Obscene editorial in U. of Calgary newspaper

The National Post of Canada wrote last week:

A pro-Israel group says it has complained to Calgary police over Facebook comments made by a former university student group president who urged Palestinians to ‘‘spill blood.’’

“My body and soul are ready to fight and die,” wrote Ala’a Hamdan, former president of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, a University of Calgary student group. “This land will be proud that Palestinian babies are born men and women ready to spill their blood.”

In a battle hymn written to a son, Ms. Hamdan wrote: “I will soak a koffiah with your blood and save it to show to your siblings … I will be named the mother of the martyr.“

Members of the Calgarians United With Israel (CUWI) advocacy group copied the comments and posted them to their website.

“It’s extremely melodramatic and poorly written but beyond that, it’s hate speech, I think,” said Ryan Bellerose, who helped found CUWI. “This student group talks about justice and peace and she talks about blowing herself up and having her children blow themselves up. It’s hypocritical.”

It is difficult to interpret these writings as anything but advocating murder of Israeli Jews. Palestinian Arabs call suicide bombers and others who target civilians "martyrs." They also call anyone killed by the IDF to be martyrs as well, but this poem is talking about a mother pushing her son to become one, which means she wants him to actively attack Israeli Jews.

Advocating murder of a national group is pretty much the definition of incitement.

To publicize the disgusting writings of Hamdan and to denounce them is not an attack on free speech - it is free speech.

But look at this editorial in the university newspaper, the Gauntlet. They justify Hamdan's writings because they think she has a very good point. Why? Because the editors of this student newspaper don't know basic facts of history - they have been brainwashed with propaganda and aren't embarrassed to spout it themselves:

The conflict is complicated. Arguments on both sides are often fueled by emotion or religion, but the basic history is such.

Imagine it’s the 1940s. Jewish people are uprooted in Europe by the Nazis because of the Holocaust. An obscene number of them are murdered. The Second World War ends and the concentration camps are closed, but Jewish communities remain broken, individuals still stripped of their property and the stink of anti-Semitism continues to hang over much of Europe.

Under the banner of Zionism, sectors of the Jewish community have long advocated for a return to their ancient homeland, which is then referred to as the British mandate for Palestine. After the Second World War, the United Nations decides that the Zionists will get their wish, and much of Palestine transforms into the Jewish state of Israel.

The problem is that people already live there. And they don’t feel like leaving, so Israel colonizes them, violently.

A series of wars between Israel and the surrounding Arab states ensue. Arabs living in Israeli controlled territory — most of them identifying as Palestinians — are delegated to the status of second-class citizens, lacking the same political and civil rights as their Israelis elites. A flood of violence from both Palestinians and Israelis escalates every year.

These are only the basics.

These are the basics?

Zionism didn't start after World War II, as this implies. Jews had accepted partition plans twice and the Arabs rejected them. Zionists who had already built up much of Palestine over the previous decades always intended to live in peace with their Arab neighbors. The UN vote partition vote would have given Palestinian Arabs a state of their own and they rejected it because part was going to Jews. Most Palestinians would not have lived under Jewish rule under the plan. Within hours of the vote they started attacking Jews in buses and on the streets. When Israel finally declared independence, the Arabs were joined by the combined Arab armies from Transjordan, Egypt, Iraq and Syria. If the Jews would have lost they would have been slaughtered mercilessly, if you believe the rhetoric that Arab leaders said explicitly. Today, Arabs in Israel have the same rights as Jews, although there is unfortunately still some racism as there is everywhere else in the world. It pales next to the antisemitism of the Arab world that has remained constant for hundreds of years. And in no way, shape or form can Israeli actions be compared to the Holocaust, which seems to be an implication here, along with the idea that Jews are foreign colonizers when they are  in fact the indigenous people returning to their homeland.

The Gauntlet is not giving a basic history lesson. It is propagating a series of lies. It adds another lie, claiming that CUWI is calling for the student group to be disbanded, something they never did. They only asked that hate speech be denounced and that they be protected from incitement. (The exact request in their letter to the Student Union was "We are requesting the University of Calgary protect us from rhetoric and action on campus that exposes us to hatred, and we are asking to be provided with a safe environment that is conducive to our academic success. ")

Now, lies may be protected free speech, but there should be consequences for a newspaper - even a student newspaper - to have such reckless disregard for the truth.

Without any seeming knowledge of the terror war that Israel endured only a few years ago, the editorial assumes that Hamdan's poems refer to military actions, not attacks against women and children that characterize most historic Palestinian Arab attacks.

Naturally, given this false framework of the conflict, the newspaper understands Hamdan's anger and defends her right to call to murder people.

But if the media would start telling the truth about the Middle East, perhaps the next generation won't be so inclined to create pathetic poetic peaens to terrorism against Israeli Jews.