The newest game to keep authorities and the Jewish community busy is for anonymous provocateurs to plan events in the GTA promoting terrorists or the idea of turning Canada into an Islamic caliphate — and then watch the reaction.
It’s never clear where these events are supposed to take place or if they are fakes put forward by some mischievous agitator. But just in case they do, the police have to spend resources to find out who, what and where, and the organizations protecting Jewish people need to advocate to ensure they don’t happen.
We saw that last year when there was online advertising to hold a martyr’s celebration of the death of Gaza leader Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar at Mississauga’s city hall. And there was another example earlier this month with supposed plans for there to be a Caliphate conference in either Mississauga or Hamilton – depending on who you were talking to. Neither event materialized.
And, this week, it was a murky-scheduled event that organizers have claimed was supposed to be on the University of Toronto campus featuring a criminal who was in an Israeli prison for 20 years for his part in planning the bombing of a bus designed to slay innocent people — but failed.
Those who abhor this kind of thing are caught between a rock and a hard place. If they do nothing or say nothing, perhaps the event will happen. If they do put up a battle to stop it, when successful, one never knows whether it was going to happen in the first place.
The latest was supposed to happen Thursday: A promoted event, “Palestine and prisons: An interview with Shadi Shurafa is presented by the Watermelon Coalition and the Muslim Students Association (MSA),” according to online advertisements. “This interview aims to explore the experiences Palestinians face within the prison system in occupied Palestine, managed by both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.”
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It sure looked real. But it turns out students won’t be hearing a talk from a terrorist, who tried to blow up a bus in Jerusalem in 2001, after all.
“This event is not taking place at the University of Toronto,” the university said Wednesday afternoon.
This, however, is not what organizers claimed. Saying they have a new speaker, organizers wrote “there’s a high probability of this event having to be hosted online as U of T has cancelled our booking.”
However, saying “this event was never scheduled to take place the university,” U of T’s media office said “social media posts advertising this event appear to have been deleted” and “three of the organizations that were listed in these materials as sponsoring the event are not recognized U of T student groups.”
It’s a mystery.
It was halted in the nick of time – a major victory for B’nai Brith which, in an X post, said the organizatin is “proud to report a significant victory in the fight against extremism on Canadian campuses” with the room booking for “convicted terrorist Shadi Shurafa has been cancelled.”
What was being planned was alarming.
“Shadi Shurafa, a former prisoner from East Jerusalem, offers a unique perspective by having encountered notable and controversial resistance figures during his incarceration.” said the poster, adding “the event also hopes to shed light on the role of resistance and resilience within the prison system and to provide an account of being a prisoner in a settler-colonial context.”
What the promoters didn’t advertise is Shadi Shurafa was in prison for planning a 2001 bus bombing for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — an attack that would have killed Jewish Israelis.
And the watermelon symbol you see in protests in 2025, is related to this event.
Richard Robertson, B’nai Brith Canada’s director of research and advocacy, said even appearing remotely, “Shadi Shurafa” is “a convicted terrorist who was released from custody in 2022 after serving a decade-long sentence in Israel for participating in a foiled plot to bomb a Jerusalem bus during the Second Intifada.”
B’nai Brith writer Jonah Fried provided the report on the July 27, 2001 attack where Bilal Uda, 23, “met with Shadi Shurafa, the senior PFLP operative who planned the attack. Shurafa provided Uda with the IED concealed in the watermelon and a mobile phone having in its one-touch dialing memory the phone numbers of the two modified phones used to activate the IED.”
The only reason innocent people were not killed is because the bomb didn’t detonate because of faulty wiring. But it looks like he won’t be telling his story to university kids at this time.
However, it appears there’s another planned event already to worry about – one with a Hamas supporter.
Meir Weinstein of Israel Now said it is being organized by a group that “seeks to change Western civilization under Islamic rule.”
Maybe this event will happen. Maybe it won’t.
Either way, the damage will be done.