On September 11, The Sarnia Observer and Strathroy Dispatch published a letter by Yasmeen Ibrahim, who inappropriately invoked the memory of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York as a rallying cry for Gaza. In reality, while Americans mourned that day, many in Gaza and the “West Bank” celebrated the tragedy by handing out candy.
HRC’s Director of Education, Amanda Eskenasi, was given the opportunity to respond and emphasized that Hamas launched the current war on October 7, 2023, through a brutal terror attack against Israeli civilians—an assault which by scale is tragically reminiscent of 9/11. To recast that day as a symbol of Palestinian victimhood is profoundly disrespectful to the actual victims of both tragedies.
Read the letter in full below or by clicking here.
Let’s start by remembering the truth
Trying to hijack the memory of 9/11 to turn it into a rallying cry for Gaza, as Yasmeen Ibrahim attempted in his letter to the editor Remembering 9/11 means speaking up for Gaza, is both deeply inappropriate and historically tone-deaf.
On Sept. 11, 2001, while Americans and Canadians reeled in horror, there were Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who were filmed celebrating in the streets, handing out candy, and praising the mass murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people. That is not speculation; it was reported at the time by outlets from the Associated Press to the New York Times, and those videos continue to circulate online today. For those communities, 9/11 was not a tragedy to mourn, it was a “victory” to cheer.
To now use that same atrocity as a prop for Palestinian victimhood is profoundly disrespectful to the actual victims of 9/11 and their families. It also distorts the facts. Israel did not start this war, Hamas did, on Oct. 7, 2023, with an act of terror that deliberately targeted civilians in their homes, at a music festival, and on the streets. Israel, like the United States after 9/11, has the right and the obligation to defend its people from further attacks.
Yes, we should mourn every innocent life lost. But compassion requires honesty. Equating the families of 9/11 victims with those who celebrated that day — or with the terrorist groups who still glorify mass murder — is not compassion, it’s propaganda. If we truly want to “stand together with compassion, and work toward a world where peace triumphs violence,” then we should start by condemning terrorism wherever it occurs, not rewriting history to suit a political agenda.
Amanda Eskenasi is Director of Education at HonestReporting Canada, a non-profit organization monitoring Canadian media coverage of Israel.
