Concerned Students of McGill

The accusations made in this petition are baseless and serve only to further discredit those powers which oppose dialouge on BDS. This petition is no true call for equal representation in discussion on this topic, it is an attempt to silence any discourse whatsoever. Your reference to the "extensive debate" at the October GA is laughable, as the debate you are referring to never occured. Debate at that venue was silenced before it could even take place just as these petitioners look to silence the upcoming event. You make the implicit statement that the SSMU hosting this discussion is a show of support for the cause of BDS and serves to isolate members of the student community but that certainly isn't the case. What this event is aimed to do is allow exactly that discussion which was silenced to take place, to inform students about the implications of BDS, and to stop the isolation of an historically oppressed group who hold views contrary to the status-quo at McGill. It is significant that an expert on South African apartheid will speak at this event, and that leads me to question if you would have liked for any discussion on BDS South Africa to have included the racist supporters of the South African regime. Of course, such an idea is ludicrous. The oppressed and the oppressor do not hold equal power, and to claim that giving the oppressed a venue to express their opinions without the interference of the oppressor is unfair in any way, as if the forces are symmetrical in a situation where the power dynamics at play are certainly not at equilibrium, is to usurp the language of social justice only to further marginalize and silence the victims of power abuses. The people of the McGill community are intelligent, and I am certain they will see through your misleading use of language to recognize the fascist historical precedent of such a petition.