From the London Jewish Chronicle, November 2025
Twenty-nine-year old IDF soldier Jonathan Karten is being hailed as a hero by many Torontonians after single-handedly ejecting up to a dozen masked protestors after an unruly mob disrupted a meeting of pro-Israel students at Toronto Metropolitan University on November 5. The skirmish, which spilled onto the street, left three people injured and resulted in five arrests.
Videos of Karten have gone viral on YouTube, showing him powerfully removing the trespassers from the room, sometimes two at a time. In some videos, a woman is heard screaming, “Stop! Stop! Get out of here! Get out! This is private property! Call 911! Call the police!” above singsong chants of “Free free Palestine!” and “We refuse to allow war criminals in our city!”
After someone wielding a drill bit knocked through the glass door, Karten confronted him and “got hit in the face and stabbed, either by the broken glass or by the drill bit,” he said. He and one student were taken by ambulance to hospital, where they were treated and released.
“I have a bit of a shiner and some abrasions, and I needed a couple of stitches on my forearm,” he said. Soon after leaving hospital, he returned to campus and gave his planned talk to the students because “I wasn’t going to let them take that away from us.”
Ethan, a 22-year-old student and vice-president of Students Supporting Israel (SSI), the group that hosted the event, said that the gathering “was supposed to be a private, off-campus event for students to come speak and learn from two IDF soldiers about their experiences after October 7.”
Despite stringent efforts by organizers to keep the time and location private, the university-affiliated chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) learned the details and circulated an emergency alert on social media, prompting dozens of followers to grab their keffiyehs and Palestinian flags and rush to the scene.
Organizers were just setting up at a rented venue when they were suddenly overwhelmed by shouting intruders, many wearing keffiyehs and a few carrying megaphones, Ethan told The JC. “There were only five or six of us, and there were 40 or 50 of them, pushing in. It was pretty scary.”
“We had to put chairs and furniture along the window because we were afraid they were going to break the window, too,” said Hope, a 20-year-old student who, days later, admitted to still feeling traumatized. “More and more kept appearing, but at least when we were barricaded in the room, they weren’t in our space any more.”
Outside the building, protestors tried to block entry and battled with police. Five individuals were taken into custody, charged variously with forcible entry, obstructing a peace officer, assaulting a police officer, and unlawful assembly.
All of this ugly mayhem occurred only days after Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow publicly accused Israel at a Muslim-sponsored event of committing genocide in Gaza, remarks that were condemned by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs as “reckless, divisive and dangerous.”
“You can draw a line from those words to the feeling of empowerment in the mob that decided to attack TMU students,” said Ben Mulroney, son of the late former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, in a podcast. Several days later, Chow had not issued an apology or statement of any kind about the incident.
Canadian Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney has been accused of betraying Israel after recently confirming on Bloomberg that he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu in accordance with the controversial ICC arrest warrant if he were to set foot in Canada. Carney also disappointed Jewish leaders earlier this month when his new budget failed to deliver on a pledge for more security-related funding for Jewish and other vulnerable communities.
The TMU incident is just the latest in a tidal wave of anti-semitic violence and vandalism that has swept across Canada in the last two years, seriously eroding the once-solid sense of security Canadian Jews have felt for generations. “Behind it all, there’s an abject failure of government representatives to call out Jew-hatred at any level,” said Rabbi Joe Kanofsky of Toronto Kehillat Shaarei Torah, whose synagogue was vandalized for the tenth time last week.
“Unequivocal condemnation of these hate crimes has to come from the government leadership and every sector of society, and so far it has not,” he said. “You don’t have to study the Talmud to know that silence equals acquiescence.”
The TMU attack “didn’t come as much of a surprise to us,” said Jesse Primerano, executive director of the pro-Israel advocacy group, StandWithUs Canada. “First, because of the toxic nature of TMU and the way the administration turns a blind eye to the anti-semitism on campus.
“But beyond that, and more importantly, because Students for Justice in Palestine has a long history of violent and disruptive behaviour on campus, and they’re not being held accountable by the universities. This club is ratified on almost every university campus in Canada.”
Karten said that he attributed part of his warrior spirit to the memory of his uncle Sharon Edri, an IDF soldier who, at age 20, was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas terrorists in 1996.
“Thank God, no one was fatally injured,” he said. “This altercation, their assault and their trespassing, ultimately helped us, because we were able to get our message out to a wider audience, which was our initial intent.” ♦
