“Oct 7 2023”

It is almost unimaginable that in the 21^st century, such horrors would still take place. The brutal acts of Hamas remind us of the darkest periods in history, such as the atrocities committed by Hitler’s Germany. Yet, the Iranian regime and its proxies — particularly terrorist groups like Hamas — continue to bring new levels of barbarity into the modern world.

The recent recovery of six executed Israeli hostages, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, from a tunnel in Rafah highlights the extent of this cruelty. These hostages, four of whom were scheduled to be released in a draft ceasefire deal, were murdered by Hamas before Israeli Defense Forces could reach them — a reminder of the inhumanity and savagery of Hamas, emboldened by their Iranian backers.

Large donors are abandoning the University of Windsor following its controversial deal with pro-Palestinian protesters — including business magnate and philanthropist Barry Zekelman, who withdrew a $1-million gift and future support.

The Star has learned that once-faithful donors have withdrawn pledges to help, or stopped donating to, various initiatives, ranging from addressing the housing crisis to renovating the university’s law school.

A group of Israeli hostages were huddled in a tunnel in Gaza a few days after they had been dragged from their homes on 7 October, when the man who had plotted their abduction appeared out of the subterranean gloom.

His hair and beard were grey and his dark-ringed eyes stared out from under thick black brows. It was a face familiar to them from a thousand broadcasts and newspaper stories: Yahya Sinwar. The Hamas leader in Gaza was the most feared man in Israel, even before he ordered the October raid in which 1,200 people – two-thirds of them civilians – were killed and 250 taken hostage.

A former Greenwood College School teacher is taking legal action against the private school, claiming she was wrongfully terminated after sharing content about the Israel-Hamas war in her math class and on social media.

Cassandra Della Mora, 33, worked as an educator at the coed middle and high school in midtown Toronto for nine years before being fired in June, according to a lawsuit recently filed in Superior Court.

Toronto’s Jewish community has established a broad private security agency to protect Jews and Jewish institutions against increasing incidents and threats of antisemitic attacks.

Called the Jewish Security Network, the agency announced ambitious plans on Thursday for an around-the-clock, centralized, command and control operations centre; “hardening” of the physical infrastructure of Jewish institutions; training of volunteers; and research, analysis, and rapid information sharing.

Another week, another Gaza ceasefire proposal. CIA Director William Burns, speaking alongside MI6 Director Richard Moore, recently told an audience in London that a new US-backed proposal would be put forward in the coming days. Burns has had the thankless task of leading US efforts to broker a truce between Hamas and Israel.

Currently, negotiations have stalled over the Philadelphi Corridor, the strip of land along the Gaza-Egypt border, under which the IDF says it has discovered dozens of tunnels used by Hamas to smuggle weapons and ammunition. Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel must maintain a presence there to prevent its use as a rearmament route. Hamas, implicitly agreeing with this interpretation, has said such a presence would constitute a red line.

Landmarks of shame.

Hamas’ orgy of rape, murder, and callous, indiscriminate cruelty such as mutilation, torture, burning alive, and beheadings that began last October 7 and is continuing almost a year later, marks an escalation extreme even by the standards of that blood-stained region. Morally horrific have been the “protests” on prestigious U.S. university campuses, abetted by simpatico, or cowardly, professors and administrators. These riotous displays also feature property damage, record-breaking assaults against Jews, and chants explicitly or implicitly calling for another Holocaust, and celebrating the Nazis’ Final Solution.

The pretence that the UK’s new Labour government has moved away from the blatant anti-Semitism that was rife under its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been brutally exposed by the actions of David Lammy, the party’s new Foreign Secretary.

Prior to his appointment to one of the British government’s key positions in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new administration, Lammy had made his name as a Left-wing firebrand.