The Weekender: "All Zionists are Racists"
Three stories, perfectly packed for your weekend. My experience at a university protest for Gaza. Today's edition is free for all readers.
Meet The Weekender, a weekend digest that highlights just three reads from the week and why they’re worth your time.
On Tuesday evening I found myself in the middle of a protest for Gaza on the Toronto Metropolitan University campus.
I had finished dinner and began wandering the streets of Old Toronto when I heard chanting and saw police cars down one of the avenues that branched from Yonge Street. Naturally, I was curious.
The first thing I noticed were dozens of messages scrawled in chalk along the pavement and sidewalk. An Asian girl squatted nearby writing another message which began something like “We are a Community”. Beyond her a crowd of people in a circle, maybe between one and two hundred, circled around a man in a black and white keffiyeh leading them in chants and cheers.
“Disclose! Divest! We will not stop we will not rest!”
“The more they try to silence us, the louder we will be!”
I wandered to the far side of this large circle, which was located in a quad-like area between several university buildings. Behind me a large concrete pad looked like it was a fountain water garden during the summers, but for now it was desolate and lifeless, a few puddles from the recent rain huddled in solitary corners of the would-be concrete oasis.
An older woman dressed in all black eyed me suspiciously as I leaned against a tree. I guessed at her thinking—policeman? journalist? Her suspicion only grew the longer I stayed, the longer I refused to participate in the chanting and jeering. To my right a group of students stood holding a red banner with yellow hammer and sickle on the bottom left corner. REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNIST PARTY OF CANADA, it read. Other students sat at a table nearby, I assume ready to sign up anyone who might be catalyzed into joining the RCP by the momentum of Toronto’s student movement for Palestine.
The yell leader began a new chant: “Zionists are racists. All Zionists are racists.”
This went on for a minute, but then he abruptly cut the crowd short. A confused silence ensued. “Do you all know what you’re chanting?” Here, I thought, is someone with a conscious. Is he going to try to steer them to another chant? He went on. “You need to know what this actually means.” He was pacing back and forth in front of the crowd now, and I moved to get a better look, now extremely interested in where this was going.
“Zionists are racists,” he repeated. “What this means is that Zionists by definition are racists. That is an objective truth. It’s a law of nature. Zionists are f—ing racists and deserve to die.”
The drum began again at some unseen signal and the crowd launched back into their chant. “Zionists are racists. All Zionists are racists.”
I didn’t stay much longer after that. This was no protest. It was a mob.
Our first story is a closer look at another protest on Cal Poly Humboldt’s campus, a deeper look at what might actually be going on in these protests. The second story examines how the zeitgeist has affected other institutions, specifically one of America’s staunchest supporters of free speech.
The final story is a reprieve. A beautifully complicated tale from the single foster parent of two teenage boys, a reminder of the beauty in humanity.
Welcome to The Weekender 🤙
From The Free Press: The Kids vs. the Empire
The most powerful portion of
’s reporting here is when he draws a comparison to his time covering the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in the early 2000s. After a rigged election that favored Vladimir Putin’s candidate, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians descended on the Maidan Square in Kiev to support Viktor Yushchenko, the lawfully elected leader of Ukraine. “The point is,” he writes,the protesters who descended on the Maidan in the winter of 2004 did something the American protesters on college campuses in 2024 could not conceive of: they put themselves at risk in a serious way, and they made demands . . . that were rooted in the law, the history, of their own country, that insisted that their country live up to its own stated ideals.
As he points out later, many of the students currently involved in the protests are ‘trapped in a miasma of confusion’. They lack an understanding of the geo-politics and history of the region. They wind up supporting terrorist groups like Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah because they are unaware of ‘the platitudes they had swallowed, or the slogans they trafficked in, which coursed through their TikTok and Snapchat and Instagram feeds, and zigzagged instantaneously from one campus to another.’
12 min read 📢
From The Free Press: PEN America Rewards Cowardice
There are few things dearer to me than free speech—the freedom to air one’s opinions no matter how abhorrent, and—contrary to many people’s understanding—even hate speech is legal in this country. As it should be.
So it is worrisome when one of the country’s premier institutions for the promotion and protection of free speech caves to pressure in support of a narrow, limited cause to the exclusion of a diversity of thought.
PEN has a laudable history of advocating for writers who’ve been persecuted for their opinions in repressive polities—polities much like the contemporary United States. But too many of its members would have the nonprofit corrupt its global mission to protect free speech across the board so long as they can bully its leadership into pointless partisan posturing for progressives’ acrid flavor of the month.
8 min read 📝
From : “Cracker Barrel”
Josh is the foster parent of two teenage boys. I should also add that he’s a white man fostering two black and brown teenage boys. He’s a talented writer who launched this Substack (
) recently, describing it as a collection of vignettes from my life as a single foster dad, living among a community of given and chosen family. These stories are for anyone whose family has branched out in unexpected, painful, beautiful ways.It’s a reminder to me that while our consciousness and concerns have increasingly grown to global proportions, our minds are conditioned for focusing on the proximate and the local. I’ve also found I’m happier that way. There are people around me, my own community, that I can be present for. How am I showing up for them? Like Josh, who has taken on the daunting task of fostering two nearly grown men as a single dad?
Give it a quick read, and I encourage you to subscribe.
3 min read 🍽️
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All images are produced by The Portmanteau. Some of them are AI generated.