By: Zach Paikin

Last week’s Campus Pulse talked about exciting events taking place in the Ottawa area, including the CJPAC and ICCA conferences. This week, the focus shifts to Montreal campuses, particularly McGill.

The McGill community was honoured to have both Jerusalem Post journalist Gil Hoffman and former Canadian Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, speak on campus in recent days.

Mr. Hoffman’s speech concentrated on the current state of Israel-US relations, a continuously bumpy ride. Hoffman concluded that US President Barack Obama has “come a long way” since he first took control of the Oval Office, and now recognizes that Iran’s nuclear weapons program has to be his administration’s primary foreign policy commitment. Hoffman elaborated on the Israeli public’s up-and-down views of President Obama. According to Hoffman, Israeli skepticism of Obama comes from his calling for a settlement freeze, even in the blocs near the Green Line, as well as from his implication that Israelis are racist, among other things. (Mr. Obama stated in an interview in recent months that Israelis don’t trust him because his middle name is “Hussein”.) Hoffman’s humour and unique understanding of the Middle East pleased the crowd of forty interested students from both McGill and Concordia.

Moving from Israeli politics to Canadian politics, Hillel McGill organized a sold-out event this week, hosting Irwin Cotler for dinner. “Social justice” was the theme of the evening. Professor Cotler’s talk focused on the importance of weighing the Jewish values of justice (tzedek) and remembrance (zahor). As a people who have suffered from one of the worst genocides in the history of humanity, it is the responsibility of the Jewish people to remember its history in order to fix the world through acts of justice. In Mr. Cotler’s words: “What was most appalling about the Rwandan and Darfurian genocides was not the abhorrent crimes against humanity that were committed. Worse was the fact that we knew about these events and chose not to act.” Mr. Cotler also spoke about Iran’s fourfold threat to international security: nuclear, genocidal, terrorist, and human-rights. The international community has a moral and legal responsibility to act to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, inciting genocide, funding terrorist groups, and committing savage human-rights abuses against its own people.

The past couple of weeks have been filled with remarkable partnerships between Hillel, Hasbara, Hagshama and the JNF. We look forward to working together again in the future in our joint pursuit for justice, truth, and peace.