Over the last 10 months of the Hamas-Israel war, there are some opinion columns which are guilty of peddling falsehoods or inaccuracies, while others fail to provide full context of the situation.

However, there are some commentaries which are explicit in their whitewashing and even justification of Palestinian terrorism that they are heinous and repulsive.

Nir Hagigi’s August 17 column in a Carleton University newspaper The Charlatan entitled: “As a Jewish person, understanding the context of ‘intifada’ is critical,” is an example of exactly that.

Hagigi, the president of Carleton’s chapter of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), an organization which has defended Hamas’ use of violence, spent his commentary attempting to sanitize the Arabic term “Intifada,” as meaning “shaking off.”

While Hagigi delved deep into the history of the term, any reasonable observer recognizes that, in contemporary usage, “Intifada” does not mean non-violent resistance, but in the context of Israel, it means violent terrorism against the Jewish State and its citizens.

In his attempt to mask the violent nature of “Intifada,” Hagigi also rewrote history, claiming that “The two Palestinian intifadas were marked by widespread civil disobedience and protests,” meekly acknowledging that there “slight periods of violence during both uprisings.”

What Hagigi called “slight periods of violence” is a five-year campaign of violent Palestinian terrorism which included mass murder attacks against Israeli teenagers in a discotheque, murdering dozens of elderly Israelis at a Passover Seder in a seaside hotel, and more. A favourite technique of Palestinian terrorists at the time were suicide bombings, when a perpetrator would don a suicide vest, add ball bearings or nails for extra impact, enter a dense civilian area such as a restaurant, bus or elsewhere, and blow themselves up, hoping to take as many Jews with them as possible.

But before long, Hagigi soon dropped the mask entirely, no longer seeking to downplay Palestinian terrorism, and began simply justifying it, claiming that it was nothing more than “built-up frustration” which somehow explains deliberately targeting civilians.

Hagigi’s contempt for the truth is evident throughout his column, repugnantly comparing Palestinian terrorists murdering civilians with Jews during the Holocaust fighting against Nazis, writing that “during the Holocaust especially, Jews in the Białystok Ghetto and the Treblinka Concentration Camp, for instance, set buildings on fire, used Molotov cocktails and bottles filled with acid, exploded a petrol tank and stole weapons to resist the Nazi occupation.”

What Hagigi conveniently leaves out is that the Jews did not, either during the Holocaust or afterwards, mass murder regular German, Polish and Ukrainian civilians for no reason other than their national identity.

Just when readers might think that he could plumb the depths of moral depravity no further, Hagigi managed to do just that. Standing upon the graves of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis to advance his hateful agenda, Hagigi calls Gaza “an extermination camp.” Importantly, comparing contemporary Israeli policy to the Nazis fits the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism.

Unlike in the Holocaust, when Jews were murdered on an industrial scale – in forests, then thrown into pits, gassed to death in gas chambers, and more by Nazis and their collaborators – Israel is fighting Hamas, a genocidal Islamic terrorist group which, like the Nazis before them, seeks the mass murder of Jews.

And yet, even as Hamas seeks genocide and uses its own people as human shields, Israel actively warns Hamas of its military activities, sends in hundreds of aid trucks daily, and puts its own soldiers directly in harms way to minimize civilian casualties.

Hagigi’s column in The Charlatan, which called Palestinian terrorism “a people’s cry against oppression,” is as devoid of facts as it is a sacrifice on the altar of moral degeneracy, twisting reality and the memory of actual victims of genocide to advance his extremist agenda.

Hagigi’s comments go so far beyond legitimate commentary into what can reasonably be seen as an explanation, or even invitation, to violence against Israelis, and must be immediately condemned by both The Charlatan and Carleton University.