On Sept. 18, several Toronto District School Board teachers thought it appropriate to take their students to participate in an outdoor protest rally at a downtown Toronto park.
The protest focused on Indigenous rights: in particular, long-standing issues regarding the Grassy Narrows First Nation. Also present were groups supporting other causes. Among them were supporters of the “pro-Palestine” movement.
Students from elementary through secondary school were taken to this event. Parents were advised in advance that this was an educational field trip focusing on long-held grievances of Grassy Narrows. Children attending Alpha Alternative School (in Grades 3-6), as well as students from other schools, were asked in advance to wear blue shirts. There are different explanations for this request. Some have said that the blue was meant to signify clean water. The Grassy Narrows First Nation has been dealing for decades with health and other impacts of industrial pollution of its water supply. Others have indicated that the blue shirts were intended to mark the students as “settlers.” A badge of shame.
The TDSB has been silent on this point, refusing to clarify.
Anne-Marie Longpre, a TDSB teacher who took students to the event, posted on her now-closed X account that: “This was a march for Indigenous land rights. Do you really believe it’s harmful to kids to hear the chant, ‘From Turtle Island to Palestine, Occupation is a crime?’”
Well, yes, Ms. Longpre. I do. Harmful and wildly inappropriate. It is also a profound breach of duty of care.
These words reflect Hamas’s ideology (a recognized terrorist entity in Canada) that Israel is an illegal and criminal occupier of what they consider to be the land of Palestine. On the streets of Toronto and university campuses, this simplistic distortion of historical fact is deployed to demonize Israel, Jews and any individual who believes that the Jewish state is “legitimate” and has a “right to exist.”
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, it did so with the declared intention of taking Jerusalem and killing any Jew they could (they referred to their victims as “yahud,” which means Jew in Arabic). Hence, the name of the killing spree: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Al-Aqsa is the mosque situated in the Jerusalem religious compound they hoped to liberate. (Known as Haram-al-Sharif, the Muslim compound is built atop the ruins of the holiest site in Judaism, the Second Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans. Jewish people refer to this site as the Temple Mount.)
The well-documented murder, torture, rape and incomprehensible savagery was celebrated on the streets of Gaza — and Toronto. The chilling pledge of Hamas leadership is to repeat this slaughter until Israel is destroyed and every last Jew is dead. This is a standard chant. These protests normalize extreme Jew-hatred, violence and a very distorted rendering of history.
“From Turtle Island to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime” is not the benign nursery rhyme that Longpre, and others defending the protest, seems to think it is. It is a call for the annihilation of Israel. Whether her views stem from ignorance or malevolence, they are neither new nor anomalous in the TDSB. The rot is deeply entrenched.
Among the more spectacular consequences of the October 7 massacre is the degree to which the very robust pro-Islamist population in Canada has been emboldened. As the slaughter and torture of civilians by Hamas continued on that day one year ago, the savagery was celebrated openly on the streets of many cities in Canada. There was an immediate and bizarre alliance between supporters of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, ISIS, the Taliban and of course, the murderous regime in Iran that trains and manages them all — and so-called “progressives.”
To Islamists, Israel is a blight on the Middle East that must be destroyed. This has been the predominant and abiding ideology in the region since 1948. Ironically, former U.S. president Barack Obama’s appeasement of Iran and its state-sponsored terror operations supporting Islamist proxies in the region alienated long-standing American allies: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. They despised Iran’s destructive, fundamentalist regime and this became the foundation of what has emerged as a strong alliance binding these countries. Including Israel.
Excluded from this group — which includes several other Muslim countries under the Abraham Accords umbrella — are the nations that support or have been overtaken by terror groups: Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq. Qatar plays both sides, financing and supporting Islamist terrorists in innumerable ways, while holding itself out as being allied with American and western interests. It is an absurdity that has a life of its own.
What is puzzling is the convergence of interests between Islamists and leftish “progressives,” many of whom are gay. They seem to be oblivious to the fact that they are loathed by Islamists; unaware that gay individuals in these societies are burned alive, stoned to death, thrown from buildings (blindfolded and bound, headfirst) and hung from cranes in the public square.
What binds these antithetical demographics — Islamists and progressives — is their shared hatred of Jews and Israel. To Islamists, homosexuality is unnatural and forbidden by Allah. Women are also objectified and subject to restrictions and abuse that do not align with liberal western norms.
Their progressive bedfellows have come to their epiphany about the evil of Israel and Jews through various forms of indoctrination and learning.
A recently published, slim volume by author Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, offers the most succinct distillation of the key “thinkers” in this socio-political movement. Israel and the United States, Kirsch explains, are “settler-colonial” societies, meaning that they are “permanently illegitimate, because they were created against the will of the people previously living there.” This theory explains and defines every aspect of the despised society. And this convoluted reasoning is how and why they proudly celebrate October 7.
“By killing old people and children inside the borders of Israel, (Hamas) acted on the principle that every citizen of a settler colonial state is a fair target, because none of them has a right to be there,” Kirsch writes.
“Young people today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews — because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.”
They have been taught, since they were small children, that Israel represents all that is evil. This is reinforced in high school. And deeply entrenched by the time they get to university.
And then they become educators, public officeholders and public servants. Not to mention the masked thugs controlling our streets and university campuses.
National Post
Vivian Bercovici is a former Canadian ambassador to Israel and the founder of the State of Tel Aviv.