War Crimes Should Not Be Endorsed in the Imprint

It has been over two weeks since The Imprint, the student newspaper at the University of Waterloo published a community editorial by the president of ‘Israel on Campus’ UW, Alex Kaldor which defends Israeli actions in Gaza by making unsourced or untrue accusations against Hamas. Some of the accusations made by Kaldor against Hamas, such as “there is plenty of footage of Hamas terrorists using the UN-run schools as launching pads for their rockets,” were known to be false by the UN and most media outlets when printed in the Imprint. Israel has even come out to say that they were targeting buildings near the UN compounds and some ordinances hit it accidentally. This same week another pro-invasion letter to the editor was published, without the appearance of any anti-violence voices.

It has been over one week since the community editorial space was used to publish a piece by Tom Levesque, another UW student. This diatribe included a call for war crimes: “Israel should discontinue its policy of distinguishing between civilians and Hamas” arguing that “It’s too convenient for the civilians” and that after all “they’re also the ones who democratically elected the Hamas government that’s behind it all.” In this article, the author uses the false statements from the community editorial from the week prior, and in the piece Levesque blames the Palestinian population or Hamas, for the more than 1300 deaths that Israel caused in its most recent aggression. This tactic of Israeli spokespeople does nothing but delay the diplomacy required to actually bring peace to the region.

Though I do not support the idea, one could use Levesque’s idea in a different context: Israelis must bear the responsibility for the deaths of the 3 civilians and 10 IDF soldiers (4 by friendly fire) who died during the invasion because they support the colonial policies of their government which Hamas fights against. An additional idea would be to ask oneself if the more than 200,000 Japanese civilians who were vapourized in the atomic blasts that ended the second world war responsible for the aggressive acts of their government, did they invite their own death?

In his piece, Kaldor asks us to imagine being an Israeli. I urge him to imagine being a Palestinian or any other person living under the horror and oppression of colonialism and state terrorism, and ask him what he would do. I would also urge Tom Levesque to imagine watching the world ignore your democratic rights of electing the government you want to. To watch the world allow occupation, blockade, and misery to your people because they do not like the people you chose to lead your nation in what former US president Jimmy Carter has called an “honest, fair, and safe election process.” It must reflect how desperate the Palestinians’ situation has become for them to elect a political organization with a terrorist faction.

After the second week of blatant colonial- Zionist propaganda and what I saw to be editorial bias, I wrote into The Imprint for the first time since my column was pulled from the opinion section for “heavy handed rhetoric,” and not sourcing facts directly in my copy. Sure my words are aggressive in my opinion column (Being The Change), they are direct and do not seek to spare feelings. But in the two years I have been writing opinion I have never called for war crimes to be committed against a civilian population (or any group at all for that matter), I never knowingly wrote lies, and no one ever questioned a single fact I wrote after my articles had gone to press. How was my rhetoric heavy-handed and unprintable, whilethe call to violate the Geneva convention, the rules that are supposed to guide combat operations and protect this country’s population and soldiers from undue suffering, acceptable?

What I wrote to be included as a community editorial questioned The Imprint’s impartiality and called for them to correct the lies that they had previously printed, and retract the statements. After all this is a student funded newspaper, and every student who has paid for the publication of the paper now has their names attached to an endorsement of war crimes. My article was not published in the most recent edition of the school’s paper, though the full text can be found on my blog at peaceculture.org .

In an effort to restore a smeared image, the January 29th edition of The Imprint did not include any community editorials or letters filled with hate. Students wrote in concerned over the previous weeks content and they tried to tell the stories of the Palestinian people, those who live under the occupation. None of the articles called for the elimination of the Israeli state, many were hopeful of a peace as soon as the rights of Palestinian’s were respected.

Editor in Chief Maggie Clark, however, did not apologize for printing the known lies that appeared in the paper. She did try to legitimate printing the call for war crimes by bringing up the academic discourse around the justifiability of the atomic end of world war two, an argument not used by Mr. Levesque when he called for open war on civilians. She is “proud” to be able to open space for open discourse, but without admitting to publishing known lies, then printing an article which based its arguments on those known lies, the reputation of The Imprint will be weakened, and its journalistic ethic will be questioned.