FIRST READING: The cheering crowds who thronged Canada’s cities to celebrate Oct. 7

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Within hours of Canada receiving the first news of a terrorist massacre striking Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, almost all of its major cities witnessed impromptu public celebrations cheering the violence.

The one-year anniversary of the tragedy was not much different, although the size and brazenness of the celebrations this time was noticeably more extreme.

In Toronto, a crowd of several hundred saturated Yonge and Dundas square on Saturday before massing outside the city’s Israeli consulate. Video captured by Toronto man Jon Fraser showed the entire crowd engaged in a screaming call-and-response of “long live intifada!”

Intifada refers to armed resistance against Israel, and is most closely associated with a five-year period of terrorist suicide bombings that began in 2000.

Postmedia reporter Brian Lilley was among the crowds, and captured video of masked protest marshals leading marchers in various chants calling for Israel’s destruction.

This included, “We don’t want two states! Bring us back to ‘48!” – an explicit rejection of the so-called “two state solution” in favour of Israel’s complete annihilation. At Yonge and Dundas square, the crowds joined in chants honouring “martyrs.”

While the word is used to refer to any Arab killed in conflict with Israel, protest organizers such as Toronto4Palestine and Palestine Youth Movement have routinely used the term “martyr” to refer to terrorist leaders such as the recently assassinated Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, as well as any number of Hamas commanders killed in Gaza.

“We will honour all our martyrs,” the crowd chanted.

Organizers with the Palestinian Youth Movement shut down a major intersection at College Street and Spadina Avenue, and erected a stage and amplification system in the middle of the street.

In Vancouver, large swaths of the downtown were closed down on Saturday by celebratory marches organized by Samidoun.

X user Aaron Pettman posted images showing a crowd of several hundred massing outside Waterfront Station, and participating in screamed chants of, “There is only one solution; Intifada revolution,” and, “Justin Trudeau you will see, Palestine will be free.”

Among the sea of Palestinian flags were several for Khalistan, the proposed breakaway Sikh homeland that has its own links to extremism in the Metro Vancouver area.

The demonstrators were all participants in “One Year of Genocide. One Year of Resistance,” a rally explicitly advertised by Samidoun as a celebration of Al-Aqsa Flood – Hamas’s official name for its operation to massacre Israeli villages in the Gaza envelope.

Crowds marshalled outside the Vancouver Art Gallery were explicitly told that they were there to call for a Middle East entirely purged of Zionism.

“Today we stand next to one another … in the name of one state. Not two, but one state,” said a speaker, to cheers.

Samidoun’s two founders did not appear to be present at the Saturday rally. One of them, Khaled Barakat, is in Lebanon where he is actively helping to coordinate “resistance” to Israeli strikes against the terrorist group Hezbollah. The other, Charlotte Kates, appeared at the pro-Hamas Masar Badil conference in Madrid, Spain.

“We are here to celebrate the 7th of October!” Kates said at the conference.

On Oct. 7 itself, Samidoun posted triumphal images of Hamas terrorists in the midst of committing the October 7 massacres. This included a photograph of a Hamas gunman in a paraglider and the vehicles that were used to surprise revellers at the Nova Music Festival, where more than 300 young people were massacred.

“October 7, the inception of Al-Aqsa Flood, the day that made clear to the world that the Palestinian people and their armed Resistance can and will liberate Palestine,” read a caption.

Illustrations of armed terrorists descending on Jerusalem in paragliders would also feature on Samidoun posters announcing a Sunday “teach-in” held at an undisclosed Vancouver location on the subject of Al-Aqsa Flood.

Wherever rallies were held, they were usually assisted by police patrolling a cordon around the demonstrators, and even coordinating the re-direction of traffic around streets the demonstrators wished to block.

In Ottawa, police protection of an anti-Israel rally on Parliament Hill even went so far as to shield the gathering from counter-demonstrators.

Video captured on Saturday by Ottawa protest-watcher Chris Dacey showed an officer with the Parliamentary Protective Service screening access to Parliament Hill based on whether someone believed Palestine “is a state.”

“If you are not a supporter of Palestine, you are not permitted,” he tells a man attempting to access the Parliament Hill grounds.

“So I’m not allowed in certain public areas if I have certain political views?” asks the man. “Right now, today, no,” replies the officer.

In B.C. election news, the incumbent B.C. NDP are going to court to force the province’s elections agency to redesign all its paper ballots (many of which have already been printed). Their issue is that the B.C. Conservative Party is listed as “Conservative Party” on the ballot, and the NDP wants it to read “B.C. Conservative Party.” The essence of the filing is that even though this is a provincial election, the B.C. NDP charges that voters will be fooled into thinking that they are voting for the federal Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre.

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