Student news outlets across Canada do not limit themselves to reporting on campus affairs alone. From international affairs to analysis to Palestinian terrorism & erasure, November 2025 student reporting continues to be fixed on ensuring the anti-Israel value system remains at its core.
International Affairs: Sanitizing Terror and Distorting Responsibility
Polina Kozlova published “Explainer: Ceasefire negotiations continue as Hamas refuses to surrender” on November 10, in St Thomas University’s The Aquinian, presenting the circumstances around the Israel-Hamas ceasefire. While Kozlova acknowledged Israeli security concerns, Hamas was treated as a legitimate political actor rather than a Canadian-designated terrorist group.
“Surrendering would contradict its founding identity,” wrote Kozlova about Hamas, its foundational ideology described as “a liberation movement fighting what it sees as an occupation.” This was juxtaposed with civilian suffering in Gaza, quoting Hamas accusing Israel of seeking to “target innocent civilians in Gaza.” Kozlova elected to present Hamas’ self-described motivations, accusations, and claims without contextualizing its role and activities as a terror group, normalizing its narrative and minimizing its responsibility in the conflict, war, and humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Similarly, Lisa Banti published “Ceasefire on Paper” for The McGill Daily on November 26. While functioning as a record of events since the Israel-Hamas ceasefire was agreed upon, Banti’s article focused on the civilian suffering and the viability of the current plan in place but missed critical elements of the conflict. The emphasis on these two elements to describe how the “ceasefire is holding in name but contested in practice” enables the omission of the root cause(s) of the conflict, broadly, and the current war.
Her reference to “Gaza’s Ministry of Health” without note of it being Hamas-run, or the neglecting of Hamas’ role in creating or worsening humanitarian conditions and sustained violence in the region is notable. For example, Banti wrote that “the ceasefire has been repeatedly stress-tested by violence. At the end of October, Israel launched air and tank strikes in Eastern Gaza, citing Hamas violations and a deadly incident involving an Israeli soldier; those strikes killed more than 100 people, according to Gaza health authorities, before the truce was restored.”
These articles make clear that when Hamas’ terror designation and actions are omitted, the resulting reporting is incomplete, distorted and ultimately misleading.
Martyrdom on Campus Grounds:
This is not limited to student reporting on international affairs. On November 9, Eshal Saad published an opinion column “Honouring our Palestinian martyrs is not hate, it’s simply grief” in the University of Toronto’s The Varsity. Saad’s article defended the “Honouring our Martyrs” vigil that took place on campus on October 7, 2025, referring to it as “Palestinian mourning,” in the face of Former Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce’s online criticism of event-goers as a “hateful, antisemitic, and anti-democratic mob.”
Saad’s defence of the vigil was that it honoured the “devastating realities of genocide, occupation, and apartheid,” backed by false claims, one from The Lancet about the Gaza death toll being over 180,000, and that 70 percent of deaths are women and children.
In a report covering how “UTM Muslim Students’ Association sends legal letter to Stephen Lecce” published on November 20, Eleanor Yuneun Park reported on developments surrounding Lecce’s aforementioned social media post. Park contextualized the controversy by stating that the “Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killed approximately 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostage. Since then, Israel’s attacks on Gaza have killed 70,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza health ministry.” Once again, Hamas is neither identified as a terror group nor acknowledged as an oppressive governing force in Gaza; Israel appears as the sole aggressor, targeting civilians.
The Politics of Erasure on Campus:
In Humber College’s Humber ETC, Julia C. Sequeira published a column “ANALYSIS: Birth of an overseas alliance aids in fighting imperial control,” about Filipino-Palestinian relations and parallel experiences. Sequeira described Hamas’ attack as, “for Palestinians… the Al Aqsa flood,” noting how “Palestine is considered one of the earliest sites of human life, appearing in scriptures as early as the 5th Century BCE, making it more than 2,000 years older than the start of the Zionist movement in 1882.” Sequeira’s emphasis on mutual solidarity as “saving… nations” is notable when juxtaposed with her blatant erasure of Jewish history and nationhood.
Concordia University’s The Link published two articles that address the idea of erasure, namely the systematic erasure of Palestinian suffering at an institutional and societal level. Jasmine Peardon’s November 1 column “The politics of silence at Concordia University” positioned discussions around “Palestine” as deliberately suppressed, claiming that Concordia’s silence and silencing leaves students feeling unheard.
Raven Angeli’s November 4 article argued that “Human lives aren’t political,” that Palestinians are dehumanized by institutions because “The Western world labels them ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’ for resisting the occupation and siege placed upon them.”
Yet in these repeated calls to humanize and amplify Palestinians, Jewish and Israeli suffering, identity, and nationhood are not simply rejected, they are erased. This erasure – whether through accusations of apartheid and occupation, legitimizing Hamas and its “Al Aqsa flood” as “resistance,” fabricated statistics, or through reducing (and rejecting) Jewish identity to “Zionism” – is increasingly embedded in campus and broader discourse, where one group’s grief is amplified, universalized and central. And the other’s history, identity and self-determination are written out entirely, recast as oppression.
