Dearest McGill Daily – are you still calling yourselves that? Or have you officially converted into the SPHR newsletter? Two articles about Israeli Apartheid Week and an editorial promoting the week’s events? This is almost as good as when you had your whole cover devoted to Gaza the same week as the General Assembly (GA), and in that same issue put your GA endorsements in the News section. And I understand you graciously allowed a dissent (curiously and misleadingly titled abstention) underneath your first editorial. But, then again, I’ve never seen an editorial go forward with dissent before, and the anti-Israel piece was penned as a traditionally anonymous editorial while the dissenter was forced to give her name, effectively making it a Hyde Park on the editorial page.
I’d like to congratulate you on the first piece’s excellence in deception – attempting to dilute a complex conflict into simplistic allocations of blame; belittling the legitimate security concerns of Israelis; failing to find irony in the fact that you are promoting an elected Arab official speaking about how his country doesn’t give Arabs any political rights; ignoring the fact that Arab gays and women have more rights in Israel than in any Arab country and that gay Palestinians have been granted refugee status by Israel; neglecting to acknowledge the respected speakers this week who are disputing the anti-Israel narrative, like Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh….
I could go on, but I mainly wanted to congratulate you for doing your best to delegitimize and marginalize supporters of Israel on campus. I can assure you they will no longer take much of what you have to say too seriously. But aside from the congrats, I do have a favour to ask you: please stop making Jewish students feel targeted on campus. Let’s keep the blood libel to the history books.
Mookie Kideckel
U2 History
President of Hillel McGill