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Ontario Stands Up to BDS, ‘One of the Main Vehicles for Spreading Anti-Semitism’

Ontario’s legislature passed a motion rejecting the BDS campaign against Israel, becoming the first Canadian province to do so

by
Jonathan Zalman
December 06, 2016
Wikimedia
The Ontario Legislative Building. Wikimedia
Wikimedia
The Ontario Legislative Building. Wikimedia

Last Thursday, Ontario’s legislature overwhelmingly passed (49-5) a motion formally rejecting BDS, in the process becoming the first Canadian province to do so. The motion was introduced by Thornhill Conservative MPP Gila Martow.

This motion comes months after “Ontario legislature voted down a proposed private member’s bill that would have called on the province to stop doing business with companies that support BDS,” reported The Canadian Jewish News, which was proposed as a law and drafted by Avi Benlolo, the president of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

But this motion passed easily. Asked Martow, the motion’s sponsor: “We would not be here supporting the Ku Klux Klan on our campuses so why are we allowing [the] BDS movement and other anti-Jewish and anti-Israel organizations to have demonstrations and use our campuses, which are taxpayer-funded?”

Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.