Editor’s Note: Students, employees and other El Camino College community members outside the journalism staff are also invited to submit guest columns for consideration as per The Union’s policy. All columns are subject to editing for length, grammar and style. They must be free of libel and in good taste. Publication or rejection of any column is at the sole discretion of the editorial board. All opinions are those of the author and do not reflect the opinion of The Union.

Jonathan Forel is a student at El Camino College.

At a time when campuses across the country are unsafe because of inflammatory, atrocity-themed conspiracy theories that are tossed xenophobically ad infinitum at Jewish people, throwing yet another one at us like your fellow idealogues of the last three years shows a pattern of an obvious, unhealthy obsession with us. We do not have a standing policy of replicating the pharaoh’s role in Exodus, unlike Hamas. We are not roaming the street with a vampiric thirst for the blood of Arabs whose grandparents aided Haj Mohammed Amin Al-Husseini during the days of the British Mandate, in contrast to the 1929 Hebron Massacre. We do not use student government systems to threaten access to halal foods, in contrast to the University of Toronto at Scarborough. We are not Nazis, but we’ve seen countless kindergartens in UNRWA-run schools in Gaza with Arabic translation copies of Mein Kampf, including editions which were actually published during the Holocaust. Across many years, I have learned far too many undeniably obscene things that I wished were not true…

…about “anti-Zionism;”

…the history of the Caliphates;

…the countless forms that antisemitism took throughout two millennia and 24 years;

…and the ways in which my tribe members have been slaughtered, raped, enslaved, trafficked, incinerated, stabbed, axed, shot, bombed, gassed and more, with a historic average of some atrocity or another being inflicted upon us every five to 20 years (that we know of).

We do not control bank accounts, the amount employers pay employees, any non-Israeli governments, any kind of meteorological phenomena, or anyone’s media (neither their decision to consume media, nor their frequency of media consumption, nor their choice of specific media). We have neither “stormed,” nor have we ever “plotted to destroy,” the Al-Aqsa Mosque for the entire century that fearmongers such as the Nazi propagandist Haj Amin Al-Husseini have falsely accused us of doing so. We go to campuses to learn and study and improve the possibilities in our futures, not to experience that popularity, incited moral panics, posturing and unthinking xenophobia are the main reasons why so many young, inexperienced defeatists and hyper-privileged one-percenters, have weaponized the benefits of wealth, power, and clout to get away with fighting words, burning our synagogues, stabbing our Holocaust survivors, threatening access to kosher food, colonizing our history, raping our women, or shooting up schools in Israel.

Grow up. Stop using this platform to spread decades-old Pan-Arabist dezinformatsiya, stop blaming us for everything and never forget that we can respond to your well-understood dog whistles, genocidal chants and stochastic incitements as fighting words. I know my rights as a Jewish progressive, including to defend myself. Goodbye, and may Hamas face the judgment for lying, rapist thieves.