The director of the sexual assault center at Canada’s University of Alberta sparked outcry Friday for signing on to an open letter denying Hamas-led terrorists raped women during their devastating October 7 onslaught in southern Israel.
Samantha Pearson signed the letter, titled “Stand with Palestine: Call on Political Leaders to End Their Complicity in Genocide,” which slammed center-left New Democratic Party leader Jagmeet Singh for repeating “the unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence,” among other critiques of the lawmaker on the issue.
The center’s account on X has since been deactivated.
The letter was authored by Susan Kim, a city councilor in Victoria, and Sarah Jama, a member of Ontario’s provincial parliament who was booted from the NDP over remarks only three days after the October 7 massacre calling Israel an “apartheid” state while ignoring Hamas’s atrocities.
Police have begun building several sexual assault cases against terrorists, citing eyewitnesses, video evidence, testimony from terrorists and photographs of victims’ bodies that all point toward such offenses.
The police confirmed a Times of Israel investigation that found physical evidence of sexual assault was broadly not collected from October 7 victims, amid the still ongoing need to identify bodies and complications posed by an active warzone.
Rape kits, which have a 48-hour window to be collected after an assault, were not prioritized, since the area remained a battle zone at that time.
Despite the evidence of rape and other brutal atrocities committed by terrorists, some anti-Israel activists have waged a campaign of denial against them.
The @AntisemitismCA account on X, which posted the letter, wrote: “The message is clear, believe all women, except Jewish women.”
“Is it the Sexual Assault Centre’s policy to turn away women who come to them with “unverified” claims?”
In a recent video, Jama also expressed her skepticism of Hamas atrocities, claiming “there is no actual evidence of these rapes and the babies with their heads cut off, all these things are pieces of misinformation.”
“So I think it shows the strength of the Zionist lobby here in Canada and the ways in which they were able to pressure an entire government operation to censure me indefinitely until I apologized,” she said in a video shared by @AntisemitismCA.
Jama’s letter, signed by several pro-Palestinian and progressive groups, called on Canada’s federal lawmakers to resign for “facilitating Israeli-led genocide” against the Palestinians, without providing evidence of the claim.
The letter claimed that an Israeli strike hit Gaza’s al-Ahli Hospital in October, stating that Doctors Without Borders and the Anglican Church that owns the medical center said so.
Evidence gathered by Israel, the United States and numerous news agencies has found the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile. Images the morning after the blast showed that the hospital itself was not hit, but rather the parking lot.
The letter slams lawmakers for “failing to recognize Israeli occupation as ‘terrorist’ and only directing this term at Palestinian resistance,” arguing they “perpetuate an Islamophobic trope.”
“Your language is fueling the collective trauma being experienced by your constituents, and inciting hate crimes against Palestinians and Muslims,” the letter read.
War erupted after Hamas’s shock October 7 invasion of southern Israeli communities under cover of thousands of rockets, when thousands of terrorists killed about 1,200 people, a majority of them civilians of all ages in their homes and people at an outdoors music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, and kidnapped some 240 into the Strip.
