The Media Accountability Project  

---

Dear National Post editorial staff:

I’m writing to you on behalf of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East regarding Terry Newman’s piece last Friday titled, “Concordia handbook teaches students to hate Canada, the West, police…” Ms. Newman’s comments about Palestinians are abhorrent and incorrect and should not have survived the editing process.

Ms. Newman castigates Concordia’s student handbook for defending Hussam Abu Safiya, a Palestinian pediatrician whom the Israeli military seized in 2024, as she puts it, “under suspicion of terrorist activity and for being a colonel in Hamas’s medical military services.” What she fails to mention is that after nearly two years of imprisonment, Dr. Abu Safiya has been charged with nothing whatsoever. If Ms. Newman sincerely believes that there is clear evidence of Dr. Abu Safiya being involved with terrorist activity but that Israel, for reasons known only to itself, refuses to put it before a court, that is her prerogative. Her credulity does not, however, relieve her of the basic journalistic obligation to provide the reader with that essential piece of information (and it is insufficient to merely link to a BBC story that, incidentally, reports that Dr. Abu Safiya’s captors have severely beaten him).

Ms. Newman’s reference to “Hamas’s medical military services” is also incorrect; as Drop Site News explains, the medical military services are a government institution akin to a state medical corps and are not part of Hamas.

Ms. Newman then expresses outrage over the fact that the 2025 student handbook had commemorated Nakba Day, which she calls “the day that the Arab-Israeli war began as a result of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon invading Israel in response to it declaring its independence the day before.” The most generous interpretation of those assertions that they are misleading in the extreme.

First, the most powerful Arab army, Jordan’s Arab Legion, did not invade Israel and in fact operated almost exclusively within the area that the United Nations General Assembly had allotted to the Arab state. Indeed, as documented by Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine, its ruler had agreed with the Zionist leadership to divide Palestine between them and so posed no real threat.

Second, the intervention of the Arab armies was prompted not by Israel’s declaration of independence but by atrocities committed against Palestinians (in particular, but by no means limited to, the massacre at Deir Yassin). By then, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians villages and towns – including the urban centers of Jaffa, Haifa and Acre – had been ethnically cleansed and it was only due to public outrage that Arab leaders were reluctantly dragged into a war for which their militaries warned they were woefully unprepared. By way of example, in 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War, Israeli historian Benny Morris confirms that it was only days before the war began that the King of Egypt (the largest Arab state) overruled his own government and decided to join the war – hardly the approach one takes when champing at the bit to attack at the earliest opportunity.

Ms. Newman’s last Palestine-themed criticism of the student manual is that it “commemorated pro-Palestinian events, including 45,000 students going on ‘strike’ for Palestine in 2024.” Ms. Newman does not even attempt to explain what concerns arise from that item, presumably on the assumption that it is self-evident that any form of support for Palestinians is inherently wicked.

Ms. Newman is perfectly free to hold pro-Palestinian advocacy in contempt and to criticize it, but she cannot simply invent or ignore facts and the points raised above warrant the issuance of a clarification.

Sincerely,

Media Advocate
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East