Why Are Canadian Children Forced to Protest Israel Against Their Will?

Canada prides itself on being a big tent nation — a place where bilingualism and multiculturalism are official government policy, and diversity is our greatest strength.

According to the country’s mythology, when Canadians disagree, they come up with practical solutions, resolve their differences peacefully, and are better off for it.

Canada’s commitment to inclusion is so deeply ingrained that in a 2015 debate with then-prime minister Stephen Harper, Justin Trudeau famously responded to Harper’s suggestion that revocation of citizenship might be justified in the case of a convicted terrorist by saying, “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.”

It was one of many one-liners that helped Trudeau become prime minister that year, and hang onto the job for the next nine and counting.

But while convicted terrorists may take comfort in their prime minister’s promise of unconditional kinship, Canada’s Jews are feeling increasingly unwelcome in their own country.

The latest outrage came from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), which is responsible for educating roughly 238,000 children and another 100,000 “life-long learners” through adult and continuing education programs.

Like many large North American school boards, while the TDSB has failed in educating children in core competencies such as numeracy, it has compensated with additional servings of diversity, equity, inclusion, and the latest fad — decolonization.

In November 2023, one of the board’s equity advisors, Javier Dávila, earned the dubious distinction of being placed on paid home assignment for the second time in two-and-a-half years for comments about Israel.

In June, after a divisive debate, the school board decided to update its Combating Hate and Racism Student Learning Strategy to include anti-Palestinian racism.

The change was an important victory for activists, who had spent years trying to invent an anti-Palestinian racism crisis out of whole cloth, including via the school board’s 2022 census, whose “Guiding Research Principles” document went so far as to confer victimhood status on non-Palestinian supporters of the Palestinian cause.

According to the new dogma, even though people like Dávila aren’t Palestinian, and Palestinians aren’t a race, these people are nevertheless victims of anti-Palestinian racism.

Never mind that Palestinians constitute a mere 5% of the city’s Arab population — less than the number of people from Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq, none of which get their own special category.

All of these factors metastasized in spectacular fashion this month, when 15 TDSB schools made a field trip to the Grassy Narrows River Run. The annual event is intended to raise awareness of the plight of a Northern Ontario indigenous community suffering from mercury-poisoned water.

Parents were told that students would merely “observe and learn from the presentations and discussions” and would not be participating in an actual protest.

Indigenous students were “invited to wear their regalia,” while “settlers” were “asked to wear blue, if possible.”

In a particularly unusual instruction, parents were told, “media will be present at the event, and there is a chance our group will pass by cameras. If there are any issues around this, please let me know and we will make every effort to keep faces obscured.”

One would be hard-pressed to come up with another example of a publicly-funded educational field trip in which kids are instructed to divide themselves into tribes of virtuous and odious, and wear masks for fear of being identified as attendees.

Shortly thereafter, video emerged that looked eerily similar to the youth indoctrination rituals in totalitarian regimes.

Small children, some as young as eight-years-old and most of whom were dutifully sporting their settler blue, were led in a call and response: “From Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime. No justice, no peace. No racist, no peace.”

It would be difficult to come up with a pithier slogan to encapsulate the omnicause of the neo-Marxist left, who believe there is a direct thread running between the long-ago conquest of the Americas by Europeans, the mere existence of the State of Israel, police brutality, and the scourge of racism in general.

Students allegedly came home with “Zionism Kills” stickers, which were being doled out by some TDSB teachers.

But please — don’t call them antisemites.

If Canadian Jews are losers in yet another alienating episode, so are indigenous Canadians, whose event was co-opted by radicals with dreams of playing Model UN, and whose disgraceful conduct ended up taking the spotlight.

There is little question that the failure of Canada — despite years of promises — to bring clean drinking water to many indigenous communities is a moral stain that demands serious solutions.

Indeed, it was in that spirit that when my own daughter’s middle school held a 2022 assembly on the issue of contaminated water on indigenous reserves, I followed up by getting the President and Chief Global Water Officer of charity: water, an American not-for-profit that has brought clean drinking water to close to 20 million people in 29 countries, to agree to speak to the students.

Over the course of two academic years, the school never took me up on the offer.

That’s because for many radical Canadians, activism isn’t about solving problems. That work is hard and often boring.

Rather, the activist’s job is to protest and attack systemic bogeymen, thereby solving all of the world’s problems in one conceptual fell swoop — all without having to learn or do much of anything.

And if some Jews are offended along the way, they should — as one teacher advised one of the children who was dragged to this event — “get over it.”

Two of the schools that participated in this shameful episode have been named in press reports.

I’ve asked the TDSB several times to name the other 13, as they are clearly hostile environments for Jewish children, and Jewish parents have a right to know which schools to avoid.

As of this writing, the Board has denied my requests. However, the Ministry of Education has ordered an investigation into the matter, so it seems probable those names will eventually come out.

One can only hope the end result of the investigation will be a removal of ideology from the curriculum.

If all the Board does is put a few of the shrillest voices on paid leave while allowing their worst ideas to remain on the lesson plan, Toronto’s Jewish community should brace for more episodes like this.

Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer

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