Dear Free Press
Re: “Bubble zones sought after protests clash over Hamas” AKA “Pro-Palestinian protest at Jewish campus sparks call for safety-zone legislation”
Thank you for changing the headline of Chris Kitching’s article on the event by Students Supporting Israel at the Asper Community Campus.
The body of the article raises good questions about the appropriateness of protesting religious spaces.
However, even after the removal of the gross mischaracterization from the headline, the second paragraph of the article gratuitously invokes Hamas, biasing the discussion.
Why does the article prominently invoke memory of the violent and cruel attack on October 7, 2023, without any mention of the more salient point that the event that raised the discussion platformed soldiers of the army that has been committing a genocide for more than 500 days?
(The Rome Statute, of which Canada is a signatory, defines war crimes and genocide and other states’ obligations not to participate in or supporter perpetrators. The International Court of Justice has more than a year ago ruled it is plausible that the state of Israel is guilty of genocide. Yet the slaughter and destruction has not only continued but intensified.)
We should have discussions about protecting the privilege of religious persons to practice their faith traditions unharassed. But in so doing, we must acknowledge that when religiously-designated spaces function like community centres, hosting all kinds of events with other emphases, including overtly political and ideological matters, clear principles for protecting religious zones become harder to discern.
But it’s especially difficult to come to fair conclusions if discussions start with inflammatory conversation stoppers and unmentioned facts.
**The FreeP only wants to publish letters that are original, so I’m holding off publishing this for a while until I’m sure they won’t use it.
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