Emmy Rubin
Editor-in-chief
Via Emmy Rubin
Montreal4Palestine, an Instagram account that radicalizes pro Palestinians and Palestinian sympathizers in the Montreal area, announced an urgent call to action for protestors to ‘die-in’ at the McGill Y-Intersection on Thursday, March 28th. Over the past six months, pro Palestinian protests in Montreal have proven to be breeding grounds for anti Zionist rhetoric as well as displays of anti semitism. With this being said, the Jews of McGill, including this author, headed over to the Y-Intersection on Thursday morning, ready to respond should the events of the protest escalate.
Just past a sparse crowd of Keffiyeh-clad supporters and concerned Jewish students lay on the asphalt approximately twenty individuals, each outlined in chalk, reminiscent of bodies at a crime scene. A masked participant stood before the bodies, holding up a single piece of chalk, inviting any interested parties to lie on the ground and have their bodies outlined as well.
Sitting on the ground slightly above the prostrated bodies, a masked individual wrapped in a Keffiyeh cried into a megaphone, “This institution has made every student, staff, and faculty member complicit in the murder of our own community’s families and the bombings of our own community’s homes.”
As the speech progressed, tears could be heard in the speaker’s voice. However, one cannot be entirely certain that these tears were summoned out of anguish and not hate as the direction of the speech headed into familiar anti semitic territory. The speech continued with the assertion, “We have reached a critical point in our struggle for liberation from Zionist oppression. There is no option other than complete divestment and total academic boycott of the Zionist regime. To the administration, we say ‘Divest now or we will transfer! We will not pay for genocide, we will not pay for apartheid.’ We the students refuse to be complicit to the horrors carried out by the settler-colonial state occupying Palestine…”
Via Emmy Rubin
After the speaker finished their tirade against ‘Zionist oppressors’, another orator took their place at the megaphone. This time, there is no denying that the display of tears were conjured out of blatant hate with the utterance of the following statement: “Mass rape at the hands of the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) are taking place in Palestinian hospitals. After 2 days of being raped, a woman lost her ability to speak. Just yesterday, Israeli forces executed thirteen Palestinian children in Al-Shifa hospital.”
An article published the day before by Morocco World News entitled “Eyewitness Accuses Israel of Raping Women During Ongoing Al-Shifa Raid” echoed the speaker’s ‘facts’. It is pertinent to note that the author, Safaa Kasroui, closed their report by reiterating that “the mass killing and beheading of babies as well as systematic rape are false. Such claims were the major viral allegations propagated by the IOF and Israeli officials following the October 7 attack.”
Not only are the statements made by these pro Palestinian students blatantly libelous as it has been proven time and time again that all rape and murder charges against Hamas have been corroborated by the BBC, the New York Times and others, but they are an appropriation of suffering that is not even theirs. Some might remember that two days before this very die-in protest, an article was published in the New York Times about Amit Soussana, a former hostage rescued from Gaza. In the article, Soussana describes the sexual assault she suffered at the hands of Hamas while in captivity, confirmed as truthful testimony by the United Nations.
With the purportment of the aforementioned libels against the IDF (which they misname the Israeli Occupation Forces), the appropriation of our citizens’ suffering, and the accusations of ‘genocide’ being funded by ‘Jewish Money’, pro Palestinians at McGill are setting a dangerous precedent. What these students believe to be noble and revolutionary only succeeds in fostering fear among Jewish students on campus.
In an interview with The White and Blue, Jacqueline Lisbona, a Journalism student at Concordia visiting campus to study with a friend said, “As I was walking down the main path I saw this big flag so I went to check it out…I feel very uncomfortable. Even if they’re not loudly preventing anyone from accessing the buildings, the fact that they’re waving around signs, lying down, and blaming us, saying on a loudspeaker that ‘we’re against Zionism, we’re against Jews’, very publicly.…it makes me feel so unsafe”
As heard in the protestors’ speeches, one of the goals of the die-in was to pressure the McGill administration into seeing how serious the students of McGill truly are in their conviction to cut all ties with Israel. However, according to Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Graduate student at Harvard University who has borne witness to every shade of pro Palestinian protest, stated that this type of protest is nothing more than “peak performative activism. Rather than engage in meaningful debate or dialogue, demonstrators simply take up space to inconvenience passersby, offering no clear intellectual or moral substance.”
When asked if this display of pro Palestinian activism will in reality have any effect on McGill administration to enact change, Samuel Levkovsky, a student in the Desautels school of Management present at the protests asserted, “Definitely not. If anything, I think this will disenfranchise people that are more centrist and uninvolved in these things.”
One can only hope that the only damage done by these continuous anti Israel protests is the sting of ridicule felt upon the cheeks of the protestors. However, no matter how childish and dramatic these protests may be, they are not to be condoned. They are, all the same, planting seeds of hate on our college campuses. The only way to destroy these seeds? To stand up for Israel and the Jewish community with integrity and fight for what is just.
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