MPs in a unanimous 237 to 0 vote Wednesday endorsed a Justice Committee suggestion to take immediate steps in protecting faith communities, per Blacklock’s Reporter. The move comes in the wake of antisemetic encampments causing chaos on university campuses across Canada, including McGill, University of Toronto, and University of Victoria. “Without freedom of religion, without freedom of movement, without the freedom of speech, there actually is no freedom in this country,” Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman earlier told the justice committee. The justice report recommended cabinet “create an Anti-Hate Crime Task Force to coordinate the protection of faith communities” and blacklist the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity under the Criminal Code. Further, the federal government should “expel the estimated 700 Iranian agents operating in Canada.”Liberal MP Anthony Housefather, former Justice Committee chair, told the Commons Wednesday the October 7 Hamas terror attack killing and kidnapping Jews in Israel shed public expression of antsemitism in Canada. “Since October 7th we have seen a wave of antisemitism sweep across the Western world including here in Canada,” said Housefather. “There is no place that right now is more difficult to be a Jewish Canadian than at university campuses.”Jewish university students have been the target of numerous anti-Jewish incidents. Anastasia Zorchinsky, a Concordia University student, said Jews were called “dogs and terrorists” and harassed by masked men who told them to “go back to Europe.”The day after the October 7 attacks “the Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights Concordia student club funded by our tuition fees posted on Instagram, and I quote, ‘Last night the resistance led a hero attack against the occupation and has taken more than 30 hostages,’” said Zorchinsky.“We have to walk the same halls and sit in the same classrooms as people who praise terrorism.”Nati Pressman, a history student at Queen’s University, said campus life was frightening. “We are seeing the rise of encampments on our campuses where students chant, ‘intifada, intifada,’ a term referring to the series of terrorist attacks that killed nearly 1,400 Israelis,” she said.“My friends who used to wear kippot on campus instead now wear baseball caps. This is not because we are any less proud to be Jewish. It is because our universities have fostered and created an environment where being openly Jewish could be a threat.”Sydney Greenspon, a University of Windsor law student, said the school “allows anti-Semitism to flourish” openly.“I have personally heard ‘death to the Jews’ chanted in Arabic,” she said.“Windsor’s Palestinian Solidarity Group held their first of many rallies on October 10th, a celebratory event to mobilize for the ‘day of resistance’ with posters depicting the very same Hamas paragliders involved in the massacre of over 1,200 innocent Israelis,” said Greenspon. “Rallies such as these that glorify violence and so-called ‘die ins’ held on campus became a normal occurrence.”“Many law professors intentionally depart from the curriculum to demonize the only Jewish state and agitate with false, radical and outlandish anti-Semitic rhetoric. At an on-campus event one professor was met with applause from students after boasting about telling a Jewish student he hoped she would not return to his class.”
