And at Montreal's McGill University's Encampment...?

"This was the latest escalation in a series of unlawful activities designed to intimidate, to coerce, and to achieve objectives through force."

"It should be clear to everyone that attacks on people and property do not represent the legitimate exercise of anyone's rights to free expression or assembly. Nor do they constitute peaceful protest. This needs to stop."

"[Protesters] spray-painted slogans and profanities [on campus]. Even more distressingly, a McGill security agent appears to have been assaulted -- I was extremely relieved to learn that he was not seriously harmed." 

"[The university is working to] restore peace and stability in our campus."

McGill President Deep Saini 

A man enters the boarded-up door to the James Administration Building at McGill University in Montreal on Monday July 8, 2024. Doors and windows were vandalized during a pro-Palestinian demonstration on Friday night. Photo by John Mahoney /Montreal Gazette

"[It is time for protesters to] escalate [beyond] symbolic action [because] we know power won't move unless we strike fear in the heart of the ruling class and pose a threat to their reproduction of capital."

"We will not disavow any actions taken to escalate the struggle, including militant direct actions."

"We keep us safe by escalating."

"Don't hesitate to take more risk."

Palestine Action Montreal

On Friday night McGill property suffered smashed windows and doors. Along with that, an assault on a campus security guard and confrontations with police. The Palestine Action Montreal occupying force called on its supporters to continue to escalate their protest, to branch out and lose their timidity, to occupy buildings and be more confident in confronting police. 

 

Vandals broke windows at McGill University’s administration building and Macdonald Engineering Building Friday night. The damage is seen on Saturday July 6, 2024. Photo by Allen McInnis /Montreal Gazette

Part of McGill University's downtown Montreal campus has been occupied by Pro-Palestinian, Hamas-admiring students and others not affiliated with the university but skilled in organizing and using funding made available from sources as far as the Middle East (Iran/Qatar) since April 27. Insisting they have no intention of leaving until such time as the  university divests from companies with links to the 'genocide of Palestinians' as well as severing relations with Israeli universities.

Encampment supporters marched to the McGill encampment site on Friday night, making their way from Victoria Square, a public park where police had earlier in the day dismantled an unauthorized encampment, at the behest of the municipality and its mayor, Valerie Plante. 

 

"F--- the dismantling, globalize the intifada", organizers -- along with the McGill chapter of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights -- wrote in a social media post prior to the protest. According to the Montreal police department, one person was arrested and two officers received minor injuries in the scuffle. Now, the protesters from the park walked to the university, at one point placing obstructions in the street to block police.

Out in force on foot, bike and horseback, police dispersed demonstrators by using chemical irritants after they manifested a "hostile attitude", said police. Where a 66-year-old man was arrested for assault of a McGill security guard, and for smashing windows. Palestine Action Montreal posted several videos on social media following the protest. "F--- you McGill, f--- you Valerie Plant, and f--- your police".

"This is what you get McGill. You will pay for silencing the students", another video message,  accompanied by graphic images of people breaking windows. The university's President, Saini, criticized the police for their lack of response to a prior protest where an effigy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was hanged from the Roddick Gates at the university.

 

Montreal riot police near McGill’s campus on July 5, 2024. Photo by sphrmcgill via Instagram

Nearby, police merely watched, failing to act. Montreal police, "as we understand it watched the events unfold without preventing them. This baffles us, and we have a asked them to take every action possible under the law", stated the university's president.

President Saini issued a statement following the disassembling of the Victoria Square camp that he had every expectation that the city and the police would remove the encampment on his campus, but Montreal Mayor Plante responded that the city cannot intervene at McGill since unlike Victoria Square, the university is private property -- accusing the university of lacking leadership by failing to "find a way out other than going to court".

Quebec judges have so far rejected McGill requests to order protesters to clear the campus. Police have refused to intervene at his request. Negotiations with the protesters have been fruitless. Their idea of 'negotiating' is to demand that the  university follow their directives. And it seems increasingly evident that the province of Quebec, the city of Montreal, the Montreal Police believe that the university should agree to follow all the demanded directives of a criminal mob.

An image provided to The Gazette shows an effigy of Benjamin Netanyahu in striped pyjamas was hanging from McGill’s Roddick Gates on Sunday, May 26, 2024. Photo: handout

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.