Cynthia Yacowar: Anti-Israel rallies on October 7 may be legal. They are also morally intolerable

The scene in Montreal amid anti-Israel protests on Oct. 7, 2025. Photo by Terry Newman /X

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October 7 marks the third anniversary of the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Yet across Canada and around the world, anti-Israel rallies and events are once again being planned for that very day.

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In Toronto, several anti-Israel student groups planned an October 7 event at the University of Toronto under the banner “Honouring Our Martyrs” — on the anniversary of the Hamas-led attack in which approximately 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, were brutally slaughtered and 251 were taken hostage. The university subsequently announced that the event could not proceed as planned, citing “significant safety and operational concerns” — not illegality.

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In Montreal, at least two anti-Israel rallies remain planned. An afternoon student rally beginning at McGill’s Roddick Gates is promoted by student groups representing five Montreal colleges and universities, including Students for Palestine’s Honour and Resistance (SPHR). SPHR McGill recently supported a successful undergraduate motion calling on the Students’ Society of McGill University to push McGill to end its exchange program with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, celebrating the vote in an Instagram post declaring, “Long live the student intifada.”

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A second rally, scheduled for the evening on Sherbrooke Street West, is organized by Montreal4Palestine, a group that describes itself on X as fighting for the “total liberation of Palestine.”

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There is something profoundly disturbing about holding such rallies on the anniversary of a massacre — a day on which families remember loved ones who were brutally slaughtered, raped, burned alive and taken hostage. The language surrounding these events compounds the obscenity: in Toronto, “Honouring Our Martyrs”; in Montreal, masked, keffiyeh-clad figures beneath the words “Respect Existence or Expect Resistance.”

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Invoking “martyrs” and “resistance” on October 7 appears to glorify the barbaric violence that the families of those murdered and taken hostage that day are mourning. Orwell couldn’t have scripted the irony better.

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But what is morally reprehensible is not necessarily against the law. So where does the law draw the line?

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Anti-Israel protesters speak at a rally organized by the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, outside the Vancouver Art Gallery on Oct. 7, 2024. Photo by Arlen Redekop/Postmedia

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Freedom of expression may protect speech that many of us find deeply offensive. But Canadian law does have limits. Publicly inciting hatred against an identifiable group, where that incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace, can constitute a criminal offence.

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And the question of when antisemitic rhetoric crosses that line is hardly theoretical at a time when Jewish institutions, synagogues and Jewish people themselves have been targets of threats, vandalism and violence.

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The criminal threshold is necessarily high. Not everything hateful, inflammatory or morally repugnant will meet it. Nor should criminal law become the arbiter of every offensive idea.

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But the fact that the state cannot — or should not — prohibit something does not require our institutions or political leaders to remain morally neutral about it. Condemnation is not censorship, and tolerance under the law need not mean acceptance by society.