CityNews Quietly Deletes Praise For Vigilante Groups

On September 6, a demonstration took place on University of Toronto campus. The banner image is one of the demonstrators on the pro-Israel side holding up a Kahanist flag. Among many other things, the Kahanist flag represents an extremist Zionist view represented by a party that was banned by the Israeli government. The Jewish Defense League, which also uses the flag, has been designated a terrorist organization by the FBI.

The Sept. 6 demonstration marked the return of students to the UofT campus for the fall semester, as well as the renewed interest in the subject by legacy news outlets. CityNews felt the need to publish an entire article to profiling the leader of a vigilante group named Magen Herut Canada, led by Aaron Hadida. Despite the fact that Magen Herut has no direct ties to the Kahanist movement or the JDL, they attended alongside representatives from both in order to provide vigilante "security."

As you may have seen, the link to the CityNews story is now dead. When clicked, it redirects to a "local" category. Since the article was reported with the Local Journalism Initiative, it appeared elsewhere, like The Canadian Jewish News. According to CityNews' news policy on removal of stories, they state "We will not unpublish a story or remove names... If the original story was flawed and indefensible, it will be removed or a retraction posted, depending on the facts." At this time, CityNews has not posted an explanation for why the story was removed. You can view an archive of their version of the article here.

While it's unclear to the exact reason CityNews removed the article, it may have had something to do with the pushback they received online. This pushback highlighted the propagandistic nature of the story.

The first sentence of the article immediately set up Jewish students as separate from those demonstrating in solidarity with Palestine. It claimed the "safety patrol teams" joined "Jewish students" during a pro-Palestine march.

Hadida claimed Magen Herut's presence was purely to maintain order and "make sure the Jewish community is safe." Unsurprisingly, he and other members of the vigilante team stood "among a team of Toronto police officers."

That's simply not true, and author Mitchell Consky did no work to question that claim. It's not difficult. A post published Sept. 5 on UofT Occupy for Palestine's Instagram account shows the logos of both If Not Now Toronto and Jews Say No to Genocide, two Jewish groups, as participants in the protest.

Clearly, Hadida, who Herut Canada describes as believing in "Jewish unity and Zionism above all else" only truly believes in Zionism. In the description of his autobiography on Amazon, he's described as a "globally recognized Zionism activist."

Indeed, this pretense of protecting Jewish people falls apart under the slightest critical eye. In the article itself, after Hadida is presented with a critique of their presence on campus, he claims his team is there to monitor "anti-Israel hostility."

Only people who believe that Israel and Zionism are inextricable from Judaism would believe that Hadida and his group are there to protect Jewish students. This is not an uncommon assumption. CBC News, while not highlighting the vigilante group colluding with police, chose to interview Hillel Ontario CEO Seth Goren, who spoke for all Jewish students, claiming they were "scared" and "anxious." Crucially, however, CBC News journalist Rochelle Raveendran also spoke with Jewish pro-Palestinian activist Anna Lippman for comment. Lippman said her experience was that pro-Israeli protestors had deployed antisemitism against her.

While perhaps flawed in other ways, the CBC News story does the journalistic work to gather concerns from different sides and input their perspective from direct interviews. Consky only spoke to Hadida, another Magen Herut volunteer and an anonymous member of "JForce team."

JForce, another vigilante pro-Zionist group, is not introduced in any way in the piece. It is simply assumed they have the same "noble" goals as Magen Harut.

As the story notes (when describing justification for one volunteer joining) one elderly Jewish man was assaulted "a month ago during a pro-Israel rally."

Surely, this would lead the reader to assume police didn't have a control of the situation. That is, except for the anonymous JForce member exonerating the police's efforts. One of the quotes from the JForce member praised the Toronto Police Services as "doing the best they can."

Additionally, why was the JForce member granted anonymity? It's not as though pro-Zionist activists have faced many professional consequences for their actions. Meanwhile, the JForce member's only other quote was how two older women asked them for an escort after the protest had thinned out.

Yes. The article ends on a saccharine description of this Zionist vigilante group as though they are a group of literal boyscouts.

In this piece, and others like it, lines are divided between anti-Zionist demonstrators and pro-Zionist counter protestors.

But it doesn't have to be this way. James Bullanoff's report in The Varsity, UofT's student paper, gives a far depper understanding of the protest than any single line in the CityNews hagiography. Bullannoff writes about the disproprotionate numbers, as approximately 100 protestors were met with a counter-protest of only about 20 counter-protestors. He also covers how UofT have implemented policies that crack down on free expression of its students, which was criticized by 31 student groups and academic workers.

It also covers the only instance of actual violence that occurred on Sept. 6, when a separate protest for Palestine was broken up by TPS. A sit-in at the UTAM building organized by Occupy for Palestine was disrupted when police officers pepper-sprayed protestors in an attempt to remove them from the building.

Were any of the students hurt by TPS Jewish? What role do TPS play in violence against Jewish people demonstrating for Palestine? These are pertinent questions to ask if you profile a group claiming to care about Jewish safety. They are also completely absent from the article CityNews quietly deleted. The only part close to a challenging opinion is when a tweet is quoted and juxtaposed to Hadida's comments. It's almost as if it's entire insertion in the article is for it to be refuted by the subject.

Groups patrolling a university in the name of safety have strains of fascist coding in the best of times. To not even question their presence, let alone praise them for their work, would be dishonest. But Consky felt the need to portray the vigilante group colluding with police as nice boyscouts representing the community's ceaseless dedication to fighting antisemitism.

At a protest where pro-Zionist representatives were waving the flag of a FBI-designated terrorist group, and where the former leader of Canada's chapter of that group was in attendance, they chose to profile a pro-Zionist vigilante group claiming to defend Jewish students.

Calling this coverage grim would be a severe understatement. CityNews deleting the story without any explanation, however, raises questions to whether editors believed the story itself was bad, or if they wanted to avoid getting yelled at online. Until that question is addressed, we have to wonder why they felt this article was worth publishing in the first place.