Palestinian students deserve to grieve in peace
On October 7, 2025, we stood quietly, watching history repeat itself — silence meant for remembrance, once more labelled as hateful. Outside UTM’s Student Centre, students gathered with bowed heads and cold hands, mourning over 69,000 lives lost in Gaza. A land acknowledgement was read. An equity statement promised safety.
Then came two minutes of silence — for the murdered, the families erased, and the names silently buried. Not a rally or protest, but a eulogy — a small act of mourning in a world that keeps saying “never again,” while watching genocide repeat in Rwanda, Darfur, and now Gaza.
As we whispered prayers and wiped quiet tears, a line of police lingered, postures tense as though waiting for something to happen. There was no hate, no disruption — only grief that institutions of power refuse to see as peaceful.
Former Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce called the vigil a “hateful, antisemitic, and anti-democratic mob” and the student organizers a “morally degenerate group.”
I believe that Lecce’s sentiment reflects a world that is quick to label Palestinian mourning as hate, where simple acts of empathy are punished as if they are crimes. As an attendee, I can say that it wasn’t hatred that filled the crowd, but a desperate plea for peace.
Neutrality in the face of injustice isn’t a virtue; it is complicity. Those who gathered at UTM understood this. I believe that by portraying such mourning as violent, Lecce exposed the anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia beneath the accusation — the fear of Palestinian grief itself. (more...)
Honouring our Palestinian martyrs is not hate, it’s simply grief
No comments:
Post a Comment