Students were injured when an off-campus gathering organized by a Jewish group at Toronto Metropolitan University was broken into by anti-Israel protesters on Nov. 5, 2025. Photo by Ernest Doroszuk / Postmedia/File

 

"I will tell anyone, with great sorrow, anyone in the Jewish community, not to have their children apply to TMU. Can you imagine that? I love this university and I've worked here for [over a decade]."

"It's given me my entire professional life. Now I tell friends not to let their children go here because they'll be harassed and mistreated and bullied and potentially assaulted."

"And I say Send them to McGill, or Western, or U of T, or to the U.S. or somewhere else'. They are all better."

Unnamed tenured Toronto Metropolitan University professor  

If, as the anonymous and obviously disturbed professor states, those other Canadian universities where attendance for Jewish students is preferential to that of the former Ryerson Collegiate Institute -- now Toronto Metropolitan University -- that improvement would be strictly marginal. The truth is all academic institutions in Canada, to greater or lesser degree have been  hijacked by Critical Race Theoried-DEI constructs of social progressivism. They all host student bodies and faculty hostile to Israel and dismissive of Jewish identity that equates with Zionism. Selecting any one of them is holding to a low standard of approval. 

"Some administrators and University leaders expressed concern that certain faculty members may be encouraging, incentivizing, or intensifying student activism in ways they viewed as inappropriate or inconsistent with professional boundaries."

"[This review] was also given multiple examples of statements reportedly made in classrooms, faculty-led seminars and educational spaces that many Jewish participants experienced as antisemitic, dehumanizing, or normalizing hostility toward Jewish people."

"Administrators, some faculty, Jewish student and faculty representatives, and event organizers frequently described conduct they experienced as crossing from protest into intimidation, harassment, or attempts to silence participation."

"Interviewees in this group pointed to repeated event disruptions, aggressive confrontations, social media targeting, doxxing, hostile language, and personal accusations directed at identifiable individuals."

TMU Report 

Former Ontario Appeal Court Justice Mary Lou Benotto has recently released her report on the simmering antisemitism that has turned Toronto Metropolitan University into a hellhole for Jewish students and faculty members. The report lists such incidents taking place as that of Jewish students being spat on, sour milk thrown at them; intimidation, harassment, threats. Leaving them living in trepidation over attending the university in pursuing their academic education within the confines of a university failing to come to grips with antisemitism's scourge of the civil social contract. 

 

Some of the statements sufficiently notable to be included in the Benotto review included denial of or minimizing the Holocaust (that Adolf Hitler was guilty of 'discrimination', not conducting a genocide). Statements such as "academic power is rooted in Jewish supremacism" which needs to be "rooted out of academia", as well as holding discussions relating to "how much violence we are willing to engage in". 

 

The inmates that have contrived control of the asylum just happen to be students and faculty members of Palestinian Arab, Muslim origin, bolstered by a large contingent of pro-Palestinian participants whose intrinsic hatred of Jews has given them a common denominator of identification of the world's conflicts summed up by volunteering Israel and diaspora Jews living in the world community as the cause and focus of world strife. Yet the report makes note that these same vectors of rampant antisemitism expressed fear, exclusion and marginalization; so very typical of the permanent self-imposed state of victimization of Palestinians.

On Feb. 23, an unidentified person threw an open carton of past-dated milk at a group of Jews and Israelis participating in a student tabling event at Toronto Metropolitan University for Students Supporting Israel in partnership with StandWithUs Canada. Photo by Handout/Ethan

 

"Several described grief and trauma connected to events in Gaza, frustration with institutional neutrality, and concern that criticism of Israel was too readily conflated with antisemitism", notes the report. This is the fixed mindset of Palestinians with their visceral hatred that is so uniquely communicated like the disease it is, to others receptive of the message of Jew-as-agent of evil. Wherever Palestinians settle in through their scattering out of the Territories, they simmer and fester and violently lash out in aggravated frustration over their lot as the world's permanent victims. This is the reason that no country in the Middle East allows them space. But the West does, out of pity for their plaintive mewlings.

 

At the university, that pattern played itself out, with senior university administrators followed, filmed, verbally abused, and violently assaulted. "Protesters repeatedly followed the University President to the parking garage and surrounded his vehicle and then posted a video of the event with disparaging remarks", noted the report. Senior university administrators, including the president vice-provost and chief financial officers were featured in posters placed around the university campus along with the phrase: "Wanted for Genocide".

 

The Benotto review was initially an investigation into several incidents -- where in September of 2025 Students for Justice in Palestine disrupted a Democracy Forum event featuring AI Minister Evan Solomon, shouting "war criminal" and "baby killer", causing the event's cancellation. It is the very Liberal government of which Solomon is a Minister that contrived their entry as immigrants, refugees and migrants into Canada. Two months later the same group pushed and shoved into an off-campus meeting of a Students Supporting Israel speaking event featuring an IDF serviceman, forcing that meeting also to be cancelled. 

 

The report's introduction notes "The Review is based on the foundational principle that universities are meant to foster inquiry, debate, and democratic engagement". The report made it clear that those behind the pro-Palestinian/anti-Jewish protests were so vehemently incensed with the  university, with the presence of Jews in any capacity, that no debate and discussion could ever be possible. 

 

"TMU effectively permitted a 'heckler's veto' whereby the threat of disruption determines who is permitted to speak." The review morphed into "a broader institutional issue: a deeply polarized campus environment shaped by the aftermath of October 7, 2023, and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Review concludes that the two incidents under review were symptoms of a deteriorating campus climate that, absent decisive institutional action are likely to recur". The university, pointed out former Justice Mary Lou Benotto, has the tools required within its Code of Conduct. The solution lies in a "consistent and principled" enforcement.

 

In response to a recent report, Toronto Metropolitan University president Mohamed Lachemi announced the launch of a task force on campus expression, antisemitism and community safety. (Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press)