Will protests over Israel-Hamas get ugly in Toronto? Only if police refuse to act
“Get ugly?” Get? You'll know that I didn’t write this headline for today’s Toronto Star column.
Some of us have harder jobs than others, and I’ve never envied the life of a police officer and their family. Our expectations are so high as a community, just as they are of the Priest or Minister on Sunday morning — one must rise to every occasion. During each and every shift.
TPS Constable Percy Cummins did, and paid the ultimate price just the same. P.C. Cummins was killed one night not too far from our high school during an altercation in 1981, and it was one of the moments in life that stands out decades later. For all of the focus I’ve tried to bring to the unfairness to Canadians of the effort to “globalize the Intifada” (see representative prior posts “The far left is exposing its moral inconsistencies” Nov. 27-24, “Premier Ford speaks for the Silent Majority” May 15-24 and “‘Toronto the Good’ bows down to Iran” April 12-24), more can be done.
We may not have much time.
Four days after the Molotov cocktail attack in Boulder, Colorado, Mohammed Abdullah Warsame was charged by the RCMP after he allegedly told an employee of Montreal’s Mission Old Brewery that “he intended to commit an attack with the goal of killing a large number of people.” The Somali-born Canadian travelled to Afghanistan in 2000 to attend al-Qaeda training camps, and has already spent 92 months in jail after being arrested by the FBI in 2003 for sending money and information to one of his former terrorist Commanders.
Lucky for us, Mr. Warsame was brash enough to brag about this alleged plans. Whether or not he planned to join Elias Rodriguez and Mohamed Sabry Soliman in their fruitless cause, it’s hard to believe there aren’t others just like them.
For this piece, I had the good fortune of getting an interview with independent journalist Caryma Sa’d. She and her team have documented hundreds of protests across Canada, and she has a warning for us all. That’s why TPS leadership must continue to step up, just as the late P.C. Cummins did.
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The school year was barely underway in 1981 when Constable Percy Cummins, a Toronto police officer, was shot and killed in the line of duty. Cummins, who was married and had two children, responded with his partner to a call about a disturbance at a rooming house in the west end of the city.
Emblazoned on Cummins’s bright-yellow patrol car were the words “To Serve and Protect,” and I’ve always been struck by the balance in that motto: police are there to protect us from harm — with lethal force, if need be — and serve the community with open arms. Officers never know which role their next shift will bring.
With more than 1,000 pro-Palestine demonstrations under officers’ belts since October 7, 2023, things must be getting tiresome for Toronto Police Service members who spend their days being shouted at by folks on all sides of the Israel-Hamas war.
A few days ago, police prioritized, as if it were a right, protestors’ blocking of the intersection at Yonge and Bloor streets over the right of an eight-year-old to be transported in an ambulance — which, as eyewitnesses reported and video seems to confirm, had its lights flashing — to Sick Kids by the best route. Who is served and protected in that troubling instance?
When ambulances are being rerouted because one of Toronto’s busiest intersections is blocked, we have an enforcement problem.
Although the size of these protests has diminished over the past 18 months, Caryma Sa’d, a defence lawyer and independent journalist, believes their “intensity” is higher than ever.
“I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop,” says Sa’d, who has built a large online following as she and her team have objectively documented the constant protests that have gripped several large Canadian cities since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The “other shoe” could be anything from a moment of unscripted rage to an attack similar to the recent killings in Washington or the barrage of Molotov cocktails in Boulder, Colorado. According to local police, the accused in those cases shouted “Free Palestine” as they personally helped globalize the Intifada against anyone sympathetic to Israel.
The protestors Sa’d is worried about in Toronto aren’t the few agitators who seem to find common cause with every left-wing touchstone, be it anti-capitalism, Indigenous rights or homeless encampments. Rather, she says, “the general lack of enforcement emboldens radical behaviour” and undermines the public’s sense of security.
Hit the link to read the rest of the piece.
MRM
(this post is an Opinion Piece)
(photo of TPS Constable Percy Cummins via Ontario Police Memorial Foundation)