The University of Toronto, the same university that brought us a two-month-long anti-Israel encampment is playing host to a virulent anti-Israel event that will glorify terrorism in the name of resistance.
The event, entitled “Silenced Voices: The Impact of Terrorism Designations on Palestinian Advocacy in Canada” is being held on the university’s downtown campus on Tuesday.
The organizer and lead speaker is Basema Al-Alami, a PhD candidate in UofT Law.
She claims that she will examine the coverage of Palestinian solidarity protests and statements within the “right-wing and centrist media” that use “criminalizing narratives” and use labels such as “terrorism” and “violence” to “”delegitimise” Palestinian voices.
Al-Alami, who did not respond to a True North request for comment, will be backed up by a cast of five academics, who have made very clear their disdain for the Jewish state in their writings and social media posts since Oct. 7/2023.
Some have even been highlighted by Canary Mission, an organization that very effectively documents hatred towards the Jews and Israel on college campuses.
A UofT spokesman, who did not attach a name to his or her comment, insisted the university has a “high threshold” for expression, which can include speech that is “uncomfortable and offensive” to some.
”The role of the university’s administration is not to adjudicate among viewpoints but rather to help … foster open inquiry and scholarly debate in its many forms,” the spokesman said.
In an article in Informed Comment — an independent newspaper out of Michigan that appears to be highly uninformed about Israel — Al-Alami repeatedly accuses Israel of genocide and repeats the false narrative that Israel disrupted the food convoys into Gaza and targeted medical facilities. She also gives credence to the International Court of Justice decision.
Fahad Ahmad, a criminology prof at Toronto Metropolitan University, regularly posts tweets supporting BDS and Israeli apartheid and uses the Islamophobic narrative to label those who raise the very real spectre of the radicalisation of some Israel haters.
He also signed a missive last year to ban Jewish American commentator David Frum from speaking at TMU.
In this tweet Prof. Sonya Fatah from the TMU school of journalism, openly invited any journalists exposed by Honest Reporting Canada for their anti-Israel and factually incorrect reports to report the Jewish organization.
Honest Reporting Canada, incidentally, has done a stellar job since Oct. 7/23 of endeavouring to correct the inaccuracies and blatant anti-Israel bias contained in a wide variety of news reports on CBC, CTV, Global, the Toronto Star and other Liberal-left publications.
Panelists Beatrice Jauregui and Alejandro Paz, both UofT professors, have been written up by Canary Mission for their support of Hamas, BDS and their anti-Israel activism.
Finally, law Prof. Kent Roach is known for resigning over the 2021 scandal regarding the hiring of Valentina Azrova, an outspoken critical of the Israeli occupation of Palestine (even though there is no such country as Palestine and Hamas, not Israel, rules Gaza.)
It’s not just that the premise of Tuesday’s seminar is completely ridiculous.
It’s not the media and public commentary that is delegitimising pro-Palestinian voices.
They lose any and all public sympathy every time they take to the streets of a Canadian city like Toronto screaming “Death to the Jews” or harass and intimidate Jews in their own neighbourhoods, where Mayor Olivia Chow and our weak police chief give them a very wide berth.
The images of masked Gazans taking to the streets to harass the poor, already abused, hostages tells me these are not pro-Palestinian voices, but pure evil and violent terrorists.
The sight of the three hostages released last weekend looking like Holocaust survivors suggests the terrorists may have tortured them.
So I’m not buying Al-Alami’s narrative.
It’s not the slightest bit surprising to me that a university which completely caved to the anti-Semitic radicals and professors who occupied UofT’s King College Circle for two months would sanction such a biased event with completely one-sided speakers.
University administrations like that at UofT are so desperate to be woke and to pander to political correctness they have completely lost the plot.
Tuesday’s seminar is not free expression or scholarly thought.
It is nothing more than anti-Israel/anti-Zionist/anti-Jew hate fest.
