Protection for Toronto's Jewish Community from Rabid Islamists

"Due to the changing security landscape in Toronto in recent weeks, including increased volatility and heightened fear in our communities, demonstrations  moving into residential neighbourhoods in the Bathurst and Sheppard area presents an unacceptable risk to public safety."

"As a result, demonstrators will not be permitted to enter residential streets in this area."

"[This is a] measured step to reduce the risk of escalation and maintain public safety." 

Toronto Police Service spokesperson Stephanie Sayer

A pro-Palestine march makes its way through Toronto, Sunday, Oct. 29, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

 

The issue of Toronto's Jewish community forced by disinterest from Toronto's mayor to 'notice' the ebbing lack of  safety and security imposed on that demographic by gangs of roving 'pro-Palestinian' demonstrators and the inaction of the Toronto Police Service to rein in the verbal insults and assaults ranging from 'Final Solution!' to 'Globalize the Intifada!' -- and other not-so-veiled threats that arose in the wake of the Palestinian Hamas terrorists governing Gaza committing an unspeakable mass atrocity in southern Israel -- had to wait over two years for action. And the Jewish community is supposed to be grateful that their distress under constant threat from openly-celebrating Islamist violence is finally being partially addressed.

 

Ostensibly the move to finally act to put an end to the mob incursion into streets housing Jewish Torontonians was the result of Jewish community group lobbying. In very fact those community groups pleaded with the municipality, the police, the province, to act in the face of intimidation and threats when the demonstrations first emerged and that was directly after the shocking massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023. The inaction of authorities at all levels to restore order and security from the federal government on down, was undoubtedly responsible for the kind of escalation that took place with synagogues, Jewish schools and community centres, along with privately owned Jewish businesses being shot at, firebombed and vandalized. 

A  protest at Bathurst Street and Sheppard Ave. West, a Jewish neighbourhood, featured one protester dressed as Yahya Al-Sinwar, the Hamas leader behind the October 7th massacre.  MSN

 

Each time violence erupted, authorities were quick to condemn the events, expressing solidarity with the Jewish community, piously declaiming that 'this (antisemitism and violence) is not Canada'. Yet it is what Canada has become under the watch of the decade-long reign of the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, followed by Mark Carney. Both of whom have a penchant for bemoaning antisemitism, and never failing to link it with the (to them) equally troubling 'Islamophobia', which in itself is rather absurd, since most of the antisemitic attacks come courtesy of the Canadian Muslim population.

 

The Toronto Police spokesperson explained that legal protests on main streets in the area where the Jewish community in the city is located will be permitted to continue. The same protests that have taken place regularly since the day following the October7, 2023 slaughter of Israelis by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the PLO's Fatah contingents, led by the master-class terrorist group Hamas, whose charter is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.  

"Our community has consistently refused to accept the normalization of intimidation on residential streets in the heart of a heavily Jewish neighbourhood."

"Around Bathurst and Sheppard, residents, families, seniors, students and community institutions have been forced to contend with repeated demonstrations in spaces where people should be able to live, walk, pray, and gather in peace."

B'nai Brith Canada 

Another Jewish group that had called upon the city and police for attention to the plight of the Toronto Jewish community, stated that the announcement by the Toronto Police Service represented "a meaningful step -- but it must be matched with consistent enforcement and protection for our community." 

"At protests at Bathurst & Sheppard, extremists openly made threats of violence, glorified terrorism, and depicted Jews as sub-human — yet no arrests have been announced. After multiple attacks on our community, many are asking why the law is not being enforced."

"We’re calling on TPS to investigate and lay charges, declare assemblies unlawful when there are activities that promote and incite hate, and make the necessary and critical changes to protect our city."

Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs  

Images of antisemitic signage shared by X user Leviathan (@l3v1at4an) during an anti-Israel protest Bathurst St. and Sheppard Ave. West in Toronto on Sunday, March 15. (Credit: @l3v1at4an/X)

 

There is much to be concerned about.  Days following the U.S.-Israel launch of the joint aerial bombardment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to destroy its nuclear ambitions by targeting its powerful missile caches, its launch sites, nuclear enrichment sites, leading government authorities and chiefs of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in an effort to hasten  regime change and rescue the Iranian people from their persecutors while neutralizing Iran's capacity to train, arm and fund its proxy terrorist groups in the Middle East, synagogues were again hit by gunfire in Toronto.

 

Jewish-owned businesses and the U.S. consulate in Toronto were also shot at in demonstrations of Islamist targeting of associates and allies of the State of Israel. In addressing these and allied issues, the Toronto Police spokesperson stated that police officers would provide "clear direction". That anyone who fails to comply with them would face possible arrest for obstructing police.  

"The Toronto Police Service facilitates lawful demonstrations while balancing the rights of participants with the safety of the broader public."

Stephanie Sayer  

Toronto police stand watch near the Al-Quds day protest in Toronto, Ontario, on March 14, 2026.

(photo credit: Geoff Robins / AFP via Getty Images)

 

'Canada Has Disgraced Itself'

"To my mind, Canada has disgraced itself in the last 18 months by showing that the anti-Jewish hatred is permissible and is tolerable in a way which hatred of no other group would be."

"I would submit that if there were a large number of protests across Canada calling for lynching of black people or Indigenous people or gay people or anything else, that all of the strength of government and civil society would condemn the people doing that. Swiftly, too."

"This is the great shame of Canada, that synagogue after synagogue and Jewish school after Jewish school across Canada should have been attacked, fire-bombed, shot at."

"Canada's politicians, if they care about Canada's view in this world, should address this."

Douglas Murray, journalist, author, anti-Islamist 

Douglas Murray, pictured at Kibbutz Nir Oz, Israel, in November 2023, delves into the aftermath of the October 7 attacks in Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization. Photo by Moshe Mizrachi

 

When Liberal Cabinet ministers along with the prime minister Justin Trudeau, made statements in condemnation of Israel on the basis of charges uttered by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, despite that group having a place on Canada's list of terrorists, choosing to give credence to accusations of Israeli responsibility of a bomb dropped on a Gaza hospital, injuring hundreds of civilians, it wasn't long before an 'official' of Hamas thanked the Liberal Canadian government for its discerning side-taking.

 

This is a different Canada from the one administered by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper under the Conservative Party, when Israel was assured it had Canada's complete support and cooperation. Under the successor Liberal government of Justin Trudeau that support crashed when Canada began voting against Israel at the United Nations. And it descended even further when Canada stated it would have no problem supporting South Africa's charge to the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel for crimes against humanity.

 

Without a vestige of doubt, Israel is the sole country on the planet which, when attacked by thousands of Palestinian terrorists, launched a military defence and has been denounced -- not only Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the PLFP and Fatah, but ordinary Palestinian citizens who grasped at the opportunity to flood across the border from Gaza into southern Israel on October 7, 2023 -- to launch an unspeakable orgy of primitive sadism and savagery, mutilating and raping women, slaughtering entire families and taking 250 men, women and children of all ages hostage after killing 1,200 people. 

 

Palestinian terrorists move towards the border fence with Israel from Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 7.   Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images

 

After decades of relentless suicide bombings, lone citizen attacks on Israelis, terrorist-launched thousands of missiles and rockets, threats contained in the charter documents of total eradication of the Jewish state, and failed attempts to negotiate peace accords and recognition in the interests of agreeing to a Palestinian state alongside that of the Jewish state, and each in turn failing because the Palestinians would offer no concessions to their goal of achieving possession of the entire geography, the finishing touch was the savage barbarity of the October 7 invasion.

 

The government of Israel stated its clear intention; to entirely demolish the military apparatus of the terrorist groups that have proven time and again that each deadly attack was only a prelude to another and another and another until their goal of destroying Israel had been achieved, when it entered Gaza in search of, and with the intention of destroying the terrorist groups at their own hateful game. What it met was more threats, this time to murder the hostages whom the Israel Defense Forces attempted to free, and more rockets into Israel.

 

The Palestine Youth Movement held a downtown rally from Yonge and Dundas Sts. to the Israeli Consulate on Tuesday, March 18, 2025, before shutting down the intersection to traffic. Photo by Caryma Sa'd /Special to the Toronto Sun

 

Palestinian terrorists have made it clear they are perfectly comfortable in sacrificing the lives of ordinary Palestinians in lieu of their own lives, to deter the Israel Defense Forces from reaching their goal of annihilating the terrorists. While many of their leaders did meet their fate, the sheer numbers of terrorist operatives hiding amongst the population, securing themselves in the vast network of tunnels in Gaza, operating out of hospitals, launching rocketry from mosques, storing weapons in UNRWA schools, presented an obstacle to reaching Israel's purposeful invasion's goal.

 

The West in general, quickly got over its initial shock at the scale and barbarity of Hamas's October 7 atrocities. With Palestinian propaganda working overtime and making swift inroads in inciting latent antisemitism at academic institutions throughout Europe and North America, and launching endless well-attended 'protests' by Hamas-admiring, anti-Israel groups, the slanderous fiction of Israel committing a 'genocide' against Palestinians was adopted and led to campus protests and shut-downs, as well as threats against the Jewish diaspora.

 

In France, Britain, the United States, Germany, Ireland, accusations of disproportionate violence by the IDF against Palestinians in Gaza redound. The protests grew more numerous, louder, bolder, and more threatening. In Canada, unlike elsewhere, governments at every level looked on, and did absolutely nothing to secure the safety of their Canadian Jewish populations. Police tended to overlook threats, violence and clear instances of law-breaking in what looked like solidarity with the pro-Hamas groups.

 

As a large number of Windsor police officers kept an eye out, dozens of pro-Palestine protesters shouted slogans and waved flags to passersby on Tecumseh Road East outside Windsor’s Caboto Club on Thursday during the Jewish National Fund’s Negev Dinner featuring former prime minister Stephen Harper as keynote speaker. Photo by Trevor Wilhelm /Windsor Star

When Jews grouped to launch counter-protests, they were warned by police that their actions were provocative and were further informed that they should disband, and were often escorted by police away from public venues, leaving the 'pro-Palestinian' groups free to continue their disturbances, including en mass prayers in the streets. It quickly became clear to Canada's Jewish population that they were on their own; in a country of guaranteed equality rights through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Jews were exempt.

 

A new government has been voted in; yet another Liberal government, this time under a long-time Liberal central banker, Mark Carney as prime minister. Whose culture, values and playlist are no different from the previous one which gave Canada ten years of divisiveness, social engineering, ethnic strife, engorged immigration rates, falling economic status, a failing universal medical system, inefficient government, an extreme housing shortage, high unemployment, and ongoing Islamist ownership of the streets.

 

Canada badly needs rescuing, its hostilities between provinces, with the east and central Canadian provinces favoured by the Liberals and the Western provinces held to strict federal government-imposed strictures over matters that should by Canadian law and convention be decided by the provinces themselves, with environmental issues eclipsing all other considerations, another four years of the same Liberal government is destined to drag the country further into ignominy and self-ruin.

 

Anti-Israel protesters hold a news conference at Queen's University in May 2024. Photo by Peter Hendra/The Kingston Whig-Standard/Postmedia Network

 

Excoriating Israel for Genocidal Intent

"Since we can't hope for anything morally courageous from most of the faculty, the best hope we have is to seek to defund the universities, to call for the resignation of their weak-kneed presidents, and to fix the broken hiring system in which a single ideology [and not merit] determines who is in and who is out."

"We must find a better way forward, and not just on campus. As the pro-Hamas fores make blatant use of Jew-hatred, they are testing how far they can go in upending our liberal values."

"If we don't stop them now, this will only be the start of a forced march on the road to much, much worse."

"All of this has its source in an ideology that has gripped the minds of the vast majority of university professors, a neo-Marxist ideology that despises the values of liberal democratic society on which our freedoms are based." 

"We now have a choice. Do we allow the pro-Hamas mobs to take over our campuses? It is painful to observe the students in the encampments serving as 'useful idiots', to see the faculty largely become deluded supporters deceived by an ideology; and to discover that the administrators are weak appeasers. This is clear in their pathetic attempts to 'negotiate' with the campus occupiers by bribing them with faculty positions and student scholarships."

Kenneth Green, professor, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto

Pro-Hamas Encampment, University of Toronto, Globe & Mail

The new 'normal' that has arisen since October 7's Hamas atrocities in southern Israel is one that constitutes a nightmare for Jews in the diaspora where throughout Europe and North America, a tidal wave of antisemitism has surfaced that, in its bold authenticity has shocked and terrorized Jews everywhere. World Jewry since the Second World War sought comfort in the belief that their enormous sacrifice on the altar of Jew-hate would never, ever recur.

 

The world, in the face of the open secret of the death camps, the gas chambers and the ovens that incinerated Jewish corpses to ashes filtered through those giant belching chimneys to sprinkle human ash like fertilizer over the agricultural fields of Europe chose to do nothing, to remain oblivious to the death throes of European Jewry. A chastened world, shocked by the visual evidence of what they knew was occurring, offered a palliative in the UN's decision to permit a re-awakened State of Israel.

Now that same world has turned upon the Jewish State, repeating what a terrorist group has disseminated, that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians. Those Arab communities who named themselves Palestinians, the ancient Roman Occupation word to describe Judean lands administered by Rome, and whose agenda was to claim heritage Palestinian designation as a legitimate Arab-Palestinian state where Israel sits.

It is a narrative that has no basis in reality, one which documented history, ascribing ancestral heritage to Jews who originated in the Middle East as the authentic indigenous people of the region validates. Yet by identifying themselves as victims of Jewish aggression, while in actuality acting out as terrorists whose goal is to embark on never-ending deadly assaults against Jews and Israel, claiming them as oppressors and themselves as beleaguered threatened people of peace, the Western world's progressive left has taken up their cudgel to beat Israel.

Their appeal to the professional and trade unions of the West, eagerly grasping the narrative of 'occupier', 'settlers' and 'indigenous people', the struggle of the underdog against the capitalist threat of the 'colonialists' has led to the snarling references to Israeli 'genocide' against a powerless people deprived of their birthright, ventilating fullblown antisemitism under the canopy of human rights being defiled by a greedy colonialist entity depriving Palestinians of what is rightfully theirs.

Palestinian terrorists crossing the fence separating Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip from surrounding Israeli settlements on October 7, 2023. (Photo by Stringer/APA Images)

And so, there are school encampments throughout the West, demands that universities condemn the Israeli genocidaires, that academic cooperation with Israel be cancelled, that investments and collaboration be cancelled in the name of upholding human rights. The October 7 atrocities interpreted as a just and admirably courageous assertion of the Palestinian right of self-defence, not the sadistic savagery for which there is abundant visual evidence recorded by the Hamas murderers themselves. 

Despite that Palestinian terrorists in their thousands swarmed across the border from Gaza into southern Israel in a well-planned and -orchestrated bloodbath of dreadful proportions, accompanied by mass rapes, the murder of infants and children, burning alive of entire families in their torched homes, the deliberately exacting mutilation of girls and women before their execution after rapes, are all justified as the uprising of a people dominated by a military that refuses them a state of their own.

That would be the state that Palestinian leaders rejected in 1948 and consistently thereafter every time an attempt at negotiations took place between Israel and the Palestinians. Who, while piteously declaring to the West that all they want is their fair share in a two-state 'solution', continue to plan their brutal attacks on Israel and its people to achieve the real agenda of clearing the region of the Jewish State to declare it forthwith a sole Palestinian State.

Whereas Israel has given citizenship and equality to Palestinians within Israel representing 20 percent of its population, the Palestinian leadership, both the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas governing Gaza, have made it clear that not one Jew would remain alive in the Palestinian Territories. And it is to these antagonists of Israel to whom the West gives their unalloyed support while giving wan lip service to the right of Israel's existence as a sovereign state.

An elderly Palestinian man raises a national flag as youths shout slogans during a protest in the southern Gaza Strip. (AFP)

A terrorist group that has committed its version of a genocidal effort to complete what the Holocaust started can characterize Israel as a genocidal state planning to eliminate Palestinians in their entirety, and that assertion is accepted and echoed by Western academics both of Palestinian/Arab/Muslim derivation and non-Arab, Marxist-inspired faculty at universities, upholding the free speech entitlements of non-student organizers and university students to hold a school in ransom to their negative-Israel demands. 

Academics, Jewish and non-Jewish risk being labelled as 'Islamophobic' and 'racist' by asserting the right of Israel to exist, by declaring Palestinian terrorist groups be recognized for what they are, by demanding the disassembling of the university campus encampments with their antisemitic themes, threats and verbal and physical intimidation against any and all who fail to agree with their messaging. That government at any level, and school administrators are too cowardly or in agreement with the pro-Hamas protests to shut them down, is a condemnation of those who have abandoned the democratic values of their own heritage and culture.

Coping with Malevolently Crazed Protesters

"BLRS follows a progressive enforcement model and takes every opportunity to educate individuals on Ottawa's bylaws before the event, and work toward a resolution during the event."

"It's important to note that enforcement during demonstrations is a result of escalated actions by the participants, which may pose nuisance and public safety issues. Since the beginning of the protests, BLRS has been working with organizers to educate them on the city's bylaws."

"As the activities of protesters escalated and became more frequent, including the defacement of property, the use of sound reproduction devices, smoke bombs, fireworks and threats toward our officers, BLRS took action to address these concerns."

"Initially, warnings were issued to individuals regarding the operation of these sound production devices on highways or public places. However, when the activity persisted, fines of $490 were issued."

Roger Chapman, director, Bylaw and Regulatory Services

 

"[Palestinian protesters] have the right to scream. Silencing Palestinian solidarity when genocide is happening is wrong."

"[When the 2022 convoy protest gridlocked downtown Ottawa for three weeks], we talked to the truckers like people. We let them organize."

Ottawa Centre NDP MPP Joel Harden 

Protesters gathered in downtown Ottawa for the 12th straight week of pro-Palestine rallies. Photo by Ashley Fraser /POSTMEDIA

The truckers' strike lasted three weeks before policing authorities stepped in to close it down, and lodge formal charges against the organizers when the federal government executed a general emergency state which enabled them to lock protest participants' bank accounts, harass them with lawsuits, while the prime minister called these loyal Canadians 'racists' and scum. These wild and menacing demonstrations by those celebrating the October 7 atrocities in Israel have gone on for 12 weeks, with little-to-no comment from the federal government.

Rather than interfere with the 'free speech' entitlements of Muslim Canadians, authorities look the other way when shouts of 'intifada' and 'from the river to the sea' are chanted, both of which represent a call to the destruction of Israel. Marchers shouting that Canadian Jews, resident in Canada for hundreds of years, unlike those who decry their presence, urging them to 'go back to Europe', and others shouting 'gas the Jews' certainly are exercising their rights that appear to contradict laws against hate speech.

So the City of Ottawa really 'cracked down' on these riotous scum, issuing nine noise-violation tickets for those seen to be disobeying city noise bylaws. Among them a Member of Provincial Parliament using a megaphone in front of the Canadian Tribute to Human Rights monument. Criminal charges were laid in a few instances when downtown streets were blocked during the Truck Convoy protest. However, no criminal charges were pressed against masked pro-Hamas protesters who issued threats and engaged in violence.

 

Saturday’s edition of the pro-Palestine rally started at the Human Rights Monument before taking to downtown streets. Photo by Ashley Fraser /Postmedia

 

The Palestinian Youth Movement has been a major organizer of the protests, prepared to support those receiving bylaw tickets. The rally organizers characterize the bylaw tickets as a "clear attempt to suppress pro-Palestinian organizing and support". But they would say that while cheering on vandalism at synagogues and Jewish social centres. According to the noise bylaw, "no person shall operate or  use of cause to be operated or used any sound reproduction device on any highway or other public place".

Regional executive vice-president for the national capital region for the Public Service Alliance of Canada -- one of Canada's largest unions, most of which have taken the political position to support the 'Palestinian cause' -- declared his solidarity with 'pro-Palestinian  protesters; the issuance of tickets represented at attack on their right to protest. "They want to silence and stop our movement. We cannot let this go on", said Alex Silas, recipient of one of the tickets.

While gathered at the Canadian Tribute to Human Rights, protesters banged drums, waved signs and Palestinian flags and chanted "Free free Palestine" and "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free". What they mean is free to commit bloodbaths on Jewish communities in Israel, and the destruction of the Jewish state, so that the fictional 'Palestine' can occupy all the geography it claims to be theirs, as squatters on Judaean Ancestral land.

This weekend’s pro-Palestinian rally started at the Human Rights Monument in Ottawa before taking to the downtown streets. A woman was questioned after being told to bring her drone down on Saturday afternoon. Photo by Ashley Fraser /Postmedia