The spring semester and academic year has come to a close, and just as in previous years, anti-Israel talking points have taken centre stage.
Delving into reporting on campus politics, Leah Hennig and Kathryn Johnson reported on how “Former students and professor file Charter challenge for encampment removal” in the University of Alberta’s campus newspaper, The Gateway.
On April 30, The Ubyssey published an op-ed by Carmella Gray-Cosgrove, on behalf of Apartheid Free UBC, claiming “We advocated for Palestine at Senate. UBC didn’t want us to.”
Henning and Johnson elected to provide context by acknowledging Hamas as a terrorist organization that launched an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 which “Israel launched a military campaign in Gaza [in response to] and is estimated to have killed 75,000 Palestinians.” Still, the crux of the report is aimed at amplifying the perspective of the two students and professor who are “‘[seeking] to establish that Palestinian life is not an exception to the Charter.’”
Gray-Cosgrove’s column is functionally the same, launching right into accusations against Israel (invasions, genocide, apartheid, and so on), arguing that the universities ties with Israeli institutions are “partnerships that violate our basic human rights.”
Through these pieces, two different routes of navigating campus politics to assert the anti-Israel narrative are demonstrated, and two different journalistic ways of uncritically platforming said narrative are, too.
Concordia University’s The Link published Samuel Kayll’s report on April 29 about how the “CSU approves affinity group policy, club rules update and councillor pay increase at special meeting.” Like The Gateway article on the Charter challenge, the article reads as generally neutral, reporting on student union motions and decisions. Still, it demonstrates how seemingly routine journalism can play into the politicization of both anti-Israel beliefs and anti-Jewish measures.
On the other hand, Toronto Metropolitan University’s student newspaper, The Eyeopener, reported on April 7 about how an “Off-campus event featuring IDF soldier brings calls to revoke SSI student group status.” Like the article in The Gateway, this article gave a platform for anti-Israel groups’ notions about a Students Supporting Israel (SSI) event – bringing “foreign war criminals” on campus – and their broader group status.
These four articles demonstrate the ways in which some student groups are approaching and contesting academic systems to proliferate an anti-Israel agenda, and how student journalism uncritically amplifies their narratives, shaping how readers understand whose worldview, speech, and safety is being threatened or codified. More notably, these patterns often occur under what appears as routine, procedural news coverage.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been at the center of global conflict for a few years now, given its widespread support for its terrorist proxies, and university life has not been immune to this geopolitical reality.
The Plant, Dawson College’s student paper, published an April 15 article by Atika Ume Fazal, “How Iran Finds Itself at the Epicenter of Global Politics.” Many important aspects of the current conflict are accurately reported, but the Islamic Regime of Iran’s role as an Islamist state – which plays a central role in its decades-long campaign against Israel and the United States, and its stoking tensions and violence in the region – is largely ignored.
Fazal used passive language to describe how the protest movement in Iran resulted in “7,000 to 30,000 civilian deaths,” rather than attributing the suppressive, violent campaign to Iran’s theocratic government; similar is Fazal’s description of how “Hezbollah joined the conflict on Iran’s side” which passively omits its role as a terror proxy of the regime based in Lebanon that has perpetuated a decades-long conflict with Israel.
On April 9, Brendan Poste published “Opinion: CUSA should not be afraid to condemn the war on Iran” in Carleton University’s newspaper, The Charlatan. The student union released and retracted a statement condemning U.S./Israel operations against the Islamic Republic of Iran; Poste claimed that that “those who demand U.S. intervention are incapable of learning from the last two decades of war… bombs do not lead to democracy.”
The view that “the Islamic Republic has created more harm and destruction in the region” are dismissed by Poste. The regime’s recent (and historic) actions, even its domestic repression, are completely neglected, and instead current military operations are juxtaposed to previous U.S.-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and so forth. By utilizing a simplistic framing of the U.S./Israel operations and neglecting mention of any of the regime’s actions, Poste positions the conflict as just another example of Western intervention in the Middle East.
In spite of these patterns of news coverage in student journalism, the complex reality for students affected by both global affairs and its impact on campus has also been covered.
The Eyeopener, for example, published an article on April 7 by Amira Benjamin reporting on how Iranian students have been rallying for tuition support from the government since the war & the regime’s domestic repression have made tuition payment infeasible. Less than a month later, on May 3, Benjamin and Nadine Alsaghir covered the developing story around the “President of pro-Israel student group [suing] TMU for $1.3 million, [alleging] ‘poisoned environment’ for Jewish students.”
The academic year may be over, but anti-Israel activists continue to have their complaints turned into fodder for ‘news’ stories on campus, alongside historical-revisionist opinion columns.
