It was the speech Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t give at Concordia University.
On September 10, in front of a sellout crowd of 2,000, the former prime minister of Israel defended his country’s war against the Palestinian Authority.
“We have to uproot the terror regimes and plant the seeds of freedom,” Netanyahu said.
Outside the Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts, a noisy crowd of pro-Palestinian protestors waved flags and chanted slogans, stared down by a smaller crowd of pro-Israeli activists.
Many of the protestors were from U of T groups opposed to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, administered under the Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat.
Netanyahu was scheduled to make a speech at Concordia University in Montreal last Monday, but protestors overcame campus police and the event was cancelled.
Netanyahu was introduced by Izzy Asper, executive chairman of Canwest Global Communications, the media conglomerate which owns the National Post and Global Television Network.
In his remarks, Asper compared the Concordia protestors to the brownshirts, a group of Nazi thugs that accompanied Hitler’s rise to power in 1930s Germany.
“Yesterday in Montreal you saw the face of hatred,” Asper said. He blamed “left-wing academics and the media” for distorting the Palestine conflict, saying “in the campuses of Canada and the United States they were fomenting hatred.”
Asper received a standing ovation for his remarks.
After taking the stage, Netanyahu joked that he expected more demonstrators at the North York event. “I was terribly disappointed to hear that only 250 protestors are here — what happened?”
He said the “violent riot” at Concordia was not because of his ideas, because he “didn’t even speak there.”
Instead, he said the protestors were angry at “Israel just existing.”
“What you saw in Montreal was a microcosm, a window into hatred,” he added.
In his remarks, Netanyahu defined terrorism as the deliberate targeting of civilians in warfare to achieve political goals.
He used the analogy of Japanese Kamikaze attacks against U.S. battleships during the Second World War to explain his government’s strategy for dealing with Palestinian terror attacks.
Sinking the aircraft carriers that launched the Kamikaze planes was the only way to stop the attacks. So defeating Palestinian terror means targeting the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu said.
“Arafat and all his cronies, they’ll have to go down.”
Netanyahu compared the history of Israel to the Palestinian struggle for independence. He denied that Jewish underground groups such as Irgun ever engaged in terrorist attacks — a common criticism of Palestinian supporters.
“I suppose you can make that argument to people whose historical understanding extends as far as breakfast,” Netanyahu said, to enthusiastic applause from the crowd.
Instead, Netanyahu said that the Palestinians and their allies among Arab nations had turned to political struggle only after their combined armies were defeated by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War.
He said that calling Isrealis the “real terrorists” is a “reversal of causality.”
Photographs by Simon Turnbull
