When a university department claims to be committed to the precept of fighting “anti-racism,” and then willingly embraces open and unapologetic discrimination against a marginalized group, it sounds like the butt of a joke, but it’s the reality at Concordia University.

For more than 20 years, Montreal’s Concordia University has had a sordid reputation as one of the epicentres of hateful anti-Israel propaganda, and now, a group of faculty members at the university appear dead set on continuing that trend.

A July 8 statement from the Department of Communication Studies at the school, “BDS motion,” acknowledged that the department was committing “institutional level to signing on to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) guidelines which outline the specific ways to boycott complicit Israeli academic and cultural institutions.”

The BDS (boycott divestment sanctions) movement, which has been roundly condemned by the federal government and multiple provincial governments, is an explicitly discriminatory and antisemitic campaign aimed at targeting Israeli institutions for condemnation and boycott, regardless of their perspectives on Israeli government policy.

By publicly declaring its allegiance to such a hateful effort, the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University is effectively announcing that it is entirely unconcerned with issues of discrimination, and in fact, is enthusiastically embracing it, despite their comical claim to being committed to “anti-racism.”

The statement also made the extremely misleading claim that the “International Court of Justice… is pursuing the claim that Israel’s recent actions in Gaza plausibly constitute genocide according to the provisions of the Genocide Convention.”

Nowhere has the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ever claimed that Israel’s counter-terrorism efforts against Hamas “plausibly constitute genocide,” despite the lies peddled by anti-Israel activists to that effect. Such claims have been made only by disseminators of propaganda, not the court.

In fact, the anti-Israel disinformation in this respect has spread so widely that it had to be addressed by Joan Donoghue, the now-retired judge of the ICJ, who served in January when the world court issued a provisional ruling on the war (where, notably, it refused to call for Israel to stop fighting).

In an April interview with BBC, Donoghue said that: “the court did not decide, and this something where I’m correcting what’s often said by the media, that the claim of genocide was plausible,” and as a legal analysis pointed out: “nothing in the ICJ’s decision concludes — or even implies — that Israel has violated its obligations under the Genocide Convention.”

At no time anywhere in the statement was the word Hamas ever mentioned, referring to the Palestinian Islamic terrorist group which launched the current war with its bloody massacres in Israel on October 7, 2023. This is hardly surprising, by airbrushing Hamas entirely out of the equation, extremist voices are able to more easily frame Israel’s counter-terrorism efforts as “genocide,” all while shamelessly twisting facts so badly that they no longer resemble reality at all.

By embracing the BDS movement, and baseless lies such as accusing Israel of “genocide,” the Communication Department at Concordia University has brought both its own name, and the name of the entire university, into utter disrepute. But will the news media, as well as the public and the taxpayers – who help fund the school – stand for it, or remain silent?