Thank you, Madam Chair. I truly feel honoured to be here today.

I feel the weight of Jewish physicians and health care workers across Canada, who feel attacked and marginalized in our universities and hospitals. I feel the weight of the majority of Canadian Jews, who have been shocked by the unprecedented outbreak of anti-Semitic Jew hatred and are demoralized by the inadequate response from our leaders. I feel the weight of thousands of Canadians, who are appalled by the blatant hatred, harassment and violence that have drowned out civil discourse and taken over our universities, streets, theatres and shops.

In January 2024, I resigned as an assistant professor from the UBC faculty of medicine because I believe UBC, like most medical schools and universities across the country, allowed naked Jew hatred to creep in, which has now become systemic.

I'm a physician who's been privileged to study and practise medicine for over 40 years. I have worked in remote indigenous communities and in public health and research, and I have spent the past 20 years doing house calls for frail seniors. I love teaching and mentoring.

Now, according to students and colleagues, like any supporter of Israel, I am falsely labelled a racist who supports the white, European, settler-colonial apartheid and genocidal regime that deliberately starves and ethnically cleanses populations and murders women and children. Can you think of anything more odious? How can any person of good conscience feel anything but contempt and hatred for any person who supports such a loathsome regime? That is who they say I am.

In November 2023, demonizing accusations about the so-called Israeli settler-colonial regime occupying and murdering Gazans for 75 years were circulated in a petition signed by one-third of the UBC medical school class. Similar false accusations of genocide were echoed by Gem Newman in his valedictorian speech at the U of M, my alma mater, to a standing ovation.

In addition to accusations about murdering 35,000 Gazan women and babies, he also included accusations of intentionally bombing hospitals and the deliberate murder of physicians and journalists. These were shared as facts, despite the al-Ahli hospital bombing being discredited and the tragic civilian casualty figure being downgraded by 50% by the UN the week before his speech. Sadly, facts have become irrelevant, even in faculties of medicine, which used to pride themselves on being evidence-based and scientific.

UBC medical professors and senior residents posted blood libels about organ trafficking, Christ killing and anti-Semitic conspiracies with impunity. They reposted that Zionist physicians, Jews like me, are racist and demanded that they be removed from the selection process for postgraduate resident positions.

These are not innocuous political differences. How are Jewish physicians supposed to teach students who hold us in such contempt? Will Jewish patients be safe with physicians who call to wipe Israel off the map? Will physicians who despise Israel and call for an academic boycott be willing to collaborate with Jewish colleagues over research, or even patient care?

I doubt I would be admitted to medical school in 2024. Do you want a health care system that prioritizes ideology and decentred and decolonized medicine over individual patient care?

There were 284 physicians who wrote a letter to the president and dean, Dermot Kelleher, expressing concerns about harassment, blatant anti-Semitism and a toxic, hyperpoliticized environment. He refused to meet with us.

We found out that anti-Semitism or Jew hatred is not officially recognized in the DEI search engine for vulnerable groups. This is despite a Canadian government 2023 document warning about the surge of anti-Semitic hate crimes on Canadian campuses.

In addition to the administration's tolerance of demonization, our concerns about Jew hatred were illegitimate. In fact, the faculty of medicine refused to acknowledge in their poster for International Holocaust Remembrance Day that the Holocaust was the anti-Semitic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis. Our concerns were illegitimate. We were told it was a universal lesson, not particular to the Jews. The poster was changed only after threats from donors.

We are also subjected to a double standard. There is, rightly, zero tolerance for homophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny or anti-Black and anti-indigenous discrimination. Every other group can define what they experience as systemic hatred, but for some reason, the Jews can't. Somehow, it's more complicated, just like the Ivy League presidents indicated. Calls for genocide against the Jews on campus can be acceptable. It's contextual. What about calls for genocide against Black or indigenous people? Are they also contextual?

Demonization, delegitimization and double standards—the three Ds—are excellent indicators to determine when legitimate criticism of Jews and the State of Israel crosses into hatred.

We are told by deans, presidents and politicians that the students are just expressing their right to free speech, venting their moral outrage and participating in social justice activism.

I'd like to remind them that after World War I, German students were also outraged by injustice and poverty. Russian students were outraged by the exploitation of workers. Chinese students were outraged by authority during the Cultural Revolution. Graduates from the Sorbonne, no less, and the Khmer Rouge were outraged by capitalism and western colonialism. Where did this end?

Now the students are outraged by Zionism.