Navigating the TDSB: An investigation into the document's aims and source (part 2)
In Part 2, I reveal new details about the source and debunk the big lie (genocide) told on page 1.
Recap and update
In Part 1, I examined the source of the document and found that one of two groups purported to be behind it, namely, Toronto Jewish Families (TJF), was registered by the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO), a group that was formed by the splinter groups which had remained committed to the USSR and which were strongly anti-Zionist.
Since the other group which was purportedly behind the document, namely, Toronto Palestinian Families (TPF), was created within 48 hours of TJF, and since the content on their sites is a virtual mirror, I had hypothesized that TPF might be a UJPO front. However, since publishing that piece, I discovered that Zaid Zawaideh is a TPF co-founder. Here he is claiming that the fiasco that occurred at a TDSB field trip to Grassy Narrows in which bewildered children and parents were subjected to an anti-Zionist protest was no more than “manufactured outrage.” He had the gall to say that the outrage “focuses attention away from the purpose of the rally,” as if the anti-Zionist protest in which kids were instructed to chant “From Turtle Island to Palestine, occupation is a crime” did not accomplish that outcome all on its own.
Zaid is also the point of contact for media relations on an article titled “TDSB fails Palestinian families; parents create guide to address anti-Palestinian racism in schools” (yeah, you guessed it—the Navigating document) that appeared in a leftist rag called “School Magazine” featuring a positively illustrious Editorial Board (no, I’m kidding).
In any case, I think this effectively rules out the single-actor hypothesis. I suspect that there is a close association between Jewish and Palestinian anti-Zionist groups. They share much the same talking points reflecting their shared interest in the delegitimization of Israel as a means to increase the probability of its eventual eradication. If that were achieved, I suspect their goals would soon depart—communists and Islamists seek different end states. But for the time being, they have a strongly shared interest in working towards Israel’s destruction.
Genocide featured on page 1
Of course, any effort to steer the TDSB towards an anti-Israel stance, which estranges over 90% of Jewry (who we normally call mainstream Jewry in contrast to the minority of Jews who hope that Israel will one day be eradicated), would not be complete without an unsubstantiated accusation of genocide levied against Israel on page 1. And here, my dear reader, the authors of Navigating do not disappoint:
Oh really? A long history of Palestinian oppression in TDSB schools—is there any evidence for such a bold claim? None is given. Is there even one example offered? Again, no. The claim of oppression is simply presented as a matter of fact. Since we do not know what the authors are talking about, we can only assume this is hyperbolic nonsense, an attempt to shame the TDSB into compliance. We can assume this since extraordinary claims normally require extraordinary evidence, and no evidence, not even anecdotal evidence, is quite the opposite of that! Therefore, any dispassionate observer would rightly suspect epistemic foul play.
Of course, this conclusion is only strengthened when the authors blurt out the G-word without any shade of doubt. Yes, a genocidal attack did occur, but it wasn’t the one the authors implied. It was the one that bloodthirsty Palestinians committed against helpless Israeli civilians. It was the genocide committed against Israelis and some unfortunate foreigners dancing at a music festival. It was the genocide committed against Israeli babies and elderly Israeli Holocaust survivors. It was the genocide committed against Israeli women through gruesome acts of sexual violence. It was the genocide committed through the executions of hostages taken into Gaza that day. It was all that and more. Entirely unprovoked by Jews or by Israel.
Yet, the Palestinian genociders from Gaza who gleefully shared their GoPro videos of their murderous activities with friends and family members received not only widespread support from the Palestinians in Gaza but also from the Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria under the Palestinian Authority leadership of Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Abbas. The Palestinians could have redeemed themselves to some degree by disavowing Hamas and proclaiming the genocide that their Palestinian brothers committed on October 7, 2023, was a horrendous crime against humanity. Instead, they relished the violence and supported Hamas. They cheered and danced in the streets.
While this disgusting fact alone did not make Palestinian civilians legitimate military targets, it certainly leaves them with a moral stain akin to that which a generation of Germans were tarnished with during the Nazi Third Reich. The Allies did not coddle a generation of Germans who supported Hitler and his genocidal plans to make Europe Jew-free through extermination. Instead, they de-Nazified the society. Even the Nazis understood that this was their fate.
But the Palestinians of TPS don’t seem to get this. Did the Palestinians who emigrated to Canada not do so to get away from the clutches of Hamas? Were those born here not aware that, in Canada, Hamas is a terrorist organization and for good reason, proven yet again on October 7? If Palestinian Canadians understood this and accepted it, would they not be compelled to explain to the knuckleheads of the world that, no, Hamas are not resistance fighters but ruthless terrorists who value the destruction of Israel above the protection and development of their people? The way they write suggests no sympathy for the Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Palestinian brutality. There is no attempt to confront and openly reject the savagery of their people. They do not mention it and their silence is deafening. Rather they focus attention on the fake genocide that they want the world to believe is true.
Was Israel found guilty of committing genocide? No, it most certainly was not. Did the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rule that Israel was guilty of plausible genocide? No, once again, it unequivocally did not make such a ruling. This latter claim might surprise some readers since the lie has been told so many times by so many disparate parties, including the media and the United Nations, that it now is assumed by many poor victims of disinformation to be the truth.
However, one need only go to the most direct source: the ICJ judge, Joan Donaghue, who ruled on South Africa’s complaint. In a BBC interview, when asked for clarification on whether she ruled that there was a plausible case of genocide committed by Israel against the Palestinians, Donaghue had the following to say:
You know, I’m glad I have a chance to address that because the court’s test for deciding whether to impose measures uses the idea of plausibility. But the test is the plausibility of the rights that are asserted by the applicant, in this case, South Africa. So the court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court. It then looked at the facts as well, but it did not decide—and this is something where I’m correcting what is often said in the media—it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible. It did emphasize in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide. But the shorthand which often appears is that there’s a plausible case of genocide and that isn’t what the court decided. (emphasis added)
Think I’ve misquoted her? Watch the video for yourself. She’s reiterated the same point in multiple interviews. So why are the authors of Navigating the TDSB lying to their audience? Simple. They are trying to delegitimize Israel and ostracize mainstream Jewry who support Israel from their school communities. They are waging information warfare against mainstream Jewry in the TDSB area of operations and the form of warfare that they have undertaken, as I indicated in my last post, is an influence operation aimed at taking control of the TDSB and steering it towards their political objectives.
Our hope
But what about the claim that Palestinian students have been attending school while grieving loved ones who were killed, and worrying about the fate of survivors? We—namely, mainstream Jews and many tolerant and peace-loving Canadians of other religious and cultural backgrounds—certainly hope that Palestinian parents explain to their children that the cause of this suffering was self-inflicted and that the only remedy is to give up on the genocidal dream of destroying the one Jewish state in the world. If Palestinian parents explained this to their children, if they explained how Palestinian leaders through the decades betrayed the best interests of their people, then perhaps in a generation they would have leaders to send who could fill the power vacuum created by endless, destructive hatred of Israel.
This evil dream of destroying Israel fuelled by Jew hatred has caused so much suffering, including to Palestinians, and it has squandered so many precious resources through the decades, resources which could have been used to develop Palestinian society and move the region towards peace and prosperity. (And, no, by the way, being okay with powerless Dhimmi Jews or Israel-hating fringe Jews in your midst, doesn’t prove you’re not antisemitic!) The opportunity costs incurred by Palestinians’ inability to come to terms with the existence, permanence, and strength of the State of Israel are incalculable. So much has been squandered on their hatred of Jewish success and autonomy, of Jews who refuse to be second-class Dhimmis in Muslim lands.
In other words, we hope that Palestinians living in Canada do not harbour the same hateful vision as the majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. We hope they did not feel glee when they learned of Hamas’s terrible crimes against the Jewish people and the State of Israel. We hope that they will not join with those suffering from the White Savior Complex to make the plight of Palestinians and Israelis even worse. We hope that we share Canadian values of tolerance and pride in the Western civilization that Canada is an important part of. We hope for parental sobriety and human decency.
We hope for all that and more, but yet, our confidence in the promise of that hope is diminished when we see Palestinian families in Toronto as represented by TPS lie about genocide and fail to express solidarity with Jewish and Israeli Canadians who are also grieving and living through the high costs of war, a war they did not start, but which was started by a Palestinian terrorist organization banned in our country. And we naturally question intentions when these lies and one-sided portrayals of suffering are perfectly timed with an exponential rise in antisemitism that Jews in Toronto, as in many cities across the West, are living through.
Our promise
We will not take these lies meant to harm our Jewish community, here in Toronto or elsewhere, sitting down. While we would much rather spend our time nurturing our families and friendships and pursuing our hobbies, we are not so intellectually indolent as to let ourselves be cudgelled by the short stick of “anti-Palestinian racism” and other influence tactics designed to cause stigma and induce social control through paralysis. We see through the veneer and we will work tirelessly to ensure that others see through it as well. Saying that Israel isn’t committing genocide when it isn’t ain’t racist. It’s necessary. Saying that Palestinians should disavow Hamas and tell their children that what happened on October 7th was morally and ethically wrong and a crime against humanity is not racist. It’s what they should be saying themselves, and we, as Canadians whose government has listed Hamas as a terrorist organization, have every right to expect this attitude from the Canadian Palestinian community.
The truth is the truth and lies are lies. A pair of tautologies, I’m aware, but we will not have truth turned into lies or lies spun as truth simply because it serves a certain group’s interests or guards its preferred narratives. Ceding that right—the right to seek and speak the truth—offers a quick descent into tyranny. As Westerners—as beneficiaries of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution—we must unabashedly reject all such sinister ploys.
I wish that were all, but unfortunately, we still have a long playbook to unpack. These first two posts only take us through page 1 and we cannot stop there.
Thanks for taking the time to do a deep dive on this.
It's incredibly audacious of them to try to wedge their thinly-veiled Jew-hatred into the TDSB. Why wouldn't they? It costs them nothing.
They are betting that the cloak of Wokeness will work: A pinch of "settler-colonist" here and a dash of "supremacist" there, sprinkled liberally with "genocide" and "apartheid," and they just might hit on an effective recipe that can then be copied to other school boards that are susceptible to this kind of empty rhetoric (i.e. almost all of them).
That kind of "woke-washing" will definitely bedazzle most TDSB principals and vice-principals who attained their positions not because of their stellar IQ but because of their willingness to check their brains at the door and drink whatever Kool-Aid is fashionable. It was BLM a couple of years ago, and it just might be "free Palestine" tomorrow.
Great writing and insights. It is indeed sinister and I look forward to your continues unpacking of this document.