Organization calls it “morally grotesque” that U of T is hosting an event affiliated with a known Palestinian arch-terrorist.
By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
B’nai Brith Canada is calling out the University of Toronto for using the image of a notorious Palestinian terrorist to promote an upcoming event, noting the ongoing problem with anti-Semitic incidents on the campus of Canada’s largest university.
This week, the U of T Institute of Islamic Studies, Department of History and Center for the Study of the United States are scheduled to co-host an event with the bizarre title: “Liberated Students in a Colonised Campus: Reflections on the Palestinian Experience at the University of Toronto.”
The advertisement for the event includes a picture of a person holding a sign that reads “HEARING PALESTINE,” surrounded by a number of sketched people, one of whom is clearly notorious Palestinian terrorist Ghassan Kanafani, a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
The PFLP is designated by the Canadian government as a terrorist organization, and Kanafani was known for forging connections between the PFLP and other far-left terrorist groups, including the Japanese Red Army, which carried out the 1972 Lod Airport Massacre in which the two groups murdered 26 civilians, one of whom was a Canadian Jewish woman, Lonna Sabah.
In 2019, following a petition campaign by B’nai Brith, a church in downtown Toronto cancelled an event due to take place on its premises that would have honored Kanafani, who was assassinated by the Mossad in Beirut in 1972 for his role in planning the airport massacre.
“The University of Toronto has an anti-Semitism problem,” said B’nai Brith Canada CEO Michael Mostyn. “It is morally grotesque that the University is advertising an event using the sympathetic portrayal of a terrorist whose group has been responsible for so many murders, airplane hijackings and suicide bombings targeting innocent civilians.
“We call on the university to cancel the event, issue a public apology, and launch an investigation into how this happened in the first place.”
Ironically, B’nai Brith pointed out that U of T announced in December the launch of a working group to combat anti-Semitism on campus.
B’nai Brith also called on U of T to implement the recent ruling of the university’s Complaint and Resolution Council for Student Societies (CRCSS), which found that the Graduate Students’ Union has engaged in an ongoing discrimination against Israeli grad students based on their nationality, in violation of its own Anti-Discrimination Policy.