Jewish student group calls on TMU to discipline incoming interim dean over anti-Israel social posts
Hillel Ontario is calling on Toronto Metropolitan University to investigate Maher El-Masri, a recently appointed interim associate dean, because the group says he has 'repeatedly engaged with and spread extreme, antisemitic, and deeply polarizing content on his social media account.'
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Hillel Ontario, a Jewish student organization with a presence on nine campuses across the province, including TMU, sent an action alert last Thursday alongside several screenshots of social media posts from an account Hillel says belongs to El-Masri. The X account is under El-Masri's name and the biography describes the user as the 'son of (a) Nakba survivor,' referring to Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The account states that the user is in Ontario, has a Palestinian flag for its profile picture and a background quote claiming 'humanity is failing the Palestine test.'
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One message Hillel highlighted from the account concerned a post about Noa Marciano, an Israeli intelligence soldier abducted by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, during its invasion of Israel. Marciano later died in captivity. 'This is what is so scary about people like her,' the TMU professor wrote beneath a graduation photo of Marciano, which claimed she was killed in an Israeli airstrike. 'They look so normal and innocent, but they hide monstrous killers in their sick, brainwashed minds.'
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'I hate everyone who directly or indirectly caused this indignity to the most honorable and most dignified people on Earth,' an undated post flagged by Hillel reads alongside broken heart emojis, an apparent reference to the conflict in Gaza. In December 2023, El-Masri was interviewed by CBC for a story about his brother, who he said was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza while searching for food.
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El-Masri has continued to post about the conflict on the X account, which remains open to the public. 'Israel is a baby killer state. It always has been,' he wrote on June 6, a day after the Hillel notice.
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Some of his posts compare Israel to Nazi Germany, a comparison deemed antisemitic by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
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'How could a people who have endured the worst human persecution in the holocaust carry this deep hate and inflict unimaginable pain on a nother (sic) people who, in fact, had nothing to do with the holocaust!!!!' he wrote last June.
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'When the victims of the holocaust call for a holocaust,' El-Masri wrote in early May 2025.
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He has also downplayed the role of Hamas in the conflict on several occasions. 'This is NOT a war against Hamas. This is a genocidal war against the very existence of the Palestinian people,' he wrote in August 2024. In May 2025, he argued that ''Hamas' is the zionists' code word to dehumanize the Palestinian people.'
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