where you might be appreciated and allowed to flourish."

"It's when all of the parasitic idea, jointly in a perfect orchestra as a cocktail, flew the planes of bulls--t into our edifices of reason. So first, I hit you with postmodernism. There are no absolute truths. Up is down. Left is right. Women are men. Peace is freedom."

"Islam is peace. Judaism is terrorism, and so on. Because if there are no absolute objective truths, no calculus of adjudicating truth, then all bets are off."

"So the West is uniquely evil. Not all those other beautiful cultures in Waziristan and Yemen. And therefore, how do I expiate this original existential sin? I do that by becoming orgiastically empathetic to the noble other."

"I would say by about 30 years ago, the ground was set for a nice warm swim in the infinity pool of suicidal empathy."

Gad Saad, Canadian Professor of Marketing, Evolutionary Behavioural Scientist, Concordia University

A woman cries in shock after a car bomb killed 13 in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War on August 8, 1986. (Khalil Dehaini via Getty Images)

 

Born in 1964 Beirut, Gad Saad's family fled the Lebanese civil war to settle a world away, in Montreal.  A scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom, University of Mississippi, his professional career is backgrounded by 32 years at Concordia University as a professor of marketing. More latterly, he has become a public intellectual with a global reputation. The most recent of his publications is the book Suicidal Empathy. Highlighting how enlightened Western values of democratic liberalism have been gradually overtaken by a process of dark, mindless imprinting of 'colonialist' guilt.

 

He speaks of the weaponization of empathy, playing on the 'nice' factor in Western society, an implicit uncertainty whether perceived 'white' society is sufficiently deferential to all the ethnic, social, religious, ideological, gendered groups that have traditionally been conceived of as peripheral and unimportant. Above all, he points out, the minds that shrink at the possibility that they could be thought of as uncivilly intolerant of others. Bringing to mind the issues of immigration, crime and extreme fanaticism. People like to have warm feelings about themselves; constantly being castigated as being cruel to others can be devastating to one's self-regard. 

"Empathy within well modulated, evolutionarily appropriate ranges is exactly what you want in a social species. In order for you and I to have a meaningful conversation, we need to have empathy toward one another. I understand your pain, I feel your pain."

"Suicidal empathy erases all that evolutionary calculus. It targets the wrong target like: Guatemalan gang members are more important to let into the country than investing in American vets."

"Homeless people who take over our parks are more important than the children whose parents have paid taxes, so that their children can play in the park."

"It becomes suicidal both at the individual level -- you have some rape victims who feel guilty reporting their rapist, because it might spread Islamophobia -- but it also then results in domestic and foreign policies that result in the suicide of the West."

Gad Saad 

Because, he points out, the new philosophy of guilt and empathy must agree that the foundation of the West sits on the rubble of Indigenous genocide, transphobia and Islamophobia and misogyny, it is an evil human construct. Whereas anyone with morals knows that all other cultures are to be admired and emulated; the West simply misunderstands female genital mutilation, the objectification of women, capital punishment for offending the state, animal cruelty because what are animals other than unfeeling objects? The countries that go to war with one another to resolve issues that diplomacy could solve know their tribal/sectarian values better than we do. 

 

Westerners who find fault with immigrant cultures that tend to break the social compact and justice system of the West are all out to sea; it is the values, customs and legal system of the West that counteracts normal human actions by forcing people to conform in ways that nature never intended them to. Conquest has merit, when it unites people, whether by common agreement or forcibly, and the West had better get used to it, because that accommodation is an expectation of the increasing hordes of refugee claimants, immigrants, and migrants flooding Western shores. 

 

The patterning of Western minds and their governments has been a long and steady progression of infiltration and studied understanding of accepted Western social mores, the language of acceptable discourse, the taboos and the fears. And that manipulation and deft exploitation by malicious forces whose adherence to the noble cause of jihad, for example, exploiting the byways of Western thought, accommodation and expectations has led to the undermining of foundational concepts, values and verities. Leaving us as craven idiots, mired in the swamp of suicidal empathy. 

 

 

"All of the insane policies that are destroying the West are rooted in suicidal empathy. Return to a commitment of liberty freedom and an individual dignity that made the West great."

"Throughout human history, most societies did not adhere to the ethos of the West."

"The West is really a miracle, within the buffet of human societies that have ever existed, and we're now seeing that it takes very little for us to lose it."

"You can practise your homophobia and genocidal hatred of the Jews and cutting off of the clitorises in your own beautiful countries. We don't want that here."

Gad Saad 

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney Devoted to Slamming Israel

"Hamas relies on a diverse web of international partners to expand its malign political influence, facilitate violent terrorist activity, and undermine international efforts to achieve lasting peace in Gaza."

"[The key backer of the flotilla, and previous iterations, is the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad [PCPA], an organization that] is clandestinely controlled [by Palestinian terrorists]."

"In reality, the PCPA was established with funding from Hamas's International Relations Bureau and Hamas directs its activity through the placement of Hamas officials throughout the organization."

"The PCPA does not only work with, and in support of, Hamas -- it operates at Hamas's behest." 

US. Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) 

 

"I am both honoured and humbled to be a part of this year's mission to Gaza."

"The aid that we have isn't sufficient to the structural issues in a post 'ceasefire' Gaza [clearly not a 'humanitarian' mission."

"For me, as someone who, I think at this juncture in history, is very wedded to direct action, I feel like directly confronting the Israeli occupation forces at sea as we try to break this 20-year genocidal siege, to me is like a historic responsibility."

Flotilla activist Rosa Martinez 

Basque police officers detain members of the Global Sumud Flotilla upon their arrival at Bilbao Airport on May 23, 2026. (Idurre Etxaburu / AFP)

 

On Monday, Canada's prime minister Mark Carney held a telephone conversation with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, a summary of which was released for public viewing by the Prime Minister's Office. From that summary we learn that Mr. Carney 'underscored' Canada's support for a negotiated two-state 'solution', a solution that the Palestinian leadership has time and again rejected. As well, the imperative of regional de-escalation was 'underlined' by the prime minister who 'raised' the issue of the Gaza crisis, and 'expressed concern' for civilian displacement in Lebanon.

 

Gaza crisis? Hamas designed, directed and deployed. Civilian displacement in Lebanon? Hezbollah rockets fired incessantly into Israel leading to civilian displacement of Israeli citizens. Both crises caused by terrorists' actions meant to lead to the destruction of the Jewish state. Condemn Hamas and Hezbollah, and empathize with Israel under constant fire? Heaven forfend. 

 

"The Prime Minister reiterated that the appalling treatment of civilians, including Canadian citizens, aboard the Gaza-bound flotilla was unacceptable, and he called for an independent investigation." 

 

This, from a leader whose most grave homeland concerns are 'elbows  up' against a powerful neighbour who enjoys needling Canadian sovereignty and imposing ridiculous self-harming tariffs in vital resources to remind Canada just who leads throughout the global community. Contrasted with a national leadership forced to focus on military self-defense from a implacably violence-devoted neighbours who will go to any lengths to see that citizens of Israel pay the ultimate price for squatting as colonialists on their own singular indigenous ancestral land.

 

Israeli naval commandos intercept boats in the Global Sumud Flotilla off the coast of Cyprus on May 18, 2026. (Global Sumud Flotilla)

 

If there was ever any doubt that Mark Carny is an unreconstructed Judeophobe, his complacency over Palestinian-led slanderous propaganda carousing through the cities and streets of Canada, threatening the security of Canadian Jews, leading a viral campaign of pure Jew-hate -- failing in his duty as the current executive administrator of Canada's commitment in law and social agreement to protect and provide equality of treatment to all of the country's various ethnic-cultural-religious groups -- sealed that apprehension comprehensively.

 

To which, in turn during the conversation, Israel's President responded in his own version of the lines spoken during their telephone call: 

"I expressed my deep alarm over the rise in antisemitic violence in Canada."

"I called on Prime Minister Carney and his government to address the fear and sense of abandonment felt by our sisters and brothers in the Canadian Jewish community before it's too late."

 

It is clear that Mark Carney has a special regard for Hamas which despite being on Canada's terrorist list, must obviously be doing something right in 'resisting the occupation' he so deplores. Israel, in its never-ending vigilance against new violence perpetrated against the Jewish state and its citizens on the other hand, offends Mr. Carney's sensibilities. In other words, a democratic Jewish state which far from intolerance, has absorbed Muslims, Christians, Druze, Kurds, Circassians, B'hai, and Bedouin among others into its citizenship, as far as Carney is concerned is violently intolerant, whereas Palestinian terrorism merely represents the frustration of 'occupation'.

 

Carney cannot be bothered with history, not when identities are clearly defined and give the lie to his contentious beliefs in Palestinian indigeneity and historical rights, when in fact they are part and parcel of the lie of Palestinian victimhood. Ismail Haniyeh who led the mass atrocity of October 7, 2023 when thousands of Palestinian terrorists streamed across the border from Gaza into southern Israel to wreak rape and murder, spoke of the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad as a strategy to "boost Hamas's international outreach".

 

Activists from the global Sumud flotilla in Italy May 21. Reuters

 

"This is the fourth flotilla organized for provocation rather than humanitarian concern."

"The flotillas have not been driven by legitimate humanitarian objectives, but by an orchestrated political campaign that serves the interests of Hamas."

Israeli Embassy, Canberra 

 

 

The Unspeakable Debasing of the Social Order in Canada

"[Montreal4Palestine has spend years raising awareness in Montreal, consistently working to] unite Montrealers of all religious backgrounds."

"[We have] stood firmly against all forms of hate, including antisemitism [and uphold] values of human dignity, freedom of expression and solidarity among communities."

"[We are] deeply concerned by efforts to falsely characterize a side-profile image of an effigy as depicting a 'man in a kippah.'"

"[The effigies displayed] were directed specifically at political figures [and] at no point were [they] intended to represent Judaism, Jewish people, or any religious, ethnic, or identifiable community."

Montreal4Palestine

Montreal4Palestine posted this image to Instagram on Wednesday in response to the public outcry, clarifying that the three figures hanging in effigy at a rally on Saturday in Montreal were directed specifically at political figures. (mtl4pal/Instagram)

 

"The incitement to violence, hate symbols, and displays of intimidation that we see in our streets are unacceptable."

"Images of hangings or effigies have no place in Montreal, nor anywhere else."

"Montreal must remain a city of dialogue, respect, and living together, where everyone can feel safe and treated with dignity."

Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrara 

 

"This is not a debate about the Middle East."

"Hanging effigies of Jews in the streets of Montreal evokes some of the darkest antisemitic imagery in history and is completely unacceptable."

"This is not 'peaceful activism.' It is the promotion of hatred and the incitement of violence that fuels the radicalization of our social climate."

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs 

A still from the footage that appears to show the effigy of a Jewish figure being hung (Photo: X)

 

The ongoing spectacles of Palestinian 'protests' alongside their far-left-wing supporters that denigrate the state of Israel as a genocidal entity with the usual chants of 'globalize the Intifada', 'Final Solution' and 'From the river to the sea!' do not, and cannot be construed as free speech, when a simple analysis of these chants reveal their true meaning; the 'final solution' hearking back to the Holocaust and the infamous Nazi final solution to the Jewish 'problem'; the bookending chants' meaning the destruction of Israel, the Jewish homeland. 

 

The usual commentary by government officials, decrying the obvious antisemitic and violent nature of such protests amount to public dressing and no more by authority figures who deny that antisemitism reflects the values of society, but their declarations of denials are pablum and nothing more. Disrupting the social order to the extent that has become so depressingly commonplace since the Palestinian terrorist attacks on southern Israel of 7 October 2023, with no penalties attached for those who slander, threaten, and aggressively harass Jews within their communities represents a blot of shame for both elected officials and Canadian police services for their inattention and inaction.

 

No segment of society representing an ethnic, cultural, religious group should ever be forced by government unwillingness to apply the law as it should be done, to be constantly victimized with no consequences resulting from their violently verbal attackers. The government leaders that prefer to turn a blind eye, blinkered by their own political animus against a legitimate democratic state constantly under attack by destructive and violent neighbours, prefer to do nothing rather than alienate a voting block of Muslim Canadians that have become through immigration, migrant and refugee intake, far larger than that of the Jewish-Canadian demographic with its much longer historical roots in Canada. 

 

Mock hangings at a pro-Palestinian event in Montreal on Sunday, May 24, 2026 appear to show effigies depicting U.S. President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. (Montreal4Palestine / Instagram)

 

Finally, the Montreal Police Service has announced an investigation following yet another anti-Israel march that saw the hanging of effigy figures on the May 24 weekend. Effigies purporting to depict U.S. President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir amused the crowd no end. But, claimed the protest organizers, there was nothing antisemitic about the spectacle, nothing at all. Islamists who have succeeded in infiltrating Canada know how to play the game of using Western social justice values to their advantage, mouthing denials and claiming adherence to human rights.

 

Montreal police emailed their intention to investigate these most recent examples of Montreal4Palestine honouring Canadian values. The matter, they declared, was being investigated by their hate-crimes unit, with further details to be released at a later date. "As city councillor, I reached out to the local commander and asked for the latest information on the protest. I had received a lot of complaints from people in my district", explained Leslie Roberts, a Montreal councillor whose district the protest rally took place in.  

"In my view, depiction of violence against anyone crosses the line. I contacted the police to find out if what they were doing was within the Charter of Rights [and Freedoms] or not."

"Depiction of a Jewish man hanging with a kippah, depiction of anyone hanging, is crossing the line, in my opinion."

Montreal City Councillor Leslie Roberts   

"Hanging effigies, burning effigies, that sort of thing, is a very common form of political protest. The courts have said over and over again that political speech is, in a sense, the highest form of free speech, because it engages with our understanding of self-expression, it engages with the broader public sphere", stated Pearl Eliadis, a lawyer and McGill associate professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy. The exception under Canadian law, is when violence is used to foment hatred. And if this display fails to fall into that category, then what does?!!

 

The animus and hostility toward Jews is fully expressed by Montreal4Palestine and other like groups practising their very special brand of antisemitism in Canada. While the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms protect free expression, they do not extend that freedom to the expression of viral hatred of the depth and degree demonstrated at this May 24 rally featuring a hanging-in-effigy of world leaders and by obvious extension Jews in general, which the kippah-clad effigy represented.

 

 

"Canadians are Experiencing a Polite Pogrom"

"[The] harm to Canadian Jews won't stop until we all have the courage to name the problem accurately and to identify the specific people perpetuating it: Islamist religious extremists in collaboration with progressive activists."

"[Canadians are experiencing a] polite pogrom." 

Jesse Brown, Canadaland publisher

 

"I have often thought about making aliya [moving to Israel] but for familial reasons, I was tethered to Canada."

"Whenever I go to Israel, I experience a sense of calm. It is because I don't have to explain, or justify or excuse."

"I can be who I am in a way that I cannot in Canada."

Jack Novack, retired Dalhousie University professor 

 

"It's not even drip, drip, drip anymore. It's like a freaking firehose [rampant antisemitism]."

"[The NDP has made]a crude political calculation [to win over the much larger, faster-growing Canadian Muslim community over Jewish voters, choosing to overlook  antisemitism in their ranks]."

"[People in 1940s Montreal would call her father maudit Juif ['damn Jew']. But I never experienced that in Montreal [in the '60s and '70s]. So trying to figure out:What did we miss? Were there signs? And I think that's a very Jewish experience right now."

"Along with that comes tremendous grief. The overwhelming emotion is grief. Grief at, I would suggest, a loss of innocence for Jews and for others."

"Because Canada is supposed to be, and was supposed to be, a place where we could all be all that we are with full identity."

Selina Robinson, former NDP B.C. cabinet minister

This shot of three figures hanging in effigy of Israeli leaders was part of a reel posted by the group mtl4pal on Instagram following the group's pro-Palestinian rally in Montreal on Saturday, May 24. (mtl4pal/Instagram)

 

Jews in Canada no longer have any reason to place their confidence in law enforcement and the legal system in Canada. A high rate of the criminal charges against anti-Israel protests -- according to a Toronto digital media outlet -- sees that of the 150 people criminally charged in Toronto between October 2023 and January 2026, close to two-thirds of the cases were dropped or stayed. For further lack of trust, the recently published memoir of retired Toronto police inspector Hank Idsinga accuses the Toronto Police Service of institutionalized antisemitism. 

 

Mr. Idsinga's book recounts antisemitic incidents prior to his leaving the force in late 2023 for retirement, when colleagues were prone to state "I can't believe we have to pander to this f--king Jew". When his colleagues in the force, not aware that he was Jewish, would baldly make outright antisemitic statements. Mr. Idsinga unequivocally states from his own experience that antisemitism permeates every level of the Toronto Police Service, from the very top on down.  

"Every time I wake up and I realize that the water's getting hotter [like being a frog in a pot of boiling water], somebody greases the bowl."

"The level of tolerance that this country seems to have adopted in terms of antisemitism is breathtaking." 

"[Even as European Jews see politicians abandoning smaller Jewish electoral communities for larger and fast-growing Muslim ones, so too do Canadian Jews]. [Case in point: Belgian Jews] fear that they might be abandoned by politicians who look for new voters in Belgian society, for example among the Muslim population."

"Many politicians lack the political will [to address antisemitism and recognize a] jihadi ideology [has] now come to Canada."

Talia Klein Leighton, president, Canadian Women Against Antisemitism 

More than fifty Toronto police officers receive a morning briefing Sunday April 5 at Sheppard Plaza in North York before ensuring any anti-Israel or pro-Israel protesters remain out of residential neighbourhood streets. (Photo by Ellin Bessner/The CJN)

 

"Of all the groups" sociology Professor emeritus Robert Brym at University of Toronto studied, including racialized Canadians, left-leaning Canadians, Quebecers and others, it is Canadian Muslims whose attitudes toward Jews stands out for their malevolence in regarding Jews, where 28 percent agree in polls that "Jewish people are largely to blame for the negative consequences of globalization", while 34 percent feel Jews "talk too much about the Holocaust". Four percent of non-Jewish Canadian adults on the other hand, agreed with the former, 13 percent with the latter statement.

 

"The percentage of Muslims among the most extreme antisemites is considerably higher than the corresponding percentage of non-Muslims", Professor Brym wrote in an academic paper. In Australia that same differential also is reflected in attitudes toward Jews. Surveys to gauge European Christians and Muslims on whether they view "Jews cannot be trusted" reveal huge differences, where in Australia 10.7 percent of Christians agree with the statement, and a whopping 64.1 percent of Muslims agreed. 

 

In France, similar research reveals that the Muslim community's antisemitic views are at levels higher than the far left and the far right, where French Muslims in the majority believe that "Jews have too much" economic power (67 percent) and that "Jews today use their status as victims of the Nazi genocide during the Second World War for their own interest", at 56 percent. When these issues are pointed out, that the great upheavals seen in publicly expressed antisemitism, are led by Muslims throughout Europe and North America, executive government levels invariably while denouncing antisemitism never fail to link that social sin with 'Islamophobia'.

 

And then the popular version of fault rests on a totally unaccountable source, the nationalists and far right groups. To publicly agree that Muslim extremism is responsible for the raging antisemitism seen everywhere today is a non-starter. And because it remains unrecognized officially and institutionally, there can be no amelioration of the situation if the specific people perpetrating and perpetuating Islamist religious extremism are not held responsible, much less checked. 

 

The minority antidote when government itself will not do its work in upholding the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms:

The Council of Muslims Against Antisemitism (CMAA) is a group of global
Muslim thinkers, professionals and activists, led by its founder director
Raheel Raza that is committed to fighting antisemitism in all its guises. This
group took its foundational inspiration from Canadian values of tolerance,
justice and peace among Canadian diverse communities living together
side-by-side.
We recognize antisemitism for what it is – a uniquely pervasive, enduring,
and lethal form of hatred which has insinuated itself into multiple cultural,
religious and political frameworks across the globe. We recognize the
particular threat posed by the meteoric rise of antisemitism in the 21st
century. Often genocidal or eliminationist in intent or expression, it
represents an unprecedented amalgam of the more familiar strains of
antisemitism promoted in extremist right-wing, left wing and Islamist
ideologies. The spread of contemporary antisemitism has been accelerated
by globalization and the advent of 21st century technologies.
The CMAA endorses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
(IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition constitutes the
world’s most widely accepted definition of antisemitism which has been
adopted or endorsed by 43 countries including Canada. It appropriately
recognizes that the demonization of the State of Israel as a Jewish state is
antisemitic, whereas criticism of Israel, its government, policies or actions
of a type that all countries are subject to, is not.
Despite challenges that include receiving death threats, we are committed
to working with like-minded groups to challenge antisemitism wherever it
may appear. We are working relentlessly towards the goal of attaining a
hate-free Canadian community.                                                                                          Council of Canadian Muslims Against Antisemitism

Canada, Deligitimizing Jewish History, Heritage, Culture, Religion and Society

"Publicly funded institutions have a responsibility to approach contested historical issues with fairness, balance and intellectual integrity."

"A national human rights museum cannot become a platform for politicized narratives that risk contributing to division and misunderstanding, including here by erasing Jewish history, delegitimizing Jewish self-determination, or contributing to hostility against the Jewish community."

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Center) President 

 

Palestinians use the word al‐Nakba — Arabic for “the catastrophe” — to describe their forced displacement in 1948.

In 1948, militias, followed by Israeli forces, expelled civilians, destroying or emptying hundreds of villages amid regional war and lasting instability. Around 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced during the creation of the State of Israel.

Five generations later, these people and their descendants still live with insecurity and uncertainty and are unable to return home.

The exhibition Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present explores the human rights violations related to the ongoing forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians. Featuring personal stories told through objects and video testimonies, the exhibit presents Palestinian Canadians reflecting on their ongoing struggle for justice and human rights. Together with art, photos, and text, these elements reveal enduring patterns of loss and resistance.

For Palestinians, the Nakba is both their history and their present — it is an ongoing process shaping every aspect of life today.

Canadian Museum for Human Rights  --  Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present 

Displaced Palestinians walk along a road in Jabalia, as they leave areas near Gaza City, January 19, 2025. Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa, Getty Images

"[Fully one-fifth of the population in Israel comprising non-Jewish minorities, including Christian and Muslim Arabs, Druze, Circassians and Samaritans]."

"Their presence in Israel demonstrates their continued existence as Palestinian Arabs in Israel, which complicates the totalizing notion of the 'Nakba' as it is most widely understood around the world, mostly by enemies of Israel and the Jewish People."

"This context is crucial to include. However, all this could have been understood, if the organized Jewish community had been consulted meaningfully from the beginning and not excluded from discussions."

Belle Jarniewski, executive director, Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada 

Palestinians portray themselves as 'victims', perpetuating the myth that the presence of Israel, re-established on Judean ancestral land, was responsible for disinheriting Arabs originally from Jordan and Egypt who had moved to the region to take advantage of opportunities not available to them in their original  homelands. The land called Palestine, originally named such as a 'province' during the Roman occupation, was recognized as land where Jews had lived and thrived for millennia. In 1947 when the United Nations offered their Partition Plan to Jews and Arabs, Jews were swift to re-establish their homeland, while Arabs, calling themselves 'Palestinians' rejected that offer.

 

Jerusalem, Western Wall

 

They did so, because they claimed all of the land as theirs and spurned the legitimate presence of a Jewish state. Many of the Palestinians who fled did so voluntarily, they were not forced out; they planned to return once Arab armies marched on Israel to destroy the nascent state. From 1948 to the present time, Palestinians have cherished their victimhood, holding it out to the world as a dreadful wrong forced upon them. The original 750,000 Arab Palestinians who fled with Israel's declaration of statehood, was more than matched by the 850,000 Arabized Jews who were exiled, their properties expropriated from Arab lands where they had lived a thousand years. The United Nations does not recognize the banished Jews as refugees or victims, as it does the Arab Palestinians.

 

The Jewish refugees from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco and elsewhere settled in Israel and elsewhere around the world. Those same Arab nations failed to absorb the Palestinian Arabs as citizens, preferring to leave them as eternal refugees whose status could be used to legitimize the Arab League's hostility to, and military plans against the Jewish State, a situation that went on to see one combined Arab war after another march on Israel, yet the tiny fledgling state was able to fend them off time and again.

 

Israel Bonds marked a rare and symbolic milestone in Tel Aviv with the unveiling of a commemorative stamp issued by the Israel Postal Service.

 

Despite the 750,000 Arabs who fled Palestine, 160,000 chose to remain in Israel. Those Arab Palestinians, now several million in number, are Israeli citizens, with equal voting rights, some of whom sit in the Knesset and in the state judiciary. Israel is a majority-Jewish state, but it extends equal rights of citizenship to the Bedouin, Kurds, Druze, Circassians, Christians, Muslims and others who live among them. This is a reality denied by Palestinians who have fanned out in a wide-ranging diaspora in the West, spending an inordinate amount of public relations time defaming and slandering Israel, naming it an 'apartheid', genocidal state.

 

It is in very fact, the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (ancient Jewish Judea and Samaria) who are operating apartheid status, and themselves committed to genocide. No Jews may live among the Palestinians, by official Palestinian decree. As well, the Palestinian leadership, with the agreement of the Palestinian population dedicates itself to endless terrorist operations against Israel and its Jewish citizens, in the never-ending hope that the Jewish state will miraculously dissipate and the Palestinians will then occupy the land 'from the river (Jordan) to the sea (Mediterranean), triumphant.

 

Honouring Palestinian claims of a 'nakba' (disaster) to compete with and counter the jubilation of world Jewry on the recreation of the state of Israel, is a total farce which history and reality does not support. A national museum dedicated to human rights accepting the fallacy of a people suffering mass displacement as a unique event represents an assault on reason, fact and the historical record. Canada in the entireity of its governments, public institutions, academic establishments, organized unions, has distinguished itself of late as a country that has turned on its Jewish-Canadian population, on its relations with democratic Israel, in favour of commiserating with and honouring a colossal falsehood that deligitimizes Jewish history, heritage, culture, religion and society.

 

For shame.  

 

The Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is scheduled to open the exhibition Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present on 27 June Photo 

Canada ... No Longer a Secure Home for Diaspora Jews

Adil Charkaoui's speech has drawn broad condemnation from politicians like Premier François Legault and groups like the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. (Adil Charkaoui/X)

 

"The statistics on hate crimes in Canada are pretty clear on this. It's really in the early 2000s that hate crimes against Jews in Canada started to go up in a significant way."

"By this measure, then, the rate of antisemitic incidents is more than 16.5 times higher today than it was before 2000."

"I did experience quite a lot of antisemitism where I grew up [in Saint John, N.B.]. My golden age didn't start until I was 18 and got out of there. [The promise Canada offered Jews in major cities was real.] I think it's true for most Jews, who grew up in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg from the '60s on." 

"The percentage of Muslims among the most extreme antisemites is considerably higher than the corresponding percentage of non-Muslims." 

Emeritus sociology professor Robert Brym, University of Toronto 

 

"Every time I wake up and I realize that the water's getting hotter, somebody greases the bowl. The level of tolerance that this country seems to have adopted in terms of antisemitism is breathtaking."

"It was wonderful to be a Jew at York [University in the 1990s] . There was a vibrant [Jewish student and professorial] community." 

"[By 2000], it was a completely different place to be a Jew. The anti-Zionist, left-wing academic was already starting to infuse the university."

Talia Klein Leighton, president, Canadian Women Against Antisemitism

 

"It wasn't easy as a Jewish boy walking around with my kippah [in France]."

"Moving to Canada was, for me, a breath of fresh air to be able to bring up my children in a safe and welcoming environment."

"What has happened in the last two, three years, is quite unbelievable. What I saw  happening in Paris in the '70s where you could be walking in the streets and people were screaming slurs at you or driving by and just a feeling of unwelcome and just looking behind your back."

"That, to me, is terrifying, because I was able to see the contrast of being here in Canada."

Menachem Mendel Blum, rabbi, Ottawa Torah Centre Chabad

THORNHILL, CANADA - MARCH 7 : Pro-Israel demonstrators gather outside Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto synagogue hosting 'Israeli Real Estate Event' in Thornhill, north of Toronto, Ontario on March 7, 2024. (Photo by Mert Alper Dervis/Anadolu via Getty Images)

 

According to B'nai Brith Canada's statistics, there were 6,800 antisemitic incidents that took place during 2025, an increase from 2,769 that occurred in 2022. During that time, synagogues were shot at and firebombed, 'F---k the Jews' graffiti appeared all too often, Jews have been accosted, berated, harassed, beaten, even shot at with pellets. Anti-Israel, antisemitic protesters marched en masse for months on end through Jewish residential neighbourhoods in Toronto. 

 

The years following World War II saw an enlightened public attitude toward Jews. The majority of Canadians became more accepting of a Jewish-Canadian presence. Prejudice against Jews that had previously manifested in public notices that parks were off limits to 'Jews and dogs', Jewish exclusion from clubs, from buying homes in certain neighbourhoods, Jewish doctors refused hospital affiliations, rental units not available to Jews, slowly underwent a social change.

 

Jews flourished in the new social environment; the numbers limiting Jewish acceptance at universities became history, Jewish businesses thrived, laws were passed prohibiting discrimination against minority groups for employment opportunities, medical treatment, academic admissions, and home rentals made it mandatory that all citizens were treated in equal measure under the law. Just as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteeing equality and freedom of religious expression, freedom of speech and all other civil rights. Antisemitism went underground.

Parliament Hill, Ottawa, Canada (Freepik.com)

 

Jews enjoyed that same sense of security in Canada as all others and the Jewish community thrived on its freedom to explore economic prosperity. Then, suddenly, a mass atrocity that occurred halfway across the world on October 7, 2023, when Palestinian terrorists launched a mass atrocity slaughtering Israeli civilians in southern Israel changed all that. It seemed sudden, but it was a kind of climax that had been building for some time, and October 7 was the signal that the time was right for an explosion of Jew-hate. Up to that time beginning decades earlier, a slow and steady increase of Middle Eastern immigrants bringing with them traditions of antisemitism infiltrated all walks of academia, unions, government and social institutions.

 

Expatriate 'Palestinians' studying in droves in Canadian universities provided the spark as 'victims' of Israeli oppression, which is to say Israeli defensive action against Palestinian terrorism that sought to destroy the Jewish state physically, then resorted to systematically through propaganda destroying Israel's reputation through libelous slander, promulgating lies of 'apartheid' and plans to kill Palestinians to rid themselves of counterclaims to Judean ancestral lands upon which both Israel and the 'Palestinian Territories' sit.

 

TORONTO, ON - December 20 - Shots were fired at a North York Jewish girls school early Friday morning, marking the third shooting at the school this year, Toronto police said. December 20, 2024. 

 

Governments in Canada stood by, unreactive while chaos broke out in the streets and on university campuses as thousands of anti-Israel protests, extended to include Canadian Jews in rejection of their presence as Zionists were called upon to 'go back to Poland' while Palestinians used every vicious tool at their disposal to delegitimize the Jewish state, making great inroads in alliances with the far-left and Liberal 'progressives' who found much to support in those claims, repeating with vigour 'Globalize the Intifada'. 

 

As Muslim populations proliferated through immigration, refugee intake and mass migration throughout Europe, and threats against European Jews ballooned, so too did they in North America, Australia and elsewhere. Jews who once felt secure and accepted for what they are; loyal citizens of the countries they lived in, contributors to the civilized world, outperforming other groups in their literary, scientific, academic, technological proficiency, were hounded by the baying of rousing, mind-numbing levels of expressed Jew-hate.

 

Jews now in Canada, as elsewhere in the world have been forced to resort to security measures to protect their schools, their synagogues, their community centres, vulnerable to attack and indeed experiencing attacks; gunshots, explosive devices at night, and crowds of protesting Jew-haters during the day, harassing, threatening, jeering and smearing Canadian Jews; vandalizing Jewish-owned businesses and property, boycotting and isolating Jews from mainstream society.

 

Michael A. Sachs: Some Jewish Canadians planning exit strategies to more welcoming U.S.

 

The governments whose democratic duty has always been to secure public order, to protect minority rights and guarantee equality of treatment and opportunity for all, have instead merely observed the ongoing diminution of Jewish rights in Canada. Their silence and lack of action have predictably bolstered the hateful resolve of the rioters and hate-mongers. And while all decent people decry the advent of renewed antisemitism and the moral incivility accompanying it, the majority remain silent. The Jews can look after themselves. 

 

Many are trying to do just that. And many are now contemplating wrenching their roots asunder from the soil that once guaranteed them peace of mind, planning to emigrate to the one place on Earth where their survival and that of their children is guaranteed: Israel. Politics in Canada under a succession of Liberal-led governments is such that those at the highest order of governance decry the rise of antisemitism and invariably add that of 'Islamophobia'. 

 

None among them ever contemplate speaking the reality of the situation, that it is the large and growing Muslim population from among whom this rise has resulted. They are prepared to live with the results of deliberately overlooking and bypassing the truth, rather than express it, and risk losing the votes that come with pandering to a segment of society whose values are not those of the prevailing majority, nor of democracy itself. Shame on them all.

 

Portable museum to show at schools, as an educational device, but after October 7, it was deemed too political. Photo by Courtesy of Sam Eskenasi