FIRST READING: Canadian anti-Israel protests reaching new thresholds of extremism

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While the Canadian anti-Israel movement has always had extremist rhetoric at its core, the last few weeks have witnessed a notable escalation in tactics, with demonstrators now attacking police, openly waving the flags of listed terror organizations and even calling for the destruction of Canada itself.

On Monday, Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante slammed the “unacceptable” behaviour of a Sunday anti-Israel protest in which participants broke windows and threw makeshift firebombs at police.

A group of around 60 protesters moved through the Montreal core on Sunday night, breaking windows, setting off fireworks and spray-painting graffiti that appears to spell the word “complicit.”

“When officers were chasing some protesters, two Molotov cocktails were thrown in the direction of police. They didn’t hit them,” police spokesperson Jean-Pierre Brabant told The Montreal Gazette.

A videographer with the anarchist group Clash MTL uploaded footage of the crowd, dressed all in black and carrying a banner reading “L’espoir c’est la lute” (Hope is struggle). “A demo for Palestine attacked Concordia University Sunday evening. Many windows of luxury stores on Sainte-Catherine street were also broken. The police were kept at a distance with the help of molotov cocktails,” read a Clash MTL caption.

In Downtown Toronto on Saturday, a demonstration featured multiple participants carrying the flag of the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, which Canada officially lists as a terror entity.

That protest was carried live on Press TV, the English-language state media outlet of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Correspondent Firas Al-Najim stood in front of a masked man waving a Hezbollah flag in the middle of a Toronto street and said that Hezbollah is considered a terrorist group only because of the “Zionist lobby’s” influence in Canada.

“We’re here to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance,” he said, adding “we’re not going to be quiet anymore.”

Throughout the broadcast, bicycle-mounted Toronto Police can be seen moving amid the Hezbollah flags. At one point, Al-Najim even gestures to an officer, saying, “we’re cooperating with the police.”

Photographer Yasmine El-Sabawi publicized photos of demonstrators at the Toronto protest clad in masks and carrying portraits of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed on Friday by an Israeli air strike. In one of El-Sabawi’s images, a woman can be seen wearing a green headband similar to the type typically associated with Hamas.

“Long live legal armed resistance to occupation” read a large banner carried at the demonstration. The banner included an inverted red triangle; a symbol glorifying violence against Israel. Its use has been popularized in videos released by Hamas’ military wing, in which the triangle is used to mark Israeli targets.

Nasrallah’s death was widely mourned by many of the central players in the Canadian anti-Israel cause, including by Samidoun, a Vancouver-based non-profit with direct ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an active Gazan terrorist group.

“We express our deepest mourning & our highest salutes to the great leader, the martyr, inspiration of so many around the world, symbol & strategist of resistance, tireless anti-imperialist, anti-colonial liberator, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah,” read an official statement by Samidoun.

Samidoun co-founder Khaled Barakat has been recorded in livestreams referring to members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as “friends and brothers.”

Although he has been a frequent participant in Vancouver anti-Israel rallies (one of which featured him declaring “long live October 7”) Barakat is currently in Lebanon. In a recent press release from Beirut, Barakat praised the “heroic resistance” of Hezbollah and claimed “the resistance will be victorious.”

The Ahlul Bayt Mosque in Windsor, Ont. also advertised a Sunday event to “commemorate the martyrdom” of “The Great Martyr Sayed Hassan Nasrallah.” Although, as of Tuesday, the Instagram link promoting the event is no longer active.

The day before the Toronto pro-Hezbollah demonstration, roads around a Jewish neighbourhood in Ottawa were blockaded by keffiyeh-wearing crowds setting off smoke bombs and issuing Arabic chants for Israel’s destruction.

Conservative Deputy Leader Melissa Lantsman highlighted the gathering in an X.com post, writing “this is outside a Jewish seniors home in Ottawa. Not a consulate or an embassy. Not a government building. Not a politician’s office. A Jewish seniors home.”

The ostensible reason for the demonstration was that a nearby Jewish community centre had been holding a presentation for Sar-El,  an organization that recruits volunteers to work logistical roles with the Israel Defense Forces. Sar-El’s Canadian branch is a registered non-profit.

Nevertheless, anti-Israel organizers falsely claimed the event was “illegal” and marshalled several hundred demonstrators to completely block access to the surrounding Jewish neighbourhood, which did indeed include a seniors centre.

The Ottawa blockade came just one day after a Parliament Hill protest in which anti-Israel demonstrators called for Canada’s destruction. Video captured from a protest livestream and uploaded to X.com by a user going by the name “Leviathan” shows a masked demonstrator leading the crowd in a chant calling for Canada’s end.

“We will continue fighting until the Zionist entity crumbles along with its accomplice the United States and this country crumbles to the ground, we will win,” he says, prompting an extended chant of “we will win” from the crowd.

Next week, there are events planned across Canada to celebrate the October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel, in which Hamas gunmen murdered more than 1,200 Israeli civilians.

This includes a Samidoun-organized event outside the Vancouver Art Gallery entitled “Al-Aqsa Flood” — the official name of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre.

A Toronto event has been billed as “One Year of Genocide. One Year of Resistance.” As per an official Instagram promotion, “this October marks one year since our people in Gaza showed the world that the Palestinian people will continue to resist their continued displacement and dispossession by their colonizer.”

New polling shows that Canadians don’t actually like being referred to as “settlers” or “colonists.” A Leger poll commissioned by the Association for Canadian Studies found that 47 per cent of respondents disagreed with the term “settler” as a descriptor for a non-Indigenous Canadian, with another 30 per cent saying they weren’t familiar with the term. Although the term is rarely used in any kind of conventional discourse, it’s extremely common in academia. For instance, just this year the federally administered Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council handed out $283,783 to a Simon Fraser University project entitled “Decolonizing Settlers’ Stories of Climate Change: Changing Our Relations to Indigenous Nations and Territories in a Time of Crisis.”

Canadians also don’t like the government banning gas-powered cars. Another Leger poll (this one commissioned by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation) found that 59 per cent of respondents disagreed with a federal plan to ban gas and diesel-powered cars by 2035.

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