In a rambling recent opinion column posted on TheConversation.com, a website claiming to present “academic rigour” to readers, four academics regurgitated half-baked anti-Israel disinformation, glossed over critical facts, and presented an image of the Middle East so detached from reality that it may as well be a work of fiction.

The January 12 column, “Lessons from Palestine: Understanding the resistance of educators and students in times of crisis,” was penned by four employees at the University of Montreal: Emmanuelle Khoury and Aline Bogossian, associate professors in the school of social work, Caron Roxane, a professor of social work, and Rola Koubeissy, an assistant professor in the faculty of education.

The quartet of authors share how, for the last two years, they have worked on a project with an Arab school in Judea & Samaria (West Bank) in order to “professors and students talk about their emotions in a region marked by occupation, violence, forced displacement and chronic uncertainty.”

They nonchalantly refer to Israel’s nonexistent “genocide,” without bothering to tell readers that no international court made any such finding, that scholars of war say no such genocide took place, and that Israel took unprecedented steps to protect civilians in Gaza.

Demonstrating a striking ignorance about the very terms they are employing, Khoury, Bogossian, Roxane and Koubeissy claim that the Palestinians have suffered through “colonial violence” at the hands of Israel, even though by no definition is Israel a colonial enterprise, but the manifestation and continuation of an ancient Jewish presence in their historic lands that stretches back some three thousand years.

Perhaps the most unintentionally comical comment made by the authors in their commentary was the statement that Palestinians have been “silenced, muzzled, diminished, trivialized and made invisible.” In reality, few peoples around the world have enjoyed as much widespread media coverage as the Palestinians.

Whether on university campuses, by “humanitarian” groups, on Canadian streets, or thanks to near-universal sympathetic media outlets, Palestinians have been given extensive, and almost always uncritical reports. Meanwhile, civilians have been massacred en masse, often at the hands of Islamic extremists, in countries ranging from Sudan to Iran to Yemen to Nigeria, and have received almost none of the support that Palestinians have received.

This comment by the four authors about the Palestinians being “made invisible” is not only utterly absurd and a complete inversion of reality, but it is simply the latest salvo in what critics have termed the Palestinian victim narrative, where they effectively claim to own a monopoly on suffering, when others have suffered as much, and often far more.

By employing this Palestinian victim narrative, the authors do more than misrepresent the truth, and more than ignoring millions of victims around the world.

In effect, they serve to enable the continued rejectionism and obstructionism of Palestinians, who for years have refused peace offers from Israel, and instead continued to incite hatred and violence towards Israel and Jews in general.

Emmanuelle Khoury, Aline Bogossian, Caron Roxane, and Rola Koubeissy, penned an opinion column with the ostensible goal of sharing the reality of Palestinians. Instead, they drew a picture that left readers further from the truth than if they had never read the commentary at all.