A highly controversial proposal that seeks to weaponize the concept of racism and demonize opponents of Palestinian terrorism was given a sanitized platform recently by CityNews.

The May 30 article entitled: “TDSB accelerates plan to combat Anti-Palestinian Racism in schools,” was written by Ziad Arab-Oagley, a reporter and anchor at OMNI News’ Arabic edition, who regularly reports on Arab and Islamic issues.

The report shared that the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) recently voted to introduce a plan to combat ‘Anti-Palestinian Racism,’ or APR. In it, Arab-Oagley quoted one trustee, Debbie King, as saying that “the motion really speaks to advancing the work of being able to address anti-Palestinian erasure and school life as part of our combating hate strategy.”

Arab-Oagley quoted King as offering an example of this apparent scourge of racism: “whether that was a student wanting to write an essay based on their lived experience, and that being questioned or being deterred from doing that.”

At first glance, any form of discrimination, no matter how it appears to be largely illusory, is to be opposed, and any effort to combat it ought to be applauded.

However, APR is not an effort to combat a form of racism, as Arab-Oagley would have readers believe. It is a purely political effort aimed at stifling opponents of an extremist Palestinian narrative, and weaponizing the concept of racism.

The APR effort has been brought to the fore primarily as a result of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association and its head, Dania Majid, who signed an open letter shortly after the October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel which justified Palestinian terrorism.

According to Majid, examples of APR can include “denying the nakba or Palestinian ties to their land,” or pointing out that large numbers of Palestinian “are supporters or terror or hate.”

The ‘nakba,’ Arabic for catastrophe, is a term which refers to Israel’s independence, and according to this proposal, anyone who denies that Israel’s independence is a catastrophe is apparently an anti-Palestinian racist. Anyone who ignores the widespread support for terrorism and extremism in Palestinian society is apparently a racist, too.

This extremist position has been adopted by a number of anti-Israel activists, ranging from Liberal Member of Parliament Salma Zahid, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Amira Elghawaby, Canada’s special representative on combating Islamophobia.

Despite the highly controversial nature of this proposal, not once did Arab-Oagley share with readers any details about what makes APR so contentious, nor did he quote any opponent to the APR, either a school trustee or anyone else.

While it remains unclear whether anything will come of the TDSB’s plans, given a recent announcement from the provincial government that it will be giving extended powers to the education minister to oversee school boards, that does not give CityNews or Ziad Arab-Oagley a free pass to write a puff piece on a scandalous attempt to stifle free speech in Canada’s largest school board.

The Orwellian-named ‘Anti-Palestinian Racism’ proposal is not an attempt to combat discrimination, but an effort aimed at providing a smokescreen to extremist Palestinian narratives and silencing those who dare to speak out against it, and the news media has a responsibility not to hide the truth, but to report it.