I was the target of Hamas supporters looking to put a chill on free speech and deny the right of the Jewish people to live in their ancestral homeland

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Proving that the truth is often uncomfortable, my column from last week struck a nerve, prompting a flood of protest letters from the pro-Hamas crowd. In a misguided attempt to stifle free expression, these voices sought to have this newspaper retract my article, which was published in these pages last Saturday.

The Palestinian lobby even went so far as to introduce the newly coined term “anti-Palestinian racism” (APR), a concept designed to suppress critiques of the Palestinian narrative and open dialogue in our democratic society.

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But Canada is not Gaza, where critical speech and public discourse are met with brutal repression rather than reasoned debate. In a democracy like ours, it is both permissible and necessary to respectfully assert historical truths, such as the fact that Jews are not colonizers in their ancestral homeland. Indeed, the Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel, a fact that’s deeply rooted in history.

It is an incontrovertible historical truth that the Arab states rejected the United Nations partition plan and launched an attack on Israel........

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