George Orwell famously said, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”
Nowhere is this more relevant than in Israel’s information war against Islamic terrorism today. The anti-Israel narrative has taken hold of much of public discourse, in particular on university campuses.
Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie’s Student Union President Mariam Knakriah’s anti-Israel agenda, and The Coast’s Lauren Phillips’s reporting on it, only contribute to widespread misunderstanding about Israel’s counter-terrorism operations. Phillips has been cited by HonestReporting Canada multiple times for her problematic reporting.
As the “Local Journalism Initiative Reporter,” Lauren Phillips authored a July 4 article entitled: “Student union president hopes Dal will fulfill divestment before her term is up.” Phillips reported that “Mariam Knakriah, the re-elected president of the Dalhousie Student Union (DSU) as of May, has been pushing the university divestment movement since she took office. She tells The Coast that the reason she ran for a second term was because she wanted to see these changes through to finish before leaving office. She has been leading her union executive through this push, as well as working with the school administration to secure support for Palestinian students throughout her presidency.”
In The Coast, a free weekly newspaper in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Phillips offered no journalistic inquiry into Knakriah’s agenda, nor did she provide any balance. Instead, her article was based on the inversion and erasure of the facts about the Hamas-Israel war. It began on October 7 when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, beheading, gang-raping, and burning 1,200 innocents, and taking over 250 captives. Phillips and Knakriah have erased this from their narrative.
Phillips likewise ignored Hamas’s genocidal intent to repeat October 7’s massacres until Israel has been annihilated, which forces Israel to act in self-defence. The Coast closes its eyes to Hamas’s cowardly use of their civilians as human shields, fighting from hospitals – including Al-Shifa’s emergency ward – and recently hiding in a school. Doing so increases the likelihood of civilian casualties, which allows Hamas to cruelly and successfully claim the victim role in the international lens, with willing lackeys like Knakriah and Phillips parrot their support, which puts future Gazan human shields at increased risk.
Knakriah gave undeserved credibility in her coverage of the “Students for the Liberation of Palestine (SLPK).” The SLPK has been active in Dalhousie’s encampment, publicly espousing Hamas’s genocidal intent to Israel with signs like, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”, which encourages the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea – Israel – to be “judenrein,” or Jew-free.
Knakriah stated that Israel is committing genocide. While she doesn’t back it up, it is a claim usually based on the so-called Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty figures. These numbers are likely fabricated and even in their own estimation combine combatant and civilian deaths, and include those due to natural causes, significantly altering the picture. Knakriah’s claim of apartheid is likewise ridiculous: a fifth of Israelis are Arabs with full and equal rights as Israeli-Jewish citizens of Israel.
The Coast has done it again. They have supplied their readers with anti-Israel misinformation and have promoted Hamas’s agenda on their pages.
