The University of Toronto has cancelled a speaking event featuring a convicted member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a listed terrorist entity in Canada.
The PFLP is a Marxist-Leninist organization which has been linked to a multitude of anti-Israel terror attacks on civilians.
According to a since-deleted post by organizers, the event will have to move online due to the school cancelling its booking, and the convicted terrorist will no longer be speaking at the event.
The University of Toronto told True North however that the event was “never scheduled to take place at the university.”
Organizers said the event was to be hosted Thursday by the U of T Muslim Student Association in collaboration with anti-Israel activist groups such as Occupy U of T, which held protest encampments in the summer; the Watermelon Coalition; and Toronto Students for Palestine.
The controversial guest speaker was Shadi Shurafa, a convicted PFLP terrorist who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2002 for his role in orchestrating a failed bus bombing using an improvised explosive device hidden in a watermelon. The attack took place during what is known as the “second intifada.”
A collection of case studies published by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University, Calif., details the failed attack, naming Shurafa as a senior leader of the terrorist organization.
Under the recently-listed terrorist group Samidoun’s website, Shurafa has written articles about his stay in Israeli prisons and how the PFLP organizes while incarcerated. Samidoun advertises Shurafa as a “leader in the PFLP.”
An advertisement for the event, which was taken down from “the Watermelon Coalition’s Instagram page on Wednesday, promoted Shurafa for his relationship with terrorist groups while in prison.
“Shadi Shurafa, a former prisoner from East Jerusalem, offers a unique perspective by having encountered notable and controversial figures of various resistance groups during his incarceration,” it said. “The event also hopes to shed light on the role of resistance and resilience within the prison system and to provide an account of being a prisoner in a settler-colonial context.”
Before the post was taken down, one person in the comments said, “Now tell us what he’s in prison for.”
The group replied only with a winky face and a watermelon emoji.
The event was cancelled following advocacy from Jewish groups, including B’nai Brith Canada.
“It is an affront to the victims of terror. It’s an affront to Canadian legislation, which lists the PFLP as a terrorist organization,” Rich Robertson, the director of advocacy at B’nai Brith Canada, told True North in an interview.
“It undermines global efforts to combat terror, and it’s, quite frankly, dangerous for students or community activists to be whitewashing the crimes of terrorists to facilitate or advance their own agenda.”
Neither the school’s Muslim Student Association nor the Watermelon Coalition responded to True North’s requests to comment.
Robertson was baffled by the event and how it could hold “any academic value” outside of a closely monitored clinical setting.
“This was not an interview with an individual in an academic or clinical setting. This was platforming a dangerous individual and exposing students in our greater community to his volatile rhetoric,” he said. “There’s a difference between conversations that are uncomfortable or that avant-garde…that are advancing academic inquiry, and conversations that just have no place in a free and democratic society that respects morals and values and upholds its laws.”
He said universities such as U of T need to take ownership over the actions of its student groups and ensure they are not creating environments on campus that are dangerous to members of their school community.
