The tents are gone. The stench isn’t.
On Wednesday morning, suburban Moms and Dads – some wearing kefiyyehs like they saw Madonna wear one time – pulled their shiny $80,000 SUVs up to the curb at the University of Toronto to collect Junior and wheel them back to multi-million-dollar white neighborhoods with nice views of the lake. The months-long illegal occupation of U of T was over.
The illegal occupation was over because it was, in fact, illegal. My former law partner,
Justice Marcus Koehnen, made all of the usual sounds about freedom of speech and the Charter of Rights in his 98-page Ontario Superior Court ruling in support of the injunction sought by the university.
But in the end, Koehnen merely told us what we already know: private property is, you know, private. And if the University of Toronto wanted the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas kidlets off their private property? So be it. Done.
So the Gen Z Gaza gang chose discretion over valor. They fled. But behind them they left little hints of how truly awful they all are.
Last week, before Koehnen gave the Infant-fada the hook, this writer took a stroll around the perimeter of the U of T “encampment,” a documentary camera crew in tow. Everywhere we looked, there were signs and symbols saying things that seemed benign – but weren’t. Here’s a summary.
The inverted red triangle. Some of the aspiring Gazans may believe the triangle has something to do with the Palestinian flag or a wedge of watermelon. But it doesn’t. Online, the inverted red triangle indicates support for Hamas, full stop.
Elsewhere, meanwhile, the red triangle means this: “we will kill you.”
After the atrocities of October 7, the red triangle started to show up in glossy Hamas propaganda videos, superimposed on footage of Israeli soldiers or citizens. There, the inverted red triangle means “this is a target.” It was, by far, the most-seen symbol at the U of T illegal occupation.
When a can of red spray paint wasn’t handy, the U of T pro-Hamas kids – always masked – would touch the tips of their thumbs together and then touch the tips of their index fingers, pointed downward. They’d they’d wiggle that at passerby. Why?
It again means: you are a target, we want you dead. The Hamas glee club were doing that, still, hours before the police were ready to move in. The police saw it and did nothing.
Intifada. You would see this word on a lot on signs, professionally rendered or otherwise, at U of T. It’s an Arabic word, roughly meaning shaking off or sort-of rebellion. For Jews, however, it has a very specific meaning.
The second Palestinian Intifada, 20 years ago, was notable for stabbing, shootings, car bombs and the murder of more than 1,000 Jews. The second Intifada is also remembered for the kidnapping, torture, lynching, disemboweling and murder of two Israeli reservists who made a wrong turn and entered the West Bank.
On that occasion, one of their murderers – after calling one of the reservists’ wives on his cell phone, to say: “we are slaughtering your husband” – leaned out a police station window with his hands covered in blood (more on that shortly). The crowd below erupted in cheers, and then the Israelis’ bodies were flung onto the street for further desecration. An Italian camera crew captured it all on film.
So, that’s what “intifada” means to the intended victims, which are Jews. The U of T tenti-fada may claim not to know that, because they are the first university students in history who have never tried out this thing called “Google.” But Jews, as always the main targets, know the truth.
The red hand. The red hand symbol wasn’t as widespread at the illegal U of T occupation, but it could be seen in quite a few places. As noted above, the red hand originated on the dark day in October 2000 when two Israeli reservists were slaughtered.
The red hand has shown up in other contexts – in Ireland’s troubled North, or to represent missing and murdered Indigenous women – but, at of T, it didn’t refer to any of those things. Obviously. There, it was a celebration of murder.
SJP: This one was harder to find, but it revealed itself on some signs and banners at U of T over the past months. It refers to Students for Justice in Palestine.
SJP has been around for two decades, and were founded in Berkeley (of course they were). They have hundreds of chapters on campuses across Canada, the United States and elsewhere.
According to a lawsuit just filed against SJP and others in Virginia by survivors of Hamas’ October 7 Nova music festival butchery, SJP is the public relations arm of Hamas in North America. SJP explicitly and unashamedly support a murderous cult of Islamic madmen. And they were extremely active at U of T, supplying rhetorical and material support for weeks.
Which should be illegal in Canada. But isn’t.
There were other words and images seen over the many weeks that U of T was illegally occupied by spoiled children who despise Jews and civilization. A popular one wasn’t obscure at all – “genocide.”
Genocide is a bit rich, of course, because the population growth of Palestinians has for years exceeded that of Israelis by about 35 per cent. And because even the UN, which hates Israel almost as much as Hamas, has started to back away from claiming that a genocide is underway in Gaza. If that’s “genocide,” in other words, it’s a pretty ineffective genocide.
And so on and so on. If you ever took a stroll past the U of T encampment – which was the equivalent of a city block, surrounded by reality – you would’ve seen some of those words and symbols. And now you know what they mean.
The occupants of the illegal occupation knew what they meant, too. So does the people they hate the most. The ones they want to wipe off the face of the Earth.
The Jews.
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