SPHR McGill is advertising an October 7 rally at the Roddick Gates. The group that called the Hamas massacre and hostage taking “heroic” wants people to assemble on its anniversary, and Jews are apparently supposed to regard this as another exercise in human rights advocacy. I take their original statement seriously. When people celebrate the slaughter of our people, I am not inclined to invent a more respectable explanation for them.
Their enthusiasm was there before Israel’s ground invasion, before the devastation in Gaza became the excuse offered for everything said and done against Jews. Hamas had murdered approximately 1,200 people and taken 251 hostages, and SPHR was applauding. By June 2024, the group was advertising a “revolutionary youth summer program” with a photograph of masked people carrying assault rifles. McGill president Deep Saini contacted public safety authorities at all three levels of government over what he described as a national security concern.
By October 7, 2024, Montreal police had counted approximately 350 demonstrations connected to the conflict and made 106 arrests. During that afternoon’s march, some participants threw paint, applied graffiti and smashed windows at a McGill building under construction. Another anniversary mobilization followed in 2025, while Concordia closed its downtown campus for the day. Students pay tuition to attend these institutions, yet university life is repeatedly reorganized around people who seem to believe their cause entitles them to disrupt everyone else’s.
In Oregon, last week, posters were hung displaying the photograph of Lenny Steinberg, executive director of Oregon Hillel, under the words “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.” It accuses him of supporting Zionism and genocide and demands “Hillel off campus.” Directly below it is an advertisement commemorating the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for its October 7 attack. Someone has taken the trouble to identify a Jewish community worker, publish his face and declare him an enemy.
Steinberg has no army, no seat in the Israeli cabinet and no authority over Gaza. He runs a Jewish student organization in Oregon, which apparently makes him sufficiently guilty to be publicly denounced. I am tired of being asked to find an innocent interpretation of this garbage. The people printing a man’s face under “enemy of the people” know perfectly well that they are directing hostility at him.
Israel, Zionist and Jew have become interchangeable in a movement whose targets keep turning out to be Jewish. They say Israel, then go after a Hillel director. They say Zionist, then attack people walking for the release of hostages. Jewish schools and synagogues are left counting bullet holes while Jews are lectured about the difference between opposing Israel and hating us. I would have more patience for that lecture if the people choosing the targets bothered to make the distinction.
The Hitler comparisons serve the same purpose. Convince someone that he is confronting another Hitler and he can convince himself that killing that person is a moral obligation, that failing to act makes him responsible for the victims who follow. The accusation does not have to be true. The person holding the gun only has to believe it, and he gets to imagine himself a hero while committing murder.
We have already seen an Israeli prime minister killed by a man who believed he was protecting Jews. Before Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, his opponents displayed posters of him in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu addressed the October 1995 demonstration in Jerusalem’s Zion Square while those images circulated below his balcony. On November 4, Yigal Amir murdered Rabin, later invoking din rodef to justify killing a man whose policies he believed endangered Jewish lives. Amir supplied himself with a moral justification, and Rabin paid for it with his life.
Netanyahu has since been put in the same uniform. Protesters opposing his 2017 visit to Argentina displayed him as an SS officer, while demonstrators in Sydney carried imagery of him with a Hitler moustache and giving a Nazi salute. Apparently, dressing an Israeli prime minister as a Nazi remains acceptable to people who consider themselves morally superior, despite what happened to the last prime minister subjected to that campaign.
On May 21, 2025, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were shot dead outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. Prosecutors say the accused gunman, Elias Rodriguez, fired approximately 20 shots, declared that he had acted for Palestine and Gaza, and shouted about “Zio-nazi terror” as police removed him. He had allegedly just killed two people outside a Jewish museum and was invoking Nazis. That was his accusation against the people around him, after the shooting.
Less than two weeks later, people walking in Boulder, Colorado, to call attention to the Israeli hostages were attacked with incendiary devices. According to the federal complaint, Mohamed Sabry Soliman threw Molotov cocktails into the group while shouting “Free Palestine,” then told investigators that he wanted to kill all Zionist people. He allegedly spent a year preparing to attack people who wanted hostages released. Their concern for kidnapped people was enough to make them his enemies.
Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue was set ablaze in December 2024 in an attack authorities investigated as terrorism. Two Jewish worshippers died during the October 2025 attack at Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue, one stabbed by the attacker and the other struck by police gunfire during the response. This past weekend, British prosecutors told a court that two men charged with preparing another terrorist attack had identified that same synagogue and the Manchester Jewish Museum as targets. The congregation had barely marked the anniversary before learning of another alleged plot.
In Montreal, gunfire struck Yeshiva Gedola and Talmud Torah in November 2023, and Yeshiva Gedola was targeted again days later. Parents had to decide whether it was safe to send their children back to school.
The thing is that Jewish schools do not all teach Zionism, and some religious Jewish communities actively oppose it. That diversity disappears when an entire community is blamed for Israel. A Jewish name on a building becomes sufficient, and the children inside inherit responsibility for a war they have no part in. Demanding that they establish their political innocence before acknowledging what is being done to them is obscene.
On September 20, a gunman attacked outside the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville as Jews gathered for Yom Kippur. Police say he shouted “you’re going to die for the Jews” before shooting Const. Jeff Smith, who continued fighting despite multiple gunshot wounds. A second officer joined him, and they prevented what police described as a planned mass killing. The attacker had multiple firearms, ammunition and gasoline. Less than two weeks later, anti-Jewish flyers were distributed at the synagogue and throughout the surrounding neighbourhood. Even after that attack, somebody decided this small congregation needed another dose of hatred.
In Belleville, the congregation’s safety depended on a wounded officer who kept fighting. I expect university administrators and political leaders to show a fraction of that resolve when Jewish people are threatened and intimidated, instead of leaving the entire burden to the officer outside the door. A group that praises a massacre has told us something about itself, and a poster declaring a named Jew an enemy deserves attention before someone acts on it.
Jews do not owe anyone an explanation of their politics before they are entitled to protection. Our children do not need to denounce Israel to attend school safely and our community institutions should not have to defend their existence every time someone announces another campaign against Zionism.
The people entrusted with our safety need to do their jobs while we are still alive to benefit from it. They can spare us the speeches afterward.
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