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How this squares with Ford’s campaign pledge to hold Ontario universities to hard standards in support of free speech, or even exactly what power he’d use to stop future Al-Quds Day observations, isn’t obvious. Asked to elaborate on both points Monday — what action? — his people didn’t respond. Maybe they don’t know.

Al-Quds Day started in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, which says a fair bit right there. “Al-Quds” is the Arabic for “Jerusalem,” and Al-Quds Day is a conscious response to Israel’s Jerusalem Day, a national holiday to mark Israel’s taking of the city in the 1967 Six-Day War. Always on a Friday at the end of Ramadan, the observance links Muslim religious obligation to support for Iran’s political aspirations in the Middle East. Specifically, its demonization of Israel and determination to evict Jews from East Jerusalem.

Even if Al-Quds Day is packaged as criticism of Israeli government policy, organizers would have to take immense care to keep speakers from spilling over into anti-Semitism. Historically, they have not taken that care.

The speeches vary from year to year but there’s a record of Holocaust denial and warnings about how death comes to all oppressors amid the chants to end Israeli Apartheid, just like Hamas and Hezbollah banners are mixed in with the Palestine flags.

Hate speech is criminal in Canada and B’nai Brith in Toronto says it’s filed a police complaint against a speaker who said he prays for “justice throughout the world” through “the eradication of the unjust powers, such as the American empire, such as the Israelis and Zionists, in the same way that we saw the British empire wither away.” The sun eventually set on the British empire, said Kitchener’s Shafiq Huda in a recording B’nai Brith posted, and God willing the sun will set on “the Zionist empire, the American empire” as well.