Al Quds Day in Toronto: A Celebration of Jew-Hatred
Where governments and law enforcement pretend it's a "peaceful" gathering
On Friday at 6 am, I flew from Israel to Toronto for a busy swing through points in Canada and the U.S. As always, it’s a mix of personal and business and every climate possible. Beginning, of course, with the frigid spell that just settled on Toronto when I arrived. All good. I came prepared.
But scarves and coats and mittens are one thing. Seeing the transformation of my hometown—where I lived until 2014—has been somewhat surreal. And it is all anyone talks about. Jews and non-Jews.
Since October 7, this city of approximately 3-million—with 6.5-million in the urban sprawl that is known as the Greater Toronto Area—has become an Islamist haven. Columbia University may monopolize the headlines, but the reality of life in Toronto is at least as disturbing as what goes down on that illustrious campus.
The culture of DEI, which finds oppression and nefariousness where there is none, flourishes in Toronto and Canada. Every level of government in every province (except for Alberta) is saturated with social justice warriors. I know how much they love to throw around the phrase “intersectionality.” And they also like to hurl the vilest epithets and slurs at Jews. Oops. I mean, Zionists. (It’s just Israel they have a problem with. Some of their best friends are Jews. Heck, even many of them self-identify as Jews.)
Islamism is everywhere. School boards. Corporate institutions. Government bureaucracies. Police forces—in particular, Toronto and Montreal. Health care institutions. Universities. This isn’t haphazard. It is and has been a massively successful operation, planned and executed with significant foreign funding, stealth, and unwavering focus.
Canada is home to the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, after Israel, the United States, and France. Most of the 375,000 Jews in the country reside in the Toronto area. Most Canadian Jews are here because of their forefathers and mothers who came in two waves: in the early 20th century and then following WWII. Smaller groups—like Jews fleeing South Africa—arrived in the late 70s and 80s. For the most part the community has become entrenched. In a good way. Moving to the United States has always been a thing—for economic opportunity and better weather. But Canadian Jews tend to stay put. We are much more European than American.
We have also been taught to be grateful for this country that welcomed our families and afforded an opportunity to live safely. No longer.
I believe that if my maternal grandparents—who arrived in the early 1920s from Odessa, which was then part of the USSR—were alive today, they would be shocked. I know that if my father—who survived the Holocaust in Romania and then spent four years in various Displaced Persons camps in Europe before coming to Canada in 1949—was alive today, he would say: “I told you so.”
I am between the two. All that shocks me is how quickly and ferociously things have turned.
When I booked my flight fro Tel Aviv to Toronto, I had no idea that “Al Quds Day” was to be marked today. Sunday, March 23, 2025.
Here is the festive poster advertising the event. Come one. Come all. Bring the kids.
Huge crowds are expected. Islamists have taken control of this city in a way that they have not done anywhere else. Not even in Europe.
Within hours of the October 7 attacks, many celebrations erupted across Canada. Jubilation. Ecstasy. Canada’s apparently large population of Islamist sympathizers did not even try to hide their delight at the massacre. While the slaughter was ongoing, they cheered. Candy was thrown around - a common Muslim custom when celebrating. Like at weddings.
I happened to be in Toronto on October 7, 2023. Along with millions, I was shocked by the virulent antisemitism that overtook our society. Like a switch flipped. And things have not subsided since.
There is so much footage of the Islamist surge in the Toronto area post-October 7, but the video below, recorded by a vocational college student and posted on X, remains one of the most disturbing reels I have seen throughout this unraveling of western society. I expect that when you watch it you will understand why. I will never forget her face.
When it was revealed that she studied at Durham College in the city of Oshawa near Toronto, the institution responded to what must have been a deluge of X inquiries by shutting down the account of the school’s president. Because that’s how we roll in Canada, it seems. I would have thought that something so violent merited an official response advising the public that the state-funded institution had expelled the student and that the video had been referred to the police for investigation. Hate speech. Incitement to hate. There is nothing “complex” about this.
From the outset, police forces in the Toronto area have stood by and watched. Often, they have been filmed and observed chumming around with the Islamists. As these protests intensified over time, nothing changed with the enforcement approach. This violence was normalized. The tone was set at the highest levels of leadership.
Then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau affected his pained but determined persona, telling us, repeatedly, that the protesters were “peaceful” and “exercising their constitutional rights to freedom of expression.”
The problem is that Trudeau was plain wrong. The protests were not and never have been peaceful. They have called for the annihilation of Israel and murder of Jews. They have violently attacked anyone they identify as being on the wrong side of the issue. They have targeted Jewish neighborhoods and institutions. Synagogues. Schools. Shopping plazas. On more than one occasion Jewish individuals who have been standing on the sidewalk have been told by police officers that their mere presence is a provocation to the Islamists. They are told to leave the area.
The Islamists, on the other hand, are emboldened and enabled. Should they choose to block major intersections, roads or transportation hubs, they are protected by police. They have developed a penchant for throwing down prayer mats on cold, icy streets to accommodate pop-up mosques. There are so many laws being broken at these events and others, but the police – particularly in Toronto and Montreal – bend over backwards to accommodate this conduct. There are plenty of mosques where they can pray. But this is not about the freedom to practice religion. This is about demonstrating that they have power. That they dominate. That they call the shots.
And so they are expected to do just that today, on a beautiful, if chilly, Sunday afternoon in downtown Toronto.
Canadians are notoriously passive and have a reputation for being overly polite as well. But that is quickly changing as our society is transformed. For many of us it is no longer recognizable. And that is reinforced by the astonishing manner in which Toronto Police – the fourth largest force in North America – has managed its duty to serve and protect the public.
Canadian Jews have been alarmed for some time. In recent weeks a broader demographic is realizing that this Islamist power trip is not a passing phase. It is becoming a way of life. And they are not amused. There has, of late, been sharper criticism of the manner in which the police have executed – and abdicated – their duties. There is a strong sense that they have lost control of the city.
And this is exactly why they held a press conference on Friday afternoon. It was an embarrassingly ineffective attempt to reassure the public that they understand that there are concerns and that the police are on the ball. Well – have a look yourself and decide. Does this bland, milquetoast “message” convey determination and control? Or a fuzzy sense of nothing?
The police are way over their heads, and they know it. They are actually trying to tell Torontonians that Al Quds Day is a peaceful protest. It is anything but. As I reminded them in my X post on March 21 responding to their press conference, Al Quds was born in hate. It perpetuates and spreads hate. And it is incomprehensible that the police are so shamelessly misrepresenting history and the present.
It was not that long ago—2018, in fact, that Ontario Premier Doug Ford understood this and communicated accordingly. Here is what he posted on X in that year regarding Al Quds:
These days, Premier Ford has gone strangely quiet on the matter.
I have spoken with dozens of people over the last two days, some Jewish, some not. To a person, they plan to avoid the downtown area, which will be occupied by Islamists. There is concern regarding blocked streets, subway cars filled with loud and threatening jihadists and, of course, violence.
Toronto residents have little confidence that the police will protect anyone but the Islamist “demonstrators.” And this is based in what has been a consistent and increasingly disturbing trend. I have covered this issue extensively on my site, in particular in a two-part podcast series on Anti-Semitism in Canada. You can listen here.
Since those podcasts were published, there have been many troubling incidents. But two, in particular, are jaw-dropping. Below is a video clip of a Toronto police officer and his reaction to individuals at the site of an Islamist demonstration. He knows they are Jewish.
Toronto Police can spin this ‘till the cows come home but when people do not feel safe; when they feel that they must stay cocooned in their homes because violent Islamists have asserted control over their city over an 18-month period – bland assurances of being “balanced” and “fair” and “protecting constitutional rights” ring very hollow.
I leave you with a few recent video clips that demonstrate just how out-of-control things have gotten in Toronto and - in one case posted here - Ottawa.
These are just a small sample of incidents that have become a way of life in Canada:
Prayer mats are unfurled in the square outside Toronto City Hall, March 21:
A video excerpt of Episode 2 of a recently launched podcast series by Toronto Police. We have posted below two short clips from the full 45-minute video. In the first one, the officers lament the unfair smearing of all who attend “pro Palestinian” events as being pro-Hamas as being Islamophobic. The disconnect is surreal. They do not speak of the antisemitic violence and speech inciting hatred that characterizes these events. They twist reality to gaslight and turn the crowds participating in the post October 7 protests and violence into the victims.
In the second clip, below, the Muslim officers speak admiringly about the uptick in people “reverting” to Islam since October 7 that they have witnessed in Toronto, as people learn the “truth” about the religion.
As you might imagine, this video caused quite an uproar.
Rather than dealing with the problem, Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw instead chose to cancel the series. The podcast episode was also deleted from the official police site but a local activist downloaded it and posted it to X, for posterity.
To provide a sense of the extent of this condonation of Jew hatred in Canada, here’s a video of an Islamist demonstration last April in Ottawa. Again – take a look. I see and hear pure hatred. Nothing complex in this video:
There is so much more to share but this provides a flavor of what the environment is like for Canadian Jews these days.
Shameful doesn’t begin to capture it.
I will be at the Al Quds event today and plan to film and record the reality of what my city has become. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, I leave you with my column that ran yesterday in the National Post, in which I work hard to distill the extreme volatility in the middle east and within Israel to a few paragraphs.
As always, thanks for being here. I hope you have a more restful Sunday than I am expecting.
We have set out the introductory paragraphs of my National Post column, below. To read the full piece please click on the link that will take you to the paper’s site.
Vivian Bercovici: The Middle East's increasing instability
The volatility, even for this volatile region, is super torqued these days
Where I live in southern Israel, the ground shakes.
This occurs, of course, when the Israel Defence Forces attack targets in the Gaza Strip, which is about 12 kilometres from my home, as the crow flies. Whatever I feel here is magnified immensely in the Strip itself.
As I write this mid-morning on Thursday, the Houthis in Yemen just fired a missile at Israel. Since October 7, the Houthis — an Iranian terrorist group — have attacked dozens of vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, choking a main maritime traffic artery.
As he is wont to do, U.S. President Donald Trump has warned them, repeatedly, to stand down or “hell will rain down.” His ultimatums were ignored, so on March 15, the power of the United States military was unleashed on Yemen. The president has further stated that he holds Iran responsible for all attacks on commercial vessels and American targets.