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)

The Long Reach of Islamist Terror Funding in North America

"We reject the distinction between 'civilian' and 'militant'. We reject the distinction between 'settler' and 'soldier'."

"Every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms."

"A settler is an aggressor, a soldier, and an occupier even if they are lounging on our occupied beaches."

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)

 

"Certainly, any steps that you can make toward disrupting a terrorist organization, those are accomplishments."

"But, in reality, what I knew, was that this infrastructure [the Holy Land Foundation] had been operating since 1988. That's a long time."

"The roots that this infrastructure had planted throughout the U.S. were deep and vast."

Lara Burns, former FBI special agent

 

"[The court filing should trigger greater interest among America's intelligence agencies about the possible] ties between Hamas and some of the so-called student groups now leading antisemitic violence and intimidation on our campuses."

Paul Moore, former chief investigative counsel, U.S. Department of Education

 

On the very day of the Hamas incursion into southern Israel to carry out a bloodbath -- replete with mass rape, torture, the burning of farming villages and kidnapping of Israeli civilians young and old -- across the United States, National Students for Justice in Palestine sprang into action to co-ordinate a swift 'public relations' campaign feeding off the terrorist action. They issued guidelines on campus walkouts across both the United States and Canada, along with graphic templates as critical propaganda tools.

A Towfan Al Aqsa statement (code for the name Hamas labelled its attack) was issued by the SJP chapter at University of California, Berkeley to honour the "Palestinians who are working on the ground on several axes of the so-called 'Gaza envelope' alongside our comrades in blood and arms, and what is coming is greater. Victory or martyrdom". George Washington University's SJP chapter caught up two days later with its own declaration. 

Students for Justice in Palestine is now recognized as the most prominent anti-Israel group operating throughout North America, where it has gained international attention in its mobilization of college campus encampments. It has taken fully four decades since the seed for such a widespread network of unified placeholders to act in support of Islamist terrorism in the Palestinian Territories, culminating in the primacy of Hamas in Gaza.

 

In 2001, U.S. government efforts based on intelligence of foreign terrorist networks' infiltration into the United States led to the closing down of the Holy Land Foundation, and the Islamic Association of Palestine following several years later. By then it was too late; the two fundraising arms of Islamist 'charities' benefiting terrorism were cut off, but more than ample arms remained, deeply integrated and quietly doing their work in support of Hamas and what it represents.

 

Senior leaders of both outlawed groups simply reorganized and became American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) which is the largest sponsor of Students for Justice in Palestine, totally invested in demanding that American universities divest from Israel. Initially, overt antisemitism was averted in favour of a civil exterior which the left found much in common with and suddenly young college left-leaning activists and the conservative Muslim community leadership began acting in support of one another.  

National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has gained global attention for mobilizing encampments on university campuses including Montreal’s McGill University, above. Photo by Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press

 

AMP established the umbrella group National SJP with a view to co-ordinating messaging and strategy among its 200-plus chapters in the U.S. and Canada; a network of growing influence. "Before 2010, SJP operated with individual campus chapters and little cross-campus co-ordination. It was not until 2010 that a national effort to unite SJP campus branches emerged". explained Dan Diker, researcher at think tank JCPA in Jerusalem. 

In the 1980s, the U.S. became a fundraising bonanza for Islamic fundamentalists where al-Qaeda leaders sent members on tour, stopping at dozens of mosques to promote funding for the mujahideen then fighting the USSR in Afghanistan. In later years, Hamas leaders emulated the success of the earlier al-Qaeda fundraising ventures to their own advantage. And Hamas's fundraising and advocacy infrastructure was slowly established in the U.S. and Canada.

 

American Muslims for Palestine strategically engineered a slander program that found acceptability in polite society, among academia and the union landscape, packaging raw antisemitism as recognition of Jews, Israel, Zionism and the Holocaust in linkage to decolonization and anti-oppression, quickly taken up as effective verbal tools that found credibility across the continent, where groups of Israel bashers took to Israel as a colonizing occupier while asserting there was nothing antisemitic in their focus on the Jewish state. 

Zionists have been compared to Nazis, to the KKK, and enthusiastic apartheid racists. "If there were Nazis, white nationalists and KKK members on campus, would their identity have been accepted and respected? Then why would we respect the view of Zionists?", the SJP chapter at Stony Brook University in New York posted on social media, demanding the expulsion of Jewish student group Hillel from campus. 

"This [law]suit, targeting key nodes in the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood U.S. network, is frankly long overdue. The close connections between these defendants and Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other designated foreign terrorist organizations are no secret."

"For years, SJP and AMP [American Muslims for Palestine] have bragged about supporting Hamas."

"And in many respects, these groups are the tip of a very dirty iceberg."

Reed Rubenstein, former deputy associate attorney general, U.S. Department of Education 

A woman walks between the tents in an anti-Israel encampment at the University of Toronto campus, May 26, 2024. Photo by Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press