The campaign to smear pro-Palestine protests

 

In mid-February 2024, one story dominated the Canadian news cycle: pro-Palestine protesters in Toronto supposedly targeting a Jewish hospital, Mount Sinai. Outlets played footage of a man in a Spider-Man costume scaling scaffolding above the hospital’s emergency entrance. A reporter spoke of “masked protesters, many of them calling for intifada,” who “jumped on the hospital” and “many other incidents of antisemitism.” (Intifada is an Arabic word for an uprising to end oppression.) An emergency physician, Raghu Venugopal, told CBC that protesters had “roughed up” security guards and forced their way into the hospital.

Politicians across the electoral spectrum and at all levels of government raced to denounce the protest. New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh stated in no uncertain terms that “the Mount Sinai Hospital was targeted because of its ties to the Jewish community in Toronto.” Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau called the demonstration “reprehensible,” “strongly condemn[ing] this display of antisemitism” and saying that Canada “stand[s] with Jewish communities against this hate.” Toronto’s much-lauded progressive mayor, Olivia Chow, said that “[t]argeting Jewish institutions is antisemitic and hate has no place in our city.”

Bonnie Crombie, leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, gave the most dramatic account, saying she was “torn up by the accounts of protestors infiltrating Mount Sinai Hospital, intimidating Jewish patients and doctors, and threatening our already weakened healthcare system.” She “condemn[ed] these indefensible acts and urge[d] governments to deploy the resources necessary to ensure our communities can be safe and welcoming to Jews and all people who call Ontario home.” The Toronto Academic Health Science Network (TAHSN), which represents Mount Sinai Hospital and 14 other health care institutions, “unequivocally denounce[d] this display of antisemitism and all forms of racism” and assured staff that the network was “continuing to work alongside local law enforcement.” Deborah Lyons, the special envoy for preserving Holocaust remembrance and combatting antisemitism, announced that she would “be calling Toronto’s Mayor and Chief of Police […] to discuss how they will put a stop to this despicable targeting and attempted intimidation of […] Jews across Toronto and Canada.” 

But no protest of Mount Sinai Hospital ever took place. Rather, Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and Toronto4Palestine (T4P) had called an emergency “Hands off Rafah!” action that day to demand that Israel stop an incursion that had already killed over 70 people. The march’s route followed that of many other Toronto protests, passing by a row of hospitals only incidentally. Yet removed from that context, a 21-second clip of protesters marching past Mount Sinai Hospital from that nearly four-hour protest was spun into a national news story about a movement to “destabiliz[e] the safety and security of Jewish people living in Ontario.”

The gulf between what happened at the “Hands off Rafah!” demonstration and its representation in the public sphere is far from a one-off incident. Since October 2023, media and politicians have portrayed pro-Palestine protests as “violent” “roving mobs,” “openly cheering for terrorism in Canada.” By characterizing anti-Zionism as “hateful” and conflating the state of Israel with Jewish identity, the press has shifted the narrative from the genocide of Palestinians to a growing crisis of “[a]nti-Israel hate marches holding [Canadians] hostage.”  (more...)

The campaign to smear pro-Palestine protests