From early childhood, my parents ensured I attended Jewish private day schools. Growing up in a predominantly Jewish bubble, the reality of antisemitism had been relatively unknown. This environment insulated me from real-life experiences of adversity in the form of antisemitism. Through my education, I became equipped with coping skills to combat antisemitism. My first eye-opening exposure to antisemitism occurred in my first year at Laurier.
Although accounting for Covid, my entire first year of learning was exclusively online, I did not expect to see blatant signs of antisemitism, which appeared on my TikTok For You Page (FYP). In May 2021, two female Wilfrid Laurier students posted a TikTok video dancing to pop music. In this video, one student held a knife and pretended to stab the other, while the other student carried toilet paper with a Star of David drawn on it. Both these students were holding an Israeli flag on a piece of paper, which they lit on fire. They showcased graphics of the Israeli flag next to bombs as they pretended to vomit in a trash bag. Their video publicly encouraged others to inflict violence on Jewish people. This form of online prejudice has spread hate speech to students at Laurier.
Read the full article on Substack at: https://davidbarron1.substack.com/p/wilfrid-laurier-student-tiktok-video
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