University of Toronto
University of TorontoiStock

B’nai Brith Canada on Wednesday called out the University of Toronto for using the image of a Palestinian Arab terrorist to promote an upcoming event.

The event, scheduled for Thursday afternoon, is entitled “Liberated Students in a Colonized Campus: Reflections on the Palestinian Experience at the University of Toronto.” It is being advertised as the first in a series of similar events co-hosted by those departments.

To advertise the event, the University has been using a custom image, showing a person holding a sign that reads, “HEARING PALESTINE,” surrounded by a number of figures.

One of the figures is clearly Ghassan Kanafani, a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a designated terrorist entity in Canada. Kanafani forged connections between the PFLP and other terrorist groups, including the Japanese Red Army, facilitating the 1972 Lod Airport Massacre in which the two groups murdered 26 civilians, including a Canadian Jewish woman.

“The university of Toronto has an anti-Semitism problem,” said Michael Mostyn, Chief Executive Officer of B’nai Brith Canada. “It is morally grotesque that the University is advertising an event using the sympathetic portrayal of a terrorist whose group has been responsible for so many murders, airplane hijackings and suicide bombings targeting innocent civilians.

“We call on the university to cancel the event, issue a public apology, and launch an investigation into how this happened in the first place,” he added.

In 2019, following a campaign by B’nai Brith Canada, a Toronto church cancelled a scheduled event that would have honored Kanafani.

In 2017, B’nai Brith Canada called on the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT) to remove a teacher from a classroom because of her continued support for two Middle Eastern terrorists, one of them being Kanafani.