Juno News - October 15, 2026


OCT. 7： “Wear your keffiyeh to school day” at Peel Secondary School

Mentioned
Rick Hansen Secondary School Cheryl Petruzzani Fadi Mahana Hamilton
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Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

157.35

Word count

460

Sentence count

21

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 A student group in Mississauga promoted a wear your keffiyeh to school day on October 7th,
00:00:06.140 three years after the Hamas-led massacre and kidnapping of innocent Israelis.
00:00:11.420 The event was organized by Rick Hansen Secondary School's Palestinian Student Association,
00:00:16.820 and their Instagram told students to wear the keffiyeh as a show of support for the October 7th attackers.
00:00:23.060 While the Peel District School Board ignored my request for comment,
00:00:26.280 the school has since quietly removed the post.
00:00:29.660 But first survivors and families of those murdered are taken hostage on October 7th.
00:00:35.000 This is a time of grief.
00:00:37.040 And while the October 7th where your keffiyeh to school event is profoundly disrespectful, 0.78
00:00:42.980 it's hardly an isolated case of overt Palestinianism in the education system. 0.80
00:00:48.160 Let me take you back to last December at another Peel Region District School Board
00:00:51.840 secondary school in Brampton, where a teacher called Fadi Mahana prepared a multi-panel hallway display
00:00:58.700 that was titled Christmas in Palestine. 0.59
00:01:01.520 Innocent enough, right?
00:01:02.960 But when you look more closely at the display items,
00:01:06.000 it's clear that it contained example after example
00:01:09.300 of historical revisionism.
00:01:11.480 The display turned Christmas-themed discussion
00:01:14.380 about Bethlehem, as we know, the birthplace of Jesus,
00:01:18.180 into a discussion about land claims
00:01:20.160 and grievances over the war in Israel.
00:01:23.320 And now let me take you to Hamilton,
00:01:24.980 where that board spent more than $70,000
00:01:28.120 on a single session of mandatory Islamophobia training that, again, could be described as
00:01:34.460 highly divisive propaganda. When I submitted a Freedom of Information request to obtain the
00:01:39.400 training, the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board refused to disclose on the grounds that
00:01:45.200 releasing it posed a threat to safety or health. But listen, I still managed to obtain screenshots
00:01:52.020 and an audio transcript. Teachers, including Jewish teachers, were gathered in a room together
00:01:58.180 as the director of education, Cheryl Petruzzani, told them to all, quote, sit in the discomfort.
00:02:05.160 Items such as the keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag were said to be representation of belief,
00:02:09.960 struggle, and hope, and displaying them representing an act of resistance. Now,
00:02:14.160 the trainers also said some really interesting things about jihad. They said that it means to
00:02:19.320 struggle, as in struggling to do better and struggling against yourself, obfuscating some
00:02:24.780 of the more violent aspects of jihad, while al-Akbar simply meant God is creator. And to be
00:02:31.800 honest, that level of whitewashing has already been legitimized by the Ontario curriculum.
00:02:36.620 Another Juno News exclusive exposed that the grade 11 world religions course in the curriculum
00:02:41.920 similarly said that jihad is nothing more than a personal struggle, essentially akin to indigenous
00:02:48.260 spiritual rituals. There was only so many examples that I could give of this phenomenon
00:02:52.480 in schools. So to find out more, check it out at Juno News.