In a world where logic and sensibility prevailed, Prime Minister Mark Carney would reverse his reckless plan to recognize a Palestinian state. But in the Middle East, where moral compasses seem to spin to the side of terror, the expectation that Canada might stand firmly with the righteous is the stuff of daydreams about the good old days.

We thought the MS St. Louis moment when Canada turned its back on Jews fleeing terror was over. Those who believe that lobbying alone can alter the course of our foreign policy ignore the reality: Canada’s international positions are increasingly dictated by shifting national demographics (as they had then by an antisemitic Canada) and by a leader who looks more to Europe than to our greatest ally and trading partner, the United States.

For Carney, it must have been sobering to hear German Chancellor Friedrich Merz

declare

, “The position of the federal government is clear, as far as the possible recognition of the state of Palestine is concerned. We will not join this initiative. We don’t see the requirements met.” Germany — Europe’s economic engine, haunted still by its historical conscience — understands what Canada’s leadership does not: the requirements for statehood have not been met, and appeasing terrorists is no substitute for diplomacy.

Yet not all in Canada have capitulated to this backwards thinking. A quiet revolution is brewing at the municipal level. The small town of Hampstead, Que.,

passed a resolution this week

“unequivocally condemning Mark Carney’s plan to recognize the so-called Palestinian state.” The resolution rejected the undermining of Israel’s legitimacy and stood firmly for truth.

This bold action follows the City of Côte Saint-Luc’s

resolution

earlier this month opposing unilateral recognition. The council declared that Canada’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state in September deviates from the established principle of achieving statehood through direct, bilateral negotiations between Israel and a demilitarized Palestinian authority which recognizes Israel’s right to exist.

These are not just symbolic gestures. They represent a model for other municipalities across Canada with moral clarity and courage to follow. In the absence of federal leadership, I call on local governments to speak for Canadians who reject appeasement of extremism.  And God forbid our left-leaning media report this, it might start a national trend!

Carney’s government is disregarding a fundamental fact: it lacks an absolute mandate. Nearly as many Canadian voters chose the Conservative party, as chose the Liberals, in the last election, supporting a platform that explicitly defended Israel. Many Liberals, too, support Israel’s right to security and legitimacy. To bulldoze this widespread sentiment is an act of political opportunism, not principled governance. Foreign policy in Canada should not mirror the fractured landscapes of France or the U.K., where pro-Hamas agitators dominate the public square. Germany, to its credit, is pushing back. Canada, tragically, is rushing in the opposite direction.

The idea of recognizing a Palestinian state in the wake of October 7 is not just irrational — it is dangerous. Such recognition rewards terror, undermines peace negotiations, and diminishes Canada’s credibility as a defender of democracy and the rule of law. Carney’s stance, if carried through, would represent a radical break with Canada’s historic foreign policy of supporting Israel as the lone democracy in the Middle East and insisting that Palestinian statehood can only be achieved through direct negotiation and renunciation of terror.

If the lessons of the Holocaust still resonate, they remind us that history judges harshly those who stand idly by while appeasing the morally corrupt. In that era, a few courageous voices stood against the might of those who were wrong. Today, municipalities like Hampstead and Côte Saint-Luc carry that mantle. They remind us that courage does not require size or power; it requires clarity and conscience. Carney may believe history will applaud him for appeasing the mob. He is mistaken. History will record that in the critical moment, when leadership demanded courage, he chose expediency.

The tragedy is that he is functioning in a vacuum, surrounded by ministers and advisers feeding him poor counsel, blind to the reality of the Middle East and the lessons of history. But maybe, just maybe, there is still time for him to reconsider — for him to rethink before irreparable damage is done. He can simply state that the Palestinians have not met all of Canada’s conditions. Miracles can happen. And if Canada were to step back from this precipice, history would remember not the folly of appeasement, but the wisdom of a nation that corrected course when it mattered most and avoid another MS St. Louis moment.

Avi Abraham Benlolo is the CEO and Founder of The Abraham Global Peace Initiative, a Canadian think-tank.

Earlier this month, 19 former senior Israeli security officials — past heads of the Israel Defence Forces, directors of the spy agency Mossad, chiefs of Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet and other senior brass —

called on Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza.

Their arguments varied, but all agreed that what began as a just and necessary war nearly two years ago has devolved into a cynical exercise in keeping Netanyahu’s coalition in power.

They’re right.

Appealing to U.S. President Donald Trump to intervene, the Commanders for Israel’s Security group says the IDF has achieved all that it’s possible to achieve: Hamas has been obliterated as a security threat, and Hamas no longer governs Gaza. What remains is the return of the hostages, which can be achieved only in some sort of a deal that Netanyahu isn’t interested in contemplating.

They’re right about that, too.

The problem isn’t just that Hamas is a gruesomely antisemitic terrorist movement devoted to Israel’s total obliteration, and that Hamas could end the Gaza war tomorrow if it would just release the last of the hostages it kidnapped on the day of the most infamously barbaric terrorist attack in Israel’s history — the slaughter of 1200 people on October 7, 2023. The problem is also Benjamin Netanyahu.

Of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups on that horrible day, only eight were rescued by the IDF in Gaza, three were killed in “friendly fire” incidents, and 148 were released alive in ceasefire agreements and exchanges of prisoners for hostages. Of the remainder, 23 are believed to be still alive.

The IDF is just beginning a new military offensive to take Gaza City to bring the entire coastal strip under military occupation, and an Egyptian-Qatari ceasefire proposal is in limbo. Every day brings another headline-grabbing outrage, another alleged war crime.

Over the past several days, tens of thousands of Israelis have poured into the streets and blocked highways, calling for a deal with Hamas and an end to the war, but long before the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023 Netanyahu’s government was already facing an opposition movement unlike anything in Israel’s 75-year history. After a razor-thin electoral victory that failed to break a five-year political deadlock, more than 100 opposition groups began a series of strikes and shutdowns in early 2023 to protest judicial reforms that the protest movement insisted would amount to a right-wing coup that would hollow out Israel’s democracy.

They were right about that, and they’re still right. The Israeli historian

Benny Morris

calls Netanyahu’s Likud coalition the most corrupt government among western countries. He says Netanyahu has been methodically dismantling Israeli democracy by tampering with the judiciary and appointing criminals to high office, all in aid of staying ahead of criminal corruption charges he’s facing himself. And so the Gaza war goes on.

After the Hamas attacks, the anti-Netanyahu protest movement Brothers and Sisters for Israel threw itself into the war effort, forming Israel’s leading civilian aid organization. But the Gaza war, with its tens of thousands of deaths and credible reports of starvation, has taken a heavy toll. And now the opposition movement is back in force, and it’s been joined by the heads of Israel’s 200 leading banks and insurance companies, and the country’s leading pharmaceutical, technological, and energy companies, and Israel’s Bar Association.

Benny Morris says they too, have a point. And Morris is not wrong.

It would be very wrong to draw an equivalence between the Israeli government and the terrorist leadership of Hamas, but among Netanyahu’s partners in the Knesset and in his own cabinet are similarly messianic extremists intent on the permanent conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, the displacement of the Palestinians and the resettlement of their territories with Israeli Jews. In neither of these camps will you find any enthusiasm for the “two-state solution” that Canada has championed since the days when Lester Pearson, who went on to become Canada’s 14th prime minister, was still a bureaucrat with the United Nations back in the late 1940s.

As utopian as that remedy might now seem, it’s still all that makes any sense as a way to end the agonies that have lately left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead and much of Gaza a starvation-haunted hellscape of rubble and bomb craters.

It’s hardly fair that the “international community” has tended to pamper Hamas, and that the burden always falls on Israeli shoulders, but that’s what you get for being a civilized country and not a gang of throat-slitters. What gets far too little attention is that Israel is one thing, and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is something else.

It would be wrong to draw an equivalence between the Hamas terrorism of hostage-taking and the cynicism of Netanyahu’s political hostage-taking. He has made hostages of Jewish and Israeli advocacy groups that are busy enough pleading Israel’s case against the hysterical anti-Zionist antisemitism that prevails in so many of the liberal democracies at the moment, Canada included.

But

Israelis are not content, either.

The Israeli Democracy Institute recently found that 87 per cent of Israelis want Netanyahu to be held accountable for the catastrophic security lapses that led to October 7, 2023, and 73 per cent of Israelis want to be rid of Netanyahu altogether.

Even after the smashing success of his 12-day war with Iran in June, Netanyahu’s Likud party gained only a slight bump in Israeli

opinion polls,

and the survey results showed that an election would leave his coalition with only 49 of the 120 seats in the Knesset.

This is more or less where public opinion stood in Israel even before October 7, 2023. Within a month of the Hamas pogrom, the philanthropist and venture-capital impresario Gigi Levy-Weiss, a key figure in the anti-Netanyahu Brothers and Sisters for Israel organization, told me that Israelis are under no illusions: No agreement with Hamas will last. What Gaza needs is something along the lines of a new Marshall Plan, the Allied effort that rebuilt Europe after the Second World War. “We have to come out and say clearly what we want. We want the world to take over Gaza.”

And in that idea, there may be at last some cause for hope. All along, the international community has been abdicating its responsibilities to Israelis and Palestinians by leaving it up to Israel to solve the problem of Islamist terror in the Middle East.

That may be changing. As squishy as they are, even the recent declarations by Canada, the United Kingdom and France that anticipate a sovereign Palestinian state are predicated on the exclusion of Hamas and anything like it from Palestinian governance.

And just last month, in an historic shift, the

Arab League’s 22 member states

demanded that Hamas surrender its weapons, release its hostages and end its control of Gaza as conditions that must precede a two-state solution. That standpoint has also been adopted by the 27-member European Union and 17 other UN member states. In place of Hamas, “a temporary international stabilization mission” in collaboration with the Palestinian Authority would assume the burden Israelis have been made to bear, “in line with the objectives of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state.”

It’s the only way to breathe life back into a two-state solution. As utopian as that still sounds, it’s still all there is.

National Post

With Quebec promising on Thursday to ban “street prayers,” the province’s minister of laicity has avoided mention of any particular faith.

Jean-François Roberge issued a Thursday statement referencing only a “proliferation of street prayers” in Quebec. Roberge added that it was an “increasingly visible phenomenon, particularly in Montreal.”

But the move just so happens to coincide with rising opposition to a new phenomenon of mass Islamic prayers on Quebec streets.

Group Islamic prayers have become a feature of some of the anti-Israel demonstrations that have hit Canadian streets since the terrorist attacks of October 7.

Quebec’s plan to ban public prayers comes in the wake of a 278-page committee report

recommending strategies

to further entrench the province’s commitment to laicity, a term roughly defined as protecting public institutions from religious influence.

Among the report’s 50 recommendations were new rules against the wearing of religious garb in daycares, bans on face coverings in Quebec’s publicly funded network of junior colleges and proposed new protections to protect universities from being compelled to install prayer rooms.

The report mentioned street prayers, but recommended that any sanctions against them be left to municipal governments.

In Quebec, one of the most conspicuous examples of public prayers has been a regular gathering outside Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica.

For at least the last seven months, the anti-Israel group Montreal4Palestine has organized Sunday protests outside the landmark, complete with an open-air demonstration of the Islamic afternoon prayer.

One December protest outside Notre-Dame

was advertised

with the title, “One solution. Intifada revolution.”

But over the summer, the Notre-Dame protests have been met with counter-demonstrations of Quebec nationalists.

“Enough, it’s enough. For the respect of our heritage and our coexistence; we will peacefully rally,” reads a poster circulated by counter-protest organizers. Those organizers

include Mandana Javan

, an Iranian-born Quebec laicity activist.

Nous continuons 🤗

SVP partagez et Soyez-y ! pic.twitter.com/2OgE25kxXB

— Mandana Javan (@MandanaJavanM_) August 19, 2025

At a July 20 counter-protest outside the basilica, Javan gave a speech in French declaring “the streets of Montreal are not open-air mosques” and

calling on the provincial government

to adopt a law banning “organized Islamist prayers in public spaces.”

Amidst Quebec’s wider secularism push, Quebec Premier Francois Legault has been on record singling out public prayers as a particular target.

“To see people praying in the street, in public parks, this is not something we want in Quebec. When you want to pray, you go in a church or a mosque, not in a public place,” he said in December.

Quebec anxiety with the sight of public Islamic prayers has been present in some form long before the practice became a fixture of anti-Israel demonstrations.

In 2017, it

became a minor controversy

after video emerged of an outdoor Islamic prayer being performed on the grounds of the Parc Safari zoo in Hemmingford, Que.

Last summer, the Montreal-area borough of Ahuntsic-Cartierville pledged to ban outdoor religious events after locals expressed outrage at seeing Muslims kneeling in prayer at a public park. They were there

as part of a public celebration

of the Eid al-Adha holiday.

But the surge in anti-Israel demonstrations has both increased the frequency of public prayers, and put them in the public spotlight.

As early as November 2023, Montreal Imam Adil Charkaoui was condemned by a cross-section of Quebec politicians after he led hundreds of demonstrators in Arabic-language prayers to destroy “Zionist aggressors.” “Allah, count every one of them, and kill them all, and do not exempt even one of them,” he told a crowd massed on a blockaded Montreal street.

Quebec’s Liberals, who form the official opposition in the legislature, wrote in a statement that there are already laws on the books covering public prayers.

“Occupying the public space without a permit is already banned, and municipalities have the necessary powers to intervene,” it read.

A similar point was raised by Montreal-area Liberal MP Anthony Housefather in December, when Legault first promised sanctions against public prayers. “Blocking streets to pray is already illegal,” Housefather wrote at the time.

In a statement this week, the Canadian Muslim Forum defended street prayers as “a manifestation of freedom of expression that has been exercised for so long by various communities.” The policy has also raised opposition from Quebec’s Catholic leaders.

In December,

Bishop Martin Laliberté, president of the Assembly of Catholic Bishops of Quebec, penned a letter condemning the proposed street prayer ban, saying they were “deeply concerned about the erasure of people and believing communities from Quebec’s public space.”

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As students head back to school this fall, most are expecting what universities promise: a marketplace of ideas, a chance to test their assumptions, and to engage with peers who see the world differently.

Increasingly, however, what they find is something else. Instead of open dialogue, campuses are being reshaped by professors who cross the line from scholarship into activism, and from activism into public support of terrorist groups.

Take the case of William Clare Roberts, a political science professor at McGill University, who

wrote

on social media this week: “I used to think BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) was a good idea. I’ve come around, though: nothing short of ‘full economic and military support for Hamas and Hezbollah’ is appropriate.”

It is one thing for a professor to challenge students with difficult ideas. It is quite another for someone entrusted with shaping young minds to publicly cheerlead terrorist organizations responsible for mass murder.

And this is not all that is happening in relation to academia.

Across the country, reports of antisemitism at universities like the

University of British Columbia

,

Concordia University

,

Toronto Metropolitan University

 show how deeply this problem runs.

Faculty and professors are not only tolerating such rhetoric but, in too many cases, emboldening their students to promote it. Remember when dozens of U of T professors “

aided and abetted

” last year’s illegal encampment on campus? Or the Wilfrid Laurier professor who

offered

students an extra two per cent credit for attending and writing a reflection on an anti-Israel rally held less than three weeks after the attacks on October 7? Or how about the Queen’s University Kinesiology professor who

allegedly taught a class

on “How Jews became White”?

What begins as political posturing quickly slips into open hostility toward Jewish students and their allies, turning classrooms and campus quads into arenas of intimidation rather than inquiry. For example, last week The Canadian Jewish News ran a

piece

listing a fresh series of antisemitic incidents on university campuses involving lawsuits, including a Toronto Metropolitan student suing over a “toxic antisemitic environment” and a University of Windsor medical fellow alleging antisemitic discrimination.

This isn’t about left versus right. Professors are entitled to their political views. But a problem occurs when they use their position to weaponize their influence.

I’ve spoken with many students who have told me professors encourage their students to follow them online, especially on X, where the rhetoric only grows more radical, and too often the message is clear: dissent will not be tolerated.

That chilling effect reaches far beyond Jewish students, though they are frequently the first targets. In my experiences as Executive Director of Allied Voices for Israel, which unites students of all backgrounds to rise up against bigotry, I’ve known both Jewish and non-Jewish students who have experienced hatred simply for disagreeing with a professor’s or activist’s position.

This is Canada. The dream of Canada is coexistence — people of different backgrounds, faiths and viewpoints living side by side in mutual respect. Yet, on too many campuses, anti-Israel activists don’t want coexistence; they want exclusion. Their rallying cry — “Zionists off campus” — says it all.

What’s at stake here is bigger than one issue or one community. Universities that once prided themselves on fostering rigorous debate are now creating echo chambers.

Conservative students, or even moderate ones, learn quickly to stay quiet. Dare defend Donald Trump (or even Pierre Poilievre) for anything? You’ll be shouted down. Suggest capitalism has lifted people out of poverty? You’re greedy. Voice support for Christian values, or for Hindus facing persecution abroad? You’re regressive. Defend Israel’s legitimacy as a state? You’re evil.

This environment is the antithesis of higher learning. It replaces intellectual curiosity with ideological conformity. And it breeds resentment, not just among Jewish students, but among anyone who dares to colour outside the approved lines.

University administrations cannot shrug this off as just another expression of academic freedom. Freedom of expression does not mean freedom from standards, and it certainly does not mean freedom to endorse economic and military support for terrorist groups.

Every university in Canada already maintains codes of conduct banning hate speech, harassment and discrimination. They must now go further and make it explicit, in writing, that any professor or faculty member who praises or justifies terrorist organizations such as Hamas or Hezbollah, including on social media, will face immediate disciplinary measures, up to and including suspension or dismissal.

There must be clear disciplinary consequences when lines are crossed, and a commitment must be made to ensuring that classrooms remain places of learning, not recruitment centres for extremist ideology.

Some will argue these measures risk stifling debate. The truth is the opposite: they are necessary to protect debate. There is no debate when one side insists the other has no right to exist.

The encouraging news is that students themselves are beginning to push back. I see an appetite for something better: open dialogue, the ability to agree to disagree, and a rejection of “woke” orthodoxy. Many are tired of being told there is only one narrative they are allowed to accept.

That hunger for honest conversation is a sign of hope. But hope alone is not enough. As another academic year begins, it is up to Canada’s universities to decide what kind of institutions they want to be.

Will they be safe havens for pro-terrorist group activists masquerading as scholars? Will Professor Roberts be excused for his behaviour and serve as yet another example of academic “activism” run amok? Or will universities like McGill recommit themselves to their true purpose — fostering critical thought, mutual respect and the pursuit of truth?

For the sake of their students, and for the sake of the country, the choice should be obvious.

Daniel Koren is the founder and executive director of Allied Voices for Israel.

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