Rats, feces, drugs and used needles.

That’s the proud legacy of the “pro-Palestinian” youngsters who occupied the main entrance to McGill University for the past months.

Said McGill: “The encampment [was] the site of profound health and safety risks that continued to grow in scope and severity…due to the presence of human waste, a rat infestation, discarded syringes, a large amount of rotting food and garbage, and other potentially dangerous and unsanitary conditions within the site, it was necessary to use heavy machinery to remove parts of the camp for the safety of all involved…For the same reasons, it will be necessary to excavate and replace a layer of contaminated soil on the site.”

That’s not all, of course. The McGill tenti-fada was characterized by drug overdoses, vandalism, mini-riots, assaults, and regular attacks on Jewish students. When this writer was there, just a few days ago, signs were up telling Jews (“Zionists”) to stay away. It was an ongoing, malodorous, fetid hate fest.

And that’s truly how bad it became: the university has had to excavate it, to remove contaminated soil.

Contaminated, too, is a word that can be applied to what happened at the University of Windsor, albeit in a different context. There, the illegal occupation hadn’t gone on as long as McGill’s. As law student Sydney Greenspoon wrote in the Times of Israel, the University of Windsor is now “an unsafe place” for Jews. Greenspoon wrote that she has been targeted with antisemitic comments by students and professors – including Holocaust denial.

Wrote Greenspoon: “It is a campus that fosters hate and allows antisemitism to flourish, forcing the few Jewish students to hide any sign of our Jewish identity, in fear for our physical and psychological safety.”

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Eylon Levy eats a slice of watermelon.  

Watermelon is green, white, black and red, like the colours of Palestinian flag.  Online, a slice of watermelon has become an unofficial symbol of Palestinian defiance – and, often, online support for Hamas and Hezbollah.  Improbably, it has become a visual representation of the post-October 7 war – what Levy calls “the information war.”

After October 7, Levy became one of the best-known spokesmen for Jews and Israel, around the planet.  He was everywhere, fighting in the information war: CNN, Fox News, Sky News, BBC, CBC and many more.  And, as he thinks about his answer to the question, he is here, eating some watermelon.  Before he can be asked whether it is a symbolic attempt to recapture a symbol that has been used to promote extremism or terror – or simply if he likes watermelon – Eylon Levy answers the question.

The question is this: what do they want? 

What do the invisible forces behind a well-funded, well-organized, propaganda war against Jews, the Jewish state and the West want, in the end? What is their strategic goal? What are the policies they hope to impose, when and if they win the propaganda war?

Levy gives his answer.  It is a long one, but it sounds like Levy knows every word of it to be true. 

“There is an attempt by Israel’s enemies to weaponize and militarize misinformation against Israel. Because Hamas’ is goal is not only to kill Israelis, and shatter national morale, it’s to poison global public opinion against Israel. It’s to create tension and friction between Israel and its allies. It’s to make good, ordinary, decent people turn against Israel by convincing them that Israel is evil incarnate. That is the meaning of the campaign to charge Israel with genocide, extermination, starvation, and being a white supremacist, colonial, apartheid, fascist state.  And to throw every nasty word in the dictionary at it.”

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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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Dear Democrats: call Doug Ford.

Doug, in case you are unfamiliar with him, is the Premier of Canada’s most populous province, Ontario. He’s a populist in the true sense of the word, too: he believes politics is for, by and about people. He believes that, to be a successful politician, you have to love people and you have to love the place you represent.

And he does. He does. Ford has a folksy, regular-guy persona that is entirely authentic. He obliterated his main opponent in his first general election at the provincial level, and he mostly has not looked back. Through the pandemic, through what has felt like a recession, through controversies, Ford has maintained his popularity and a very significant lead over all of his political opponents.

He became leader of his party during very unusual circumstances. And this is where you need to be paying attention, Democrats.

The job he now has, as Progressive Conservative leader, abruptly became available in January 2018. Despite having never run for anything outside of the municipal level, Ford threw his hat in the ring.

Just 156 days later, he was Premier – the equivalent of your Governors – of the most powerful province in Canada, and head of one of the most significant governments in North America. From no job to the top job in 156 days. Not bad.

This is why you need to call Doug, Democrats. As you ponder whether you have enough time – time to secure Joe Biden’s pledge to resign, time to have an open convention in Chicago, time to select a new presidential candidate, and time to win on the evening of November 5, 2024 – rest assured. The answer is yes. You do. You’ve got time. It’s possible. It’s doable.

But, you say, there hasn’t been a presidential candidate selected in this way – that is, without having been through months of primaries – since 1968. True: in that year, Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic Party presidential nomination without having gone through the primaries. That was the last time that happened. Doing things the same old way is important, you say.

But is it? You live in extraordinary times, Democrats. There ain’t a playbook for this. Joe Biden – who I have proudly worked for, and who I have great affection for – is going to lose, badly, to Donald Trump. As of this morning, the gap is six points nationally, which amounts to a massacre up and down the ticket. The gap among independent voters is even worse.

So, Joe has to go. You know it.

If you have an open convention, it will be the most exciting political event of a lifetime. It will attract more attention than the moon landing. It will generate a ton of publicity for your party and your policies and your people. It is the thing that Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans fear the most.

It will be messy, sure. But democracy always is. And nothing could be messier than your current predicament, from which you need to quickly extricate yourself.

Consider: at first, you suggested that Joe Biden’s debate performance was fine and people should stop complaining. When that didn’t work, you said that he was tired because of international travel – travel that had taken place nearly two weeks earlier.

When that didn’t work, you suggested that he had a cold, which was apparently serious enough to affect his debate performance – but not so serious that you’ve actually had him see a doctor since the debate.

Now, today, your latest excuse is that if Joe Biden goes to bed early, and doesn’t do anything past 8 o’clock in the evening, it will all be fine. Gotcha. (Memo to Vladimir Putin: make sure to fire your nuclear warheads after 8 PM – because the leader of the free world will be asleep.)

See? None of your attempts to spin Biden’s cataclysmic debate performance are working. And Donald Trump is getting stronger by the day. There is no time to waste. No dilly should be dallied. No sticks should be fiddled. You need to do these things, pronto.

One, secure Joe Biden’s agreement to relinquish the presidency when a new one is sworn in, come January next year. Get him to agree to release all of his delegates at the Chicago convention. Three, finally, call Doug Ford, who knows how to pull one of these things off. He knows how to win, and win big, in a very compressed timeframe.

It can be done, Democrats. It has been done.

Pick up the phone, and call Doug Ford. You’ll be glad you did.

Sincerely,

Warren

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