By posting the student video in a host of online venues, pro-Israel apologists ensured that their outrage would go viral, that it would criminalize an innocent young student, and stoke anti-Arab sentiments among their adherents. But the irony in this propaganda effort is this: as with COVID, the viral spread of digital matter does not discriminate politically. It can both serve and destroy its users.

Not only deficient in logic, not only misguided in its quest for the veritable culprits, the IHRA’s so-called guidelines have lent themselves to immoral policies. The false equation made between condemnation of the Israeli state and the gas chambers is tantamount to a rhetorical ploy that desecrates the memory of all those who died in the Holocaust.

How and why did our former government facilitate the extradition of one of its citizens by withholding critical information that would otherwise have saved him years of torment? Given this egregious irregularity in judicial and government proceedings, and given that Canada’s extradition law offers few, if any, safeguards to protect the requested individual from extradition, it behooves all Canadians to ponder seriously the extent of their civil liberties.

We ask you to resist the false alarm that your Zionist friends sound when they cry “anti-Semitism!” as the proverbial boy might cry “wolf!” For those who do so are robbing a horrendous historic episode of its gravity, confusing legitimate dissent with genocide. Criticism is not Kristallnacht; challenges to the occupation are not the gas chambers.