Prince George is a city in British Columbia, about 800 kilometres north of Vancouver, known for its rugged terrain and scenic vistas.

It is also home to one of Canada’s most outspoken anti-Israel activists, Gerry Chidiac, both as a writer and commentator, and in his capacity teaching Holocaust education to local high school students.

A deep dive into his record reveals some very troubling patterns which require attention and action on the part of all institutions associated with him.

HonestReporting Canada has, on at least nine previous occasions, exposed his bias and inaccuracy in his writings — a persistent and unaddressed trend going back to 2020.

Chidiac always frames himself as a voice of reason and moderation, but when examined closely, this image quickly crumbles. Chidiac constantly minimizes and excuses the actions of extremist players on the world stage, while categorically and unequivocally denouncing Israel on a constant basis for virtually any action it ever takes, no matter how minor or uncontroversial.

His non-stop demonization of Israel makes sense, given that he has admitted that he believes the world’s only Jewish state has no right to be a sovereign entity.

To take that case as an example of his manipulation tactics, Chidiac used the occasion of the killing of George Floyd and subsequent protest movement to try and exploit the situation for his own political agenda, suggesting that alleged censorship or criticism of those who advocate against Israel have been persecuted (ostensibly in a manner comparable to African-Americans in the US, given the context).

He baselessly claimed that Arab-Israelis, fully equal under Israeli law, “do not have equal rights,” and that pro-Palestinian academics are discriminated against for their views. While trying to present himself as the moderate, who merely wants “an ancient bond,” “peace,” and dialogue between different religions, his article celebrated discrimination against Israeli companies and totally ignored Hamas and other terrorist organization’s roles in creating the very political conditions he opposes.

For all his supposed anger at Israel being about concern for civilians caught in the crossfire, Chidiac has let the mask slip several times as well. He denounced the now-infamous pager operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon — arguably the most carefully targeted military operation in history, which directly singled out active Hezbollah terrorist fighters.

He falsely summarized the attack as “killing … children, and injuring thousands” (with no mention of the word Hezbollah) and cited notorious radical UK extremist antisemite George Galloway.

Another such moment saw Chidiac in September writing an entire article peddling the nonsensical and untrue “scholasticide” myth claiming that Israel is purposely destroying Palestinians’ educational institutions. He conveniently fails to mention the systemic abuse of educational institutions by terrorist organizations and mass indoctrination of children with vile antisemitic content in Palestinian schools, nor the physical damage done to schools in Israel from indiscriminate rocket attacks on civilian areas, nor the fact that it was only under the period of Israeli rule that universities in Judea & Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza were first created.

In a separate article on the education issue, Chidiac defended, downplayed, excused, and at times even denied the phenomenon of antisemitic indoctrination in the Palestinian territories, as well as drawing multiple false moral equivalences. He claims there is “no evidence” that Palestinian children are taught to kill Israelis, despite this plethora of information being so widely and publicly available for so many decades that this gaslighting hardly merits a serious response. Elsewhere, he avoids the issue by simply declaring that the research he read in preparing for the article conveniently “does not specifically examine preschool education in Palestine.”

How can someone be trusted to teach children about the Holocaust when his grasp of recent history and views on the community impacted by it are so clearly questionable?

Is he telling impressionable students that the systematic industrial-scale murder of six-million Jews and other minorities in Europe based on their ethnicity is somehow a comparable and equivalent event to the gradual displacement of 700,000 Palestinians during a war that their leaders initiated in 1948 — as he seems to imply in one of his articles? Is he claiming that the types of stereotypical and negative depictions of Jews that he has so readily dismissed in the Palestinian context were not antisemitic in the German context? Is he distorting the facts to favor his preferred political conclusions, such as when he wrote an entire article blanketly denying the existence of antisemitism in the Arab world without a mention of historical violence or the widespread collaboration and ideology dissemination between Nazis and Arab leaders during World War II? Or when he similarly denied that antisemitism frequently occurs in the pro-Palestinian protest movements today?

In one recorded lecture, he explicitly compares the Holocaust to the so-called Nakba, which he refers to as “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine” and said he “[doesn’t] understand why the topics need to be seen as mutually exclusive.” He also uses the term “innovation” to describe his approach to Holocaust education and says he “take(s) the risk” by teaching it this way. What is he referring to? Why does he focus so much of the framing of his Holocaust education efforts on how the issue relates to his feelings on Palestinian issues — even at times invoking comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel’s current defensive war in Gaza?

Disturbingly, he also attacks Holocaust survivor Elie Wisel for “not liv[ing] up to the ideals that he professed.” Why is he bringing a survivor’s personal political views (presumably referring to Wiesel’s support for Israel) into the teaching of his experiences as a victim of genocide?

Organizations working with this individual should take it upon themselves to closely review these troubling patterns at the first possible opportunity.