In the immediate aftermath of the December 14 terrorist attack against Jews in Sydney, Australia by a father-and-son pair of Islamic terrorists, Toronto City Council approved a motion calling on all three levels of government to create a task force to address anti-Jewish hate crimes.

However, when The Toronto Star reported on the story, it created a false equivalence between those seeking to tackle antisemitism, and those being accused of being the purveyors of this pernicious hate.

The December 17 article, “Toronto city councillors call for antisemitism task force after Bondi Beach massacre,” by City Hall Bureau Chief Ben Spurr, no sooner told readers about the call for the task force than he rushed to add that “pro-Palestinian advocates warned the proposal could end up stifling legitimate protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza.”

While in theory such a story could merit offering two sides, in reality it effectively sanitized the extremist actions of anti-Israel demonstrators.

The article noted that one councillor pointed out that phrases such as “from the river to the sea” and “worldwide intifada” are examples of harassing language, but Spurr said that “the meaning of such chants is hotly contested” by anti-Israel activists, saying that they “view them as calls for resistance to Israel’s occupation of Palestine that needn’t connote violence.”

Regardless of the fact that such activists dispute this definition, there can be little doubt as to their true meaning. The very term “river to sea” connotes Israel in its entirety, erasing it completely. As for “intifada,” it is quite literally the term used by Palestinians to describe their reign of terrorism from 2000 to 2005, which resulted in the deaths of some one thousand Israelis.

Just as a neo-Nazi might argue that “mein kampf” simply means “my struggle,” to pretend that it is not inexorably tied with a hateful ideology is simply false.

The article quotes Omar Abdullah, a member of the group ‘GTA 4 Palestine,’ which has organized protests in a residential, and heavily Jewish, area of north Toronto, for more than a year, and Spurr recorded that “Abdullah said protesters haven’t harassed residents.”

While Spurr evidently decided to simply repeat Abdullah’s claims at face value, even a cursory look would show the complete falsehood of such defences.

Copious evidence shows anti-Israel demonstrators who invaded the neighbourhood have told local residents to “go to hell,” sang a song in Arabic that allegedly openly called for violence against Jews, dangerously swarmed a car while it was the middle of an intersection, they have been seen roaming local residential streets, directly in front of a synagogue, with no ostensible purpose other than to exert a show of dominance, and harassed local residents. Early in their arrival, the protesters appeared to have one of their demonstrators dress up as deceased Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

In a previous protest, perpetual demonstrator Naved Awan had referred to a nearby neighbourhood as a “Zionist infested area,” clear evidence that it was being targeted for its demographics, and the Instagram page for the weekly protest in North York says that it is a counter-protest for the “Jewish-Zionist” rally (image)  which ended more than two months ago.

Yet for no apparent reason, Spurr ignored this compendium of evidence, extensively documented, and instead simply repeated claims of innocence from a protester spokesperson, without bothering to offer a fulsome report to readers.

Following the Sydney attacks, the Australian state of New South Wales is planning to ban calls for “intifada,” a clear promotion of terrorism, but rather than give readers an unvarnished picture of the nature of such anti-Israel demonstrators, The Toronto Star instead sanitized their hateful activities.