Katherine Grzejszczak is, or more accurately was, employed by York Region Paramedic Services who in 2024 earned just under $112,000 as an advanced care paramedic.

Her employment was reportedly terminated in June after a Facebook (Meta) post came to light where she attacked Israel, saying the country was “occupying Palestine for 75+ years,” (a denial of Israel’s right to exist) and that it was “luring starving Palestinian children to their concentration camp food aid depots so they can snipe them dead.” She further accused Israel of a supposed “genocide.”

Grzejszczak is no stranger to anti-Israel activism. In 2024, she came under fire for wearing a keffiyeh, a political symbol of opposition to Israel while chairing a meeting for her local Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) chapter, but when someone on the Zoom meeting raised this point, they were muted by Grzejszczak.

Once Grzejszczak’s employment was terminated, she was defended by a number of radical anti-Israel extremists, including CUPE Ontario leader Fred Hahn, who has shared overtly anti-Jewish content on social media.

In covering the story of Grzejszczak’s firing and the ensuing complaints by her defenders, The Canadian Press’ (CP) Sharif Hassan wrote an article on June 30 entitled: “Ontario paramedic shouldn’t have been fired over Israel comments: union, law experts,” where Hassan quoted supporters of Grzejszczak and failed to interview even a single person who condemned Grzejszczak’s words.

The article quoted James Turk from The Centre for Free Expression and Fred Hahn, as well as a spokesperson for Grzejszczak’s former employer, but nobody who could have spoken to the hateful nature of Grzejszczak’s words, nor did Sharif offer background as to the odious nature of her social media post.

By accusing Israel of “occupying Palestine for 75+ years,” Grzejszczak was not commenting on “a political matter,” as Turk falsely described it in the CP article. She was denying Israel’s very right to exist as a Jewish nation-state, which falls under the rubric of anti-Jewish hate according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, of which Canada is a signatory.

That was not the only ghoulish statement made by Grzejszczak in her social media post. By claiming that Israel was “luring starving Palestinian children to their concentration camp,” she was making a not-so-veiled comparison to the incarceration of Jews in Nazi death and concentration camps during the Holocaust.

Not only is this comparison wholly without merit or factual basis, it is a monstrous assault on the memory of six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, and is an attempt by Grzejszczak to portray Israel, the Jewish State, as a modern-day descendant of Nazi Germany. This too, according to the IHRA definition, is an example of anti-Jewish hate speech.

Thus, twice in a single social media post did former paramedic Katherine Grzejszczak share content that could be reasonably construed as anti-Jewish hate, yet not once did Sharif Hassan of The Canadian Post give any voice to a representative of a Jewish organization who could condemn her words or even give context to them so readers could understand that they were not “political,” but an attempt to delegitimize the right of Jews to self-determination in their historic and ancestral homeland.