Terry Newman: A year in the life at Hamas HQ, I mean, a Canadian university

It has now been a year since Hamas attacked Israel, took hostages, and murdered around 1200, not only Israelis, but also foreign nationals, including eight Canadians. The attack happened thousands of kilometres from where I was teaching, at McGill and Concordia universities, but the effects on campus were shocking and immediate. And I don’t see any sign that universities are prepared for its anniversary, unless you call prepared asking professors to move their classes online, and insisting it has nothing to do with safety.

October 7, 2023 was a Saturday, and the news that evening told Canadians there was a surprise attack on Israeli civilians and border posts. It was still early, but Hamas had already taken credit, and the video of a woman — hands tied behind her back, back of her pants bloodied, body being shoved into a vehicle — had made its first appearance on news networks.

On Oct. 8, a McGill University student group, Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR), celebrated the attack on their social media accounts as a “heroic victory” against the “fangs” of their enemy. The group then called upon residents of Montreal to celebrate Hamas’ “success,” exhorting viewers to meet and march at 2pm. “Victory is ours!” it told account followers. And meet to celebrate they did, Montreal residents, students, administrators, and some professors — a massive block party to commemorate dead Israelis. And this was before Israel had even retaliated.

You’d think the murder of civilians around the age of these university students would have evoked the smallest ounce of empathy, but it didn’t.

Universities are supposedly progressive spaces. What if this had been an attack on LGBTQ, indigenous, or black students while at a concert or in their homes? I have no doubt that condemnation for attacks on members of any of these groups would have been swift and unrelenting. T-shirts would have been made. A new rainbow would have been drafted for the occasion. Corporations and governments would have rushed to get in on the action and tweet their condemnation.

But the girl in the bloodied pants didn’t have the right ethnicity or gender identity to evoke pity from members of universities, even in those early hours, for the sole reason that she was a Jew.

In that first week, videos popped up on the messaging service Telegram, scenes of Hamas perpetrators entering kibbutz’s, attacking families, shooting dogs, throwing bombs into shelters where concert-goers hid, and kidnapping hostages at the Nova music festival into which they had parachuted.

These videos were filmed like a first-person shooter game, uploaded by the monsters who engaged in the terror. They had not yet made it to the official news stations, but some of my students had already received them — they must have been on someone’s VIP mailing list — and were happily perusing them in classrooms that first week after the attack.

I know, because I had to ask one of my students that semester to put their phone away. He kept showing the videos to a bunch of buddies at his group table. After several asks, he finally stopped and put his phone away. However, after that, he became increasingly hostile towards me for the rest of the semester, rarely showing up for class, draping himself in a keffiyeh, and none of this made any sense — I never mentioned what I saw on his phone, nor did I ever discuss politics in class.

Harassment of Jewish students and professors started occurring on campuses. Support from administrators was almost non-existent, as evidenced by lawsuits.

Many Jewish professors, students, and those against the October 7 attacks didn’t know who they could talk to or trust on campus. We were horrified to see some of our colleagues, professors, librarians, and administrative staff had signed an open letter supporting McGill’s SPHR group.

We reached out to each other privately, like the French underground, through email and messaging on social media, checking in on each other and sharing stories. All of us wondered if we were living in a Black Mirror episode, a dystopia where the events of October 7 had been washed down the memory hole for everyone except us.

Concordia’s student-run Hive Cafe was, and probably still is, decked out as if it were Hamas headquarters, with propaganda posters and a keffiyeh hanging above the cash register — so welcoming to diverse populations.

An Israeli table at Concordia with pictures of the hostages was attacked. The students involved quickly moved to the steps of McGill to celebrate with a bullhorn, yelling, “We terrified them,” speaking of their fellow students.

There have been countless acts of campus vandalism caught on video and posted to social media by SPHR themselves, with the culprits’ faces, of course, masked.

McGill let the situation get so out-of-hand that their urine-trenched encampment had to eventually be cleared and dismantled by private security.

My last semester wrapped up with me overhearing a student getting permission from their professor to do a presentation on jihad, which the student informed him is “all about family,” and a seemingly deranged student (intern at a Montreal aerospace company, to boot) during one of my classes, yelling out, “Genocide all the rats!”

That last one was shrugged off by everyone I consulted at the university as a behavioural problem, instead of what it likely was — a security issue. I didn’t have the energy to pursue it. I had to schedule an EKG because my smartwatch was constantly telling me that my heart rate was elevated.

None of this had to happen. Universities have clearly defined codes of conduct and rules about rights and responsibilities — harassment, vandalism, and stopping classes are all covered under these regulations. Yet, campuses seemed, and still seem, afraid to enforce them. Can you imagine any other place of work, say, a bank, casually avoiding protecting their employees and clients?

I see antisemitism in Canada as having two main sources — universities and ill-prepared newsrooms. It was clear to me throughout the entire year that the media was exacerbating the situation. Codes of conduct can be used at universities to stem antisemitism, but what about newsrooms?

Most newsrooms have had no idea how to cover October 7 or its fallout. False reports circulate, casualty numbers and their sources go unquestioned. Many lean heavily into overly sentimental broadcasts and articles that frame Israel as an aggressor, no matter how surgically it attempts to deal with an impossible situation. No amount of calls made to warn civilians, nor flyers dropped, seem able to shake some newsrooms from their framing of Israelis as bloodthirsty. None appear to even realize that the destruction of Israel, not “resistance,” is, in fact, the main feature of Hamas and all other Iranian proxies, not a bug. Or they just don’t care.

National Post

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