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Ari David Blaff
National Post, May 6, 2025
“I feel othered and isolated on almost a daily basis.”
Ethan Elharrar remembers having a single month of normal college life at Toronto Metropolitan University. He was anxious about leaving Montreal for Toronto, living on his own for the first time in a new city, beginning a new program. He was nervous but excited.
He chose TMU because it offered the only degree in the country with “hands-on experience” for graphic communications management. September 2023 went smoothly; he bonded with his roommates and adjusted to TMU’s downtown campus.
He was at home for a brief stay in Montreal on October 7 when Hamas terrorists broke through the border fence with Israel and ignited a brutal conflict that still burns today. “At the beginning, we had a week of people actually feeling sorry for us and then it just turned,” he told National Post.
Over the coming months of Elharrar’s first semester, he began posting on social media about the Israelis abducted by Palestinian terror groups, and was kicked off a private Instagram group chat with over 100 classmates in his program.
He began to feel very isolated on campus as a Jew. ...SOURCE