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Terry Newman: Inside the minds of Concordia's anti-Israel activists

A recent talk felt like a recruitment drive for law-breaking terrorist-sympathizers

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On March 4, Montreal’s Vanier College hosted a talk — titled, “Whose Freedom to Exist?” — that quickly devolved into a one-sided pro-Palestinian session filled with factual inaccuracies, anti-Zionist conspiracies and extremist rhetoric, ultimately ending with a call for college students to carry on the activism of two “exhausted” anti-Israel organizers.

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The panel, which was organized by the women and gender studies department, was moderated by Vanier humanities instructor Leila Bdeir and featured two Concordia University students: Rayana Eltanoukhi and Danna Noor Ballantyne. The session was co-sponsored by Quebec’s Ministry of Education and the Vanier College Teachers’ Association, lending it a veneer of credibility.

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Draped in a full-length keffiyeh, Bdeir opened with a standard land acknowledgement, tacking on, “We … recognize an essential part of reconciliation is land back, which is really apropos in the context of a day devoted to Palestine.”

Bdeir introduced the speakers as “two Concordia students who’ve led the way in the campus struggle for solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians” who would share “their experience of academic repression as well as the increased securitization of student life.” She further claimed that, “Their experiences will reveal the mirroring of tactics between those of local security and those of the Israeli military apparatus.”

Eltanoukhi was described as a graduate researcher in psychology at Concordia, while Ballantyne was introduced as a “Palestinian student activist in her second year as the Concordia Student Union’s external and mobilization co-ordinator,” who “previously served for three years as an executive with SPHR (Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights).”

Bdeir began by asking the students for “a more in-depth look at (their) respective goals at Concordia.” Ballantyne said that during her first three years, she was heavily involved with SPHR. Once elected to the Concordia Student Union (CSU), she said she “reoriented (her) activism into more bureaucratic work against the administration specifically.”

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Things got “really intense, really fast,” after Oct. 7, 2023, she said, “but the framework was already there.”

Eltanoukhi explained, “I’m Lebanese … I grew up extremely pro-Palestine.” Growing up in Montreal, she said, “We were kind of always warned not to talk about certain things in public, because the public wasn’t really ready, or didn’t really want to talk about Palestine.” She said that things changed after October 7, when there was a “boom of activism on campus,” which gave herself and others “material ways” to get engaged.

Bdeir kicked off the discussion, saying, “We’re Oct. 8, 2023 … what is the mobilization? And then eventually we’ll talk about different forms of crackdown. But first, let’s give our audience a picture of what it was that students were doing that began to attract that kind of backlash.”

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Ballantyne answered. “OK, so before the war, I’m calling it a war, but like, rest assured, I’m aware of the nuance there.” She laughed and continued: “Before the genocide … the Palestinian organizing on campus was largely based in SPHR, and mostly relating to political education. So we were doing a lot of workshops. I did a conference in the U.S. prior to, I think, in 2022, and there was a lot of talks about, like, how we can sort of normalize these conversations, how we can educate non-Arab students on what’s going on.”

October 7 posed some difficulties, she explained. “Immediately, those of us most implicated were very scared, and it led to a big, like, divide in the movement of who wanted to kind of take to the streets and celebrate and start, like, really hitting the ground running, and those of us who were a little bit more hesitant.”

But this didn’t deter Ballantyne. “There was a keffiyeh sale that we had organized in early November at Concordia, which led to a bit of a riot,” she said. “I remember being at the table selling them … and the Israeli club had also put their table next to us. So great fun ensued.”

She was pleased “to see so many keffiyehs everywhere overnight on campus, a lot of white people wearing them, which I love.” Ballantyne described the keffiyeh as “traditional,” but “not explicitly Palestinian, although it’s kind of become that.” Ballantyne said she’s been “wearing them my whole life,” but “it was always something you didn’t wear out, or if you wore it out, people would be like, that is a terrorist scarf from the movies.”

The students then described the “repression” they claim to have experienced.

Ballantyne said she and others from SPHR met with the university president two weeks after October 7 to put forward their disclose and divest demands, which she felt were dismissed. She also complained about the number of cops who showed up after the “riot” sparked by the keffiyeh sale, and about “mass calls for my expulsion,” which she brushed off, saying, “I think every student who’s been organizing has kind of gone through that.”

Ballantyne called it “heartening” to see large student walkouts. “And it definitely scared the administration a lot,” she bragged.

She further claimed that Concordia hired “an Israeli security firm” trained by IDF personnel specifically to target and attack pro-Palestine students, and that “they had more of a right to hurt you, attack you, pin you to the ground, stuff like that.” She accused Concordia of “hiring literal genocidal soldiers to beat up students and tie their hands behind their backs on campus for attending a protest,” and said, “It made it really obvious to us, I think, in a good way, that we were actually, like, posing a material threat to the Zionist project.”

However, a Concordia spokesperson told the Post that, “In each instance where Perceptage agents were employed, they worked under and were supervised by (Campus Safety and Prevention Services). Perceptage is a local Montreal company, registered in Quebec, and agents provided by Perceptage to Concordia were Canadian Armed Forces veterans, as is often the case with these companies.”

Ballantyne bemoaned the fact that SPHR lost its student club status in 2024, because it had violated the university’s code of rights and responsibilities. Those violations included organizing disruptive protests and pickets that blocked classes and buildings, campus vandalism and occupations, along with refusing to remove certain social media posts.

Ballantyne complained that they were sued by the university after putting strike instructions in the student handbook, which violated Concordia’s rules. It encouraged students to blockade classrooms and participate in masked demonstrations and confrontations with security officers.

Ballantyne told the audience that Concordia recently banned her CSU employee, Julianna Smith, from entering campus on allegations that she took part in illicit activity during the recent campus strike. Ballantyne also claimed the Israeli Consulate sent a letter to her work saying, “We know what you’ve been up to with the student union.” A spokesperson for the Israeli consulate in Montreal called the claim false and ridiculous.

“I don’t want to sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, but like, trust me on this, you guys, you cannot understate the way that the Israeli entity has sunk its claws into our country and our universities,” she said, complaining that Concordia hosts both a Jewish-Canadian studies department and the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies, which she suggested was akin to a “white supremacist institute of studies,” whose purpose is to “normalize Israel” and shut down conversation about Palestine.

She claimed that its founder was a terrorist who “directly participated in the murder of my own family,” and that tuition fees were being paid by Israel to “concert their efforts” against SPHR.

A spokesperson for the Azrieli Institute responded: “If anything, it is the institute that suffered a violent attack at being silenced when a group of vandals broke into our offices and celebrated their deed on social media in April 2025. The attack is investigated by the hate crime unit of the local police force.”

SPHR indeed celebrated the vandalism in an Instagram post, writing: “Glory to our martyrs.”

Ballantyne claimed that three active “IDF soldiers” were scheduled to speak on campus until SPHR “kicked it off,” and that organizers moved the event to the Montreal Holocaust Museum “on purpose,” to provoke protests and frame them as antisemitic.

In reality, the speakers were IDF reservists on a speaking tour. Concordia cancelled the original campus event due to SPHR pressure, forcing its relocation. Nevertheless, protesters showed up and blocked the entrance.

Eltanoukhi described the encampment at McGill as “one of the most beautiful places,” falsely suggesting that the media lied about the presence of needles and unsanitary conditions in order to villainize it.

Summing up, Eltanoukhi said, “We’re experiencing the repercussions of all this repression” and “we’re exhausted,” while encouraging students to take up the torch for them by finding spaces where they can continue their activism.

Ballantyne giggled when she said, “I think we scared a lot of people in power.” She then lectured the audience on the true purpose of life.

“Some people just want to get their degrees. I’m so sick of that, respectfully. Then you’re just gonna want to go to work, then you’re just gonna want to go get married and then you’re just gonna want to go and have kids. Like, shut up. People are dying,” she said. “It’s always the same Zios who are like, ‘Oh my God. Like, just let us go to school.’ ”

During the question and answer period, a number of like-minded faculty members voiced their opinions. Only one student raised her hand to tell the speakers, “You guys are the whole reason why people my age, why students my age, will want to make something of these subjects,” suggesting that, as a recruitment effort, the panel worked.

It’s clear what this global campus movement represents: the propagation of extreme anti-Zionist ideology, justifying disruption as “solidarity” and recruiting youth into radical activism laced with conspiracy theories, the glorification of violence and institutional intimidation, often aided by professors.

National PostTwitter.com/TLNewmanMTLtnewman@postmedia.com

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