TDSB: Canada's Worst Antisemitic Organization

What will it take for Canadians, especially those who live in Toronto, to recognize that the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is Canada's worst, antisemitic organization? 

Do we G-d forbid need another Oct 7th style pogrom to wake us out of our stupor? I'll bet you that right now I'm one of the very few Canadians who thinks this. Let me justify my thoughts...

The TDSB is in charge of schooling a quarter of a million students in the greater Toronto area every year. And thanks to an endless stream of unvetted immigrants, this number increases every year. If you weren't aware, Toronto is Canada's largest city with a population of almost 3 million people and the 4th largest city (population wise) in North America. 

The TDSB is the largest school board in Canada and it employs about 40,000 people. It has an operating budget of 3.4 billion dollars (and still somehow manages to operate at a deficit). As such it has a huge influence on our children and its staff. Like in any organization,  the leaders set the direction of the company. If the CEO of a corporation is nefarious, that corp will most likely attract bad people to work there. The converse is also true. If the leader is good, then the organization will attract good employees. The TDSB was led for decades by Colleen Rawlins. She had a history of antisemitic behaviour. When one of the high schools in Toronto allowed anti-Israel / pro-Palestinian demonstrations to take place at lunch on school property and some students and teachers chanted their popular mantra 'From the river to the sea Palestine will be free',  she saw nothing at all wrong with that. I tried to point out that that mantra means 'free of Jews' and that's according to Mahmoud Abbas the Palestinian leader. What happened to keeping all students and staff safe? What happened to teaching our students the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. I tried to alert our community about this dangerous school board in 2021 in a blog post called In My Own Backyard.

There has been a vile history of antisemitism at the TDSB. Back then  a Jewish school board trustee (Ms Lulka) was censured for calling out an employee for distributing antisemitic flyers to students, parents and staff. You can't make this up.

Back in June, I attended a rally at the board's head office to protest their motion to promote an anti-Palestinian policy whereby anyone opposing pro-Palestinian demonstrations or ideology would be committing a hate crime. Another attempt to provoke us and silence us at the same time. I wrote about it here: Antisemitism Gone Wild.  

More recently a teacher made her Jewish student wear a blue uniform to identify  her as a Jewish oppressor and then organized a trip to a rally for Natives in Canada which of course was hijacked by pro-Pali demonstrators. Instead of leaving the demonstration, students were encouraged to take part in it. I took part in a rally at the TDSB soon afterwards and was warmed to see many people from diverse backgrounds supporting our cause. Of course we were not permitted to speak to the board at their private meeting. When this hit the news, our Premier of Ontario and minister of education admonished the school board to keep politics out of schools and were also ordered to notify all parents prior to any school trips. A prime directive of any school board is the safety of the students. Sending them to any political demonstration certainly defies that. 

Today the school board ignored the order again and is offering an art course on Palestinian Resistance. According to their Palestinian website: 

Palestinian women have played an integral role in resisting the Israeli occupation. Tatreez—an artful embroidery technique with radical roots—is just one of the many tools they have utilized.   Ayah’s mother is one of eight daughters. They lived in Dheisha, a refugee camp located near Bethlehem, where they were displaced from Jerusalem by the Israeli occupation in 1948. There, her grandmother taught each one of her daughters, one needle and thread at a time, how to cross-stitch a mosaic of colors and shapes into various garments. Every combination told a different story about belonging and resistance.

Notice that they themselves call it 'radical'. The TDSB is a hotbed of anti-Israel / antisemitic ideology. It has been so for decades and has been permitted to grow, unchallenged for the most part by all of us.  The TDSB is so rotten that it's beyond fixing. Our politicians clearly fear this gigantic, powerful organization and are loath to punish its directors or in any way interfere with the TDSB's agenda. The TDSB has gotten the message. There are no consequences for their racist behaviour. It needs to be dismantled and replaced from the top down. ASAP! What really hurts is that I know of so many of my fellow Jews who have been or still remain devoted teachers who are forced to put up with this hatred every day. The worst part of course is that entire cohorts of young minds are turned into Jew hating kids right under our noses. Even some Jewish students are buying the lie that Israel is an apartheid state or that the IDF harvests organs from Palestinians. This is the kind of dangerous brainwashing that goes on daily at our schools. Some are worse, some are better. But they are all infected with Jew hate because it comes from the board.

I haven't begun to talk about our other school board, misnomered as the 'Separate School Board'. In Ontario it is the Catholic School Board which sadly has its own history of Jew hatred but perhaps less so than our public school board, TDSB. Why Catholics are awarded their own school board that is funded by the province is beyond me but that is another discussion entirely. 

Rawlins is gone but clearly the board's antisemitic agenda is alive and well.