Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

In their November 27 opinion column in The Conversation entitled: “Universities should not silence research and speech on Palestine,” three authors accused Canadian universities of silencing pro-Palestinian voices, but in a number of cases ended up acknowledging a truth they likely did not intend.

The authors were Priya Gupta, an associate law professor at McGill University, Fatima Ahdash, an assistant professor of law at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, located in the Hamas-supporting petrostate of Qatar, and Heidi Matthews, a radical assistant professor at Osgoode Hall Law school who has called Hamas terrorism “resistance” and has de facto justified it.

The authors misrepresented, obfuscated and twisted the facts to suit their ideological goal: namely, that pro-Palestinian activists are victims of an oppressive system meant to silence them.

From the get-go, their foundational arguments were poor. They wrote that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) believed there to be an “imminent risk” of genocide in Gaza. But the ICJ, despite demands to do so by anti-Israel activists, did not call for an end to Israel’s counter-terrorism operations in Gaza, an odd decision if it truly believed ‘genocide’ was imminent. Instead, it simply reminded Israel to abide by its legal obligations.

Against that backdrop, the trio accused Canadian universities of “increasingly prioritizing ideas of neutrality over a principled commitment to free speech and the pursuit of truth” and that they have become “sites of suppression that shrink, rather than facilitate, the open exchange and analysis of ideas.”

In that regard, they are correct, but not for the reasons they envision.

Just days before their opinion column was published, a violent anti-Israel hate mob struck multiple campuses in Montreal, leaving a trail of assault, harassment and explicit hate speech in its wake. That mob was just the latest in a long string of such harassment to take place on Canadian university campuses.

The attempted goal of these mobs is clear: to intimidate Jewish and other pro-Israel students, and to threaten university administrations into submission, where they are too afraid to stand up against the horde of Hamas supporters.

That tactic long predated the current Hamas-Israel war, with Nazi brownshirts doing virtually the same thing almost a century ago – using violence to harass their opponents, threaten authorities, and ensuring that they have a monopoly.

One might think that these authors, proclaiming a love for open dialogue as they do, would condemn such overt attempts at silencing dissent, but they failed miserably to do so.

In fact, they actually did exactly the opposite, going so far as to praise the hateful, violent anti-Israel occupations which were present on a number of university campuses earlier in 2024, writing that “students across North America…established encampments on campuses to bring attention to Israel’s crimes and to call on their institutions to divest from companies and industries associated with Israel’s assault on Gaza and occupation of Palestinian land,” and complaining that they were shut down in an effort to “shut down dissent and protest on campus.”

Beyond omitting the obvious point that the vast majority of the participants in these supposedly student-led efforts were not actually students at all, but that these encampments were efforts, not to engage in dialogue with other students, but to use violence, intimidation and harassment to achieve their goals.

In their attempt to claim that universities have shut down debate, the three authors are right, but not for the reason they envision: by tolerating anti-Jewish hate mobs, universities have given them free rein, and in so doing, allowed the silencing of the silent majority opposed to Hamas.