“Oct 7 2023”

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators held a rally outside the U.S. Consulate in downtown Toronto on Saturday afternoon to demand an immediate ceasefire in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

The demonstration is the latest weekend mass rally led by pro-Palestinian activists since the start of the current conflict on Oct. 7.

It began 2 p.m. outside the consulate on University Avenue, between Queen and Dundas streets.

They got Trudeau to join the anti-zionist ceasefire squad wasn’t that enough?

The following five ex-Muslims grew up in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, but they were all indoctrinated, they say, with the same views on Jews and Israel. They remember a childhood shot through with antisemitic moments ranging from the mundane (one woman recalls her aunt claiming Jews put cancer in her vegetables at the market) to the deadly (a former extremist went as far as to pick a location in London for a terrorist attack he planned to carry out at 17).

These hateful ideas, repeated by their family members, religious leaders, and teachers, are part and parcel of the same animus, they say, that fueled Hamas’s attacks on October 7.

President Isaac ‘Bougie’ Herzog is Israeli aristocracy. His father, Chaim Herzog, was the sixth president, serving between 1983 and 1993; his grandfather Yitzhak Herzog was chief rabbi; his maternal uncle was Abba Eban, the most famous of the country’s foreign ministers. After leading the Israeli Labor party and the parliamentary opposition in the Knesset between 2013 and 2017, Isaac became Israel’s 11th president in July 2021. He is the first to be born in Israel since the Declaration of Independence 75 years ago.

The destruction of a bookstore in Toronto during a pro-Hamas demonstration must not be excused.

Shortly after returning home from Israel, I attended a pro-Hamas demonstration in Toronto, Canada, as a counterdemonstrator. But this was no ordinary pro-Hamas rally. Its participants billed themselves as “Jews Against Genocide.” It was held outside of Indigo, a big-box bookstore in Toronto that is owned by Heather Reisman, a wealthy Jewish businesswoman and philanthropist. Ironically, her store is known for promoting progressive books. But in the eyes of the demonstrators, this fact was irrelevant because she had committed an unforgivable sin: She was known for supporting charities in Israel. During an earlier demonstration in front of this bookstore, one of the attendees, a professor at York University, had vandalized the exterior of the building. Afterward, she had been arrested and charged with vandalism, and added to this was the charge that the crime was motivated by hate. In Canadian criminal law, any crime that is deemed to have been motivated by hate can lead to a stiffer sentence. This demonstration was clearly organized at least in part to protect her.

There was speculation over whether another uprising was brewing in the West Bank, even before the Hamas attacks on Israel in October.

Frequent raids by the Israeli army, emboldened by a hard-right Israeli government – following deadly attacks by Palestinians, and violent attacks on Palestinians by settlers – had already increased pressure on Palestinians there.

Since the war in Gaza, those pressures have spiralled: Israeli raids into West Bank towns have become more frequent and more forceful, and many families are suffering economically after Israel withheld tax revenues used to pay public servants in the West Bank, and banned Palestinian workers from entering Israel too.

As well as an atrocity, the October 7 massacre was a media sensation. With the use of $150 GoPros strapped to its terrorist foot soldiers, Hamas thrust its obscenities into almost every news channel, paper and feed in the world. If you wanted to understand the democratisation of broadcasting through a single event, this was it.

As anyone who uses social media knows, anger erodes our self-control and makes us do things we often later regret.

Paul Finlayson can certainly relate to that, after responding to a post on LinkedIn last month.

The 59-year-old marketing lecturer at the University of Guelph-Humber came across a post from an educator in Pakistan, who was using what Finlayson considered genocidal language about the conflict in Gaza, by calling for a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.”

Just over ninety years ago, the Oxford Union carried the motion ‘That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’

A striking generation gap in the western world has been revealed by the responses to the October 7 atrocities in Israel. Noting in these pages the surge in pro-Palestinian sentiment among young people on both sides of the Atlantic, my old friend Douglas Murray worries that “When it comes to Palestine, the kids aren’t all right.”

Murray is correct to say that something has changed. He is also correct that it is mainly a phenomenon in the English-speaking world. In the US and the UK, young people are far less well-disposed towards Israel than a decade ago.

It’s simple, really. Why do so many college and university students hate Israel? Because they know nothing about it, and have bought into the propaganda they’ve been fed.

Israeli troops accidentally killed three hostages they mistook for terrorists during fierce fighting in Gaza, the IDF admitted tonight.

The captured Israelis, who were abducted on October 7, were shot at as the during the neighbourhood of Shejaiya in Gaza city after members of the IDF mistook them as a ‘threat’.

The IDF has named two of the hostages – Yotam Haim, who was abducted by Hamas from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, and Samer Talalka, who was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Am on October 7.