Human rights orgs say about Israel what Canada’s political class won’t

My university, under bullying pressure from the Ford government, has decided to bully three student groups who jointly expressed solidarity with Palestinians and dared to historically contextualize the October 7 massacre conducted by the military wing of Hamas.
I would have preferred that the University Administration had stood up to Ford – who, it is widely believed, is looking to distract attention from the Greenbelt scandal. They could have behaved as the educators most of them once were and seized upon the deadly acts of October 7 and the predictably deadly reprisal as an opportunity to promote peace and mutual understanding among the members of the student body.
By acting in the binary way it did, the University administration can only inflame the divisions which naturally exist on Middle East questions. By implication, the Administration’s stance sends out a message to faculty to be very careful around the free and open discussions which our classrooms seek to foster.
The university has every reason to be proud of the steps it has been taking to encourage the teaching of principles inspired by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There is no question that teaching about settler colonialism and the frank – daily – acknowledgement of the peoples upon whose land the university is located has had the effect of raising a new generation of Canadian youth literate in the ways of settler colonialism and the many human rights which were ignored and the thousands of childrens’ deaths and the vast tracts of stolen land which were visited upon the Indigenous Peoples by the Canadian colonial project and the terrible violence and multigenerational trauma it entailed.
We should not be surprised, then, if this new generation of Canadian university students, perceive a familial relationship between settler colonial regimes wherever they may appear.
In that regard, and without wanting to over-generalize, I imagine that the new generation of Canadian university students are simply much better informed than administrators of the ideology of terra nullius and the endemic violence brought about by settler colonial regimes, They are also aware as no other generation has been of the difficult steps which in Canada are (slowly) being adopted to tell the truth as a first step toward reconciliation.
For the record, if readers wonder about my position on the conflict. I would like to paraphrase the recent words of the Hungarian-Canadian Dr Gabor Mate, Holocaust survivor and life-long advocate for trauma-informed care, whose position on the Israel-Palestine conflict I find the most congenial: I am neither pro-Palestinian nor pro-Israel. I am pro-truth. I humbly line up my position with that Dr Mate and I recommend to everyone that they screen his moving YouTube video interview on Russell Brand’s channel.