Adam Pankratz: I pity the pro-Hamas students marching this week

One year after the October 7 massacre by Hamas in Israel, protesters chanting anti-Israel slogans stormed and smashed buildings at McGill, one of Canada’s premier universities. Later that same evening, on the other side of the country in Vancouver, pro-Hamas demonstrators burned Canadian flags on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery in downtown.

A day later, Oct. 8, an anti-Israel group at the University of Toronto started a “week of rage.” Equivalent anti-Israel demonstrations and events occurred at the University of British Columbia, along with universities across North America, as further mobs marched their way across campuses. None, it bears reminding, in support of the savagely murdered innocent Jews, but rather in support of the cause of their butchers.

Of course, many emotions are applicable to such a scenario. Bewilderment. Shock. Anger. Perhaps all three. Yet I can’t help but come back to pity. Pity, in this case, for the pathetic losers who have chosen the side of terrorists and murderers instead of Jews worldwide and Israel fighting for democracy and Western values against a constant onslaught of barbarism.

Watching the student demonstrations (I call them students, but that unfairly assumes a level of intellectual rectitude, curiosity and capability none of them seem to possess) one cannot help but wonder if they truly understand what they are marching in favour of. Have they ever truly considered what it was like at the Nova Music festival that day? Have they tried to contextualize that horror in their own reality? It’s doubtful, but perhaps we can try to help them see what they are supporting

Imagine, dear students across Canada, you find yourself on a sunny afternoon on English Bay in Vancouver, or perhaps on Sainte-Catherine Street in Montreal. The sun hitting your face as you chat, dance and laugh with friends and decide between another craft beer or White Claw from a nearby bar. Suddenly you hear a noise that resembles a traffic helicopter and, on the horizon, you notice some planes or copters appearing which match the sound you just heard. You think little of it and continue on with your day.

Within 30 minutes or less of hearing what you believed to be a traffic-copter one of three things will have happened to you. You will be dead. You will have been beaten, raped, captured and sent back to live in a war-torn hellhole. Or, if you were lucky enough to hide, you will have watched as your friends around you are murdered, maimed and otherwise savaged in front of your very eyes.

Many descriptions from the October 7 attacks last year can convey the horror and are easily searchable online. Douglas Murray, who has reported extensively on the massacre and has interveiwed eye-witnesses, relates the story of the final moments of a young woman who had just seen her best friend murdered. On her knees, this young woman pleaded with Hamas terrorists not to kill her. They shot her through the face and she was still screaming for them not to kill her as her face fell off and life ebbed out of her. This is what we are talking about.

In your protests this week, dear students, you have chosen the side of the perpetrators of such heinous acts.

Counter to what I have said, the protesters today would surely point to the casualty figures or images of the deaths of children and innocents in Gaza. There is no doubt that a Gazan mother grieves with equal pain to the Israeli mother for her lost child. But symmetry of grief is not symmetry of responsibility.

There were innocent Germans who were not Nazis incinerated in the allied bombing of Dresden. The accounts are gut wrenching. But in both cases we always will come back to who started it and what was their intent. Israel is fighting an existential war for survival and reprisal for an unprovoked attack and murder of its citizens on its soil. In reprisal it has, in fact, been exceedingly precise with missile strikes and, for urban warfare casualty rates, the Gaza mission has some of the lowest, if not the lowest, combatant to civilian casualty rates of any war prosecuted anywhere. It simply is not the same.

Students out there who are confused and lacking moral clarity on this issue need to take a step back and realize that in the broader scope and sweep of history, they have chosen to take the side of Nazis and terrorists. They have chosen to march against and repudiate the Western way of life. They have chosen barbarism over peace.

If there is any hope to be taken from the misguided efforts on campus it is that, in the long run, they will lose. The West is going through a difficult spot at the moment, but we will win. We have seen off larger threats by worse people than what currently assails us. Anyone still confused about where they stand on this issue should think very carefully about that and consider which side they want to be standing on when the dust settles.

Adam Pankratz is a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business.