Photo source: Dallas Duncan, University of Toronto
On September 11, 2024, Toronto ER Doctor Dallas Duncan reposted the following to his social media feed: “Doctors shouldn’t be involved in politics’ ER doc here to say I’ll stop being involved in politics when thoughts/prayers are able to fix bullet holes.”
As a cardiac anesthesiologist and assistant professor in the Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine department at University of Toronto, he responded to the statement that argued that “clinicians should try hard to stay apolitical in the public sphere” with the retort, “This is what privilege looks like.”
But mixed into Duncan’s posts and reposts on his personal X (formerly Twitter) account about “peri-operative anaphylaxis,” clean water in the Ontario reserve of Neskantaga, and systemic racism in Canada is a rhetoric that arguably crosses the line between mere political involvement and into double standards, blatant tokenization and demonization, particularly when it comes to Israel.
One post Duncan shared on September 14 particularly exhibits his denialism, as it attempts to compare tunnel networks under hospitals in Toronto to tunnel networks in Judea & Samaria (“West Bank”), and by extension, in Gaza, arguing that the latter does “not provide justification for the atrocities committed by the IDF.”
This attempt to absolve terrorist groups from any responsibility or guilt for their terrorist activity in the name of hating Israel is not a one-off for Duncan. It’s the same denialism that enables Duncan to share posts like one from author Naomi Klein claiming that Israel is using ceasefire discussions that “never seem to go anywhere” as a ruse to commit non-existent crimes like colonization and genocide, along with other posts denying the growing influence of Hamas in the West Bank, and claiming it’s being used as a ruse by Israel to just attack the region. Or another post that disregards the undeniable double standards and demonization the United Nations exhibits against Israel. It’s also why Duncan can so easily dismiss UNRWA’s proven connection to Hamas, or blame Israel for “fund[ing] Hamas.”
The list goes on, but this demonstrates the lengths Duncan goes to demonize Israel in its multi-front war against Islamic regime-backed terror proxies. It isn’t enough that “Gaza IS A HEALTH CRISIS,” like he claims; for Duncan, only Israel can be at fault — even for the terrorism it faces daily.
Click below to see more content posted and reshared by Dallas Duncan:
It is why he was compelled to share a post about the infamous (and baseless) letter in the Lancet journal claiming that 186,000 Gazans have been killed. Or how he so freely blames Israel for assassinating Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ “primary negotiator” in ceasefire talks, in “bad faith” (as this post he shared claims) but doesn’t blame, for example, the Islamic Republic of Iran for protecting and funding terror leaders like Haniyeh, or Haniyeh himself for leading the Canadian-designated terrorist group & justifying its attack in Israel on October 7 and nearly every day since.
But the double standards do not start nor end with absolving terrorists of guilt or pitting all the blame on Israel. Duncan has publicly supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) efforts by the anti-Israel mob at the University of Toronto. He turned to his X feed on September 2 to indicate that he will continue to advocate for this movement as the school year began, reposting this. It would be hardly surprising to find Duncan at a University of Toronto illegal occupation (again) or protest in the near future.
This can be why Duncan took to his X page to deny the ongoing struggles of Jewish and Israeli students across Canadian campuses like McGill University, Toronto Metropolitan University and University of Toronto. As he claims, the safety of Jewish students on university campuses is being “wielded as a tool of oppression” as it supposedly is in Israel, holding that the experiences of Jews and Israelis in academia is merely “discomfort,” which needs to be distinguished from feeling “unsafe.”
This dismissal of Jewish and Israeli experiences, feelings, and concerns in and out of academia is repeatedly exhibited on Duncan’s X page through posts and reposts. It begs the question: can Jewish and Israeli patients consider themselves safe in Duncan’s hands at the University Health Network (UHN) at Toronto General Hospital and do his posts violate UHN’s social media policies?
We see the repeated use of and reference to “apartheid,” “genocide,” “decolonization” and more across Duncan’s X feed. His incessant anti-Israel drivel on social media indicates the patterns of speech, beliefs and logic that most who prop themselves as “pro-Palestine” and “allies” engage in. It is Duncan’s treatment of the Palestinian cause or the war against Hamas in Gaza as a unique, unparalleled situation which enables him to perpetuate double standards and demonization of not just Israel, but also of Jews in and out of the Diaspora, that places him alongside most Israel haters that insist “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” before they exemplify that it, in fact, almost always is.
