Palestinian flags wave wildly in the air. Students hiding their faces call for divestment from Israel, and accuse the Jewish State and the McGill administration of genocide.
Chalk graffiti boasts that “zionism=facism.” Somewhere on the bright green grass, a person has laid what looks like a bloodied sheet down, and placed disfigured dolls on top. It is August 29th, and this is the first walkout at McGill during the 2024 school year.
Despite the large number of students donning keffiyehs and enthusiastically joining in chants about “freeing Palestine from the River to the Sea,” many are unknowingly calling for the death of the Jews and the total destruction of Israel.
With so much anti-Israel disinformation out there, this doesn’t come as a surprise.
A good number of these “anti-Israel” followers have been attracted by infographics featuring watered-down information and gory photos, calls for intersectionality and the ability to save humanity, and the horrible number of civilian deaths in Gaza.
Their social media feeds are flooded with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish accounts. Blindly accepting surface-level information provided on social media and being swept up in the excitement of mob-like chants at protests has led them to a new kind of dangerous ignorance.
McGill’s Palestinian human rights club “informs” students in their classrooms that “McGill funds genocide instead of paying their teacher assistants” (McGill’s TAs are paid the lowest wage out of the top 10 Canadian schools and went on strike last spring); and students walk through the Rodik gates every night to see the sign stating “McGill University: leader in funding genocide.”
Charges against Israel bombard students in every corner of their lives. So, why not join the protests, repost on Instagram, and stylishly tie a keffiyeh around their purses and necks?
No critical analysis skills are employed. The adopted narrative is thoughtlessly accepted — regardless of the facts that heavily suggest otherwise — and students mindlessly accept that the conflict in the Middle East is black and white.
There are so many people who too easily accept the false claim that Israel is evil and needs to be dismantled, and that Palestinian resistance by any means is justified.
Setting aside the massive amounts of cognitive dissonance that must collectively occur in a movement that justifies the rape of innocent civilians and blinds itself to the horrors that terrorist organizations cruelly inflict upon their citizens, there is another significant problem with this movement’s growing presence at McGill.
Universities are meant to instill critical thinking skills — teaching their students how to engage with one another and the media they consume so that they may form their own opinions responsibly.
Yet, almost no college students at McGill or elsewhere engage critically with Israel — and McGill is happy to let them buy into the propaganda being spouted on campus, in classrooms, and even by faculty.
Our students do not take the time to understand the history of the region — what a genocide or apartheid actually is (and how it’s not even possible in Israel), or how Judaism and Zionism are intricately intertwined.
If students performed research on Judaism, Zionism, and the history of Israel and its regional conflicts to balance out their one-sided views, they would find that not only are virtually all specific issues misrepresented, but there is also an abundance of nuance in the conflict. Many “progressive” students would learn that the Gaza society they are championing outlaws homosexuality, oppresses all free speech and dissent, and calls for the murder of every Jew — inside and outside Israel.
When we say the Amidah (a traditional Jewish prayer), we face the remains of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. During Passover, when we celebrate and remember the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, we conclude our seder with “Next year in Jerusalem,” a tradition that the seder at the McGill encampment seemed to conveniently ignore.
This article is not a request for my peers to instantly reject what they believe and take every piece of information I’ve provided in this article at face value.
Rather, this is a call for students to engage in critical thinking and investigate the validity of every claim they encounter. As it stands, our campus has devolved into an ignorant atmosphere — primarily governed by mob rule, creating an environment where students feel afraid to identify as Jewish publicly and share beliefs openly.
Blindly following the crowd may give my peers a sense of security, peace of mind, and moral superiority — but it comes at a steep cost that undermines the mission of higher education and creates a noxious environment on campuses across the world.
This article was originally published on The Algemeiner.
