Boy was repeatedly targeted by Muslim peers; Parents say school took perpetrators’ side and failed to protect student.
By World Israel News Staff
One-hundred-and-fifty members of the Jewish and Israeli communities in Toronto, along with their supporters, walked an Israeli student to a local school after he was relentlessly targeted by antisemitic bullies.
Since the October 7th terror onslaught that triggered the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, Eitan Cohen has been viciously attacked both verbally and physically by his peers.
Both of Cohen’s parents are Israeli doctors who emigrated to Canada.
According to a Ynet report, Adi Cohen, the boy’s mother, said that the harassment began with Muslim students circling around her son and telling him that “they wanted to ‘do to him what Hamas did to Israel.'”
Speaking to Kan News, Cohen said that students had “told my son ‘we need to kill you.‘” They started pushing and kicking him.”
Cohen said that despite repeated incidents of antisemitic bullying, the school initially took the side of the perpetrators who harassed her son.
The bullying has only escalated since she filed a police report on the matter, due to inaction on the part of the school, she said.
In December, her son was physically assaulted on the school’s soccer field. That incident was also swept under the rug, she said, and followed by the same aggressors repeatedly cursing her son and making obscene gestures at him.
The Cohen family eventually filed a lawsuit against the Toronto School District for failing to protect the boy after an additional incident, in which his classmates pelted him with stones and spat at him while he walking to school.
On Friday, some 150 supporters of Israel and the Jewish community accompanied the boy to school.
“I feel so much better, and my son feels so much better because of the support he received,” Adi Cohen told the Toronto Sun.
In a media statement, the school claimed that it takes bullying seriously and prioritizes the safety of its students above all.