Guest Speaker at EMSB School Accused of Anti-Palestinian Bias

Students and teachers at a Montreal high school say they were subjected to anti-Palestinian racism last month during a lecture on the Holocaust.

Five sources at the school say the speaker, Heidi Berger, had spoken to administrators beforehand and agreed not to bring up Gaza or contemporary politics during the presentation. 

But towards the end of her talk, Berger displayed a PowerPoint slide describing the watermelon emoji, a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinian people, as an antisemitic hate symbol alongside neo Nazi iconography. An emoji that resembles the Palestinian flag was also included alongside a list of hateful memes like 88 (code for “Heil Hitler”) and 14 — a reference to the 14 Words white supremacist slogan. 

“One of the students who attended that speech is Palestinian and was quite disturbed by what she saw,” said a teacher, who is not authorized to speak to the media. “She’s 12 years old, her family fled Palestine because of the war, and now she has to sit there and watch her nationality associated with Nazism. 

“It was beyond the pale.”

She said the student’s parents are filing a complaint with the English Montreal School Board (EMSB).

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The sources did not want The Rover to identify where the lecture took place for fear of professional reprisals, but it happened at a high school overseen by the EMSB. 

“I was at the presentation and saw no such thing,” said EMSB spokesperson Mike Cohen. “We had an excellent and well-received talk about the Holocaust.”

When presented with a picture of the offending image, Cohen did not respond.

The Palestinian symbols were included in a slide about how certain emojis may seem harmless but hide a sinister message. For instance, if you substitute letters for numbers in the numerical symbol 88, you get “HH” (Heil Hitler). In explaining why it considers Palestine’s flag an antisemitic symbol, the Jewish advocacy website Aish writes: “the subtext seems to be that Israel and Jews have no right to exist and ought to be replaced by a Palestinian state instead.”

Berger has been giving these presentations for the past 15 years, according to her website. But since the Oct. 7 attacks, she has also allied herself with conservative ideologues who peddle conspiracy theories, accept free trips to Israel from Zionist lobby groups, and compare the pro-Palestinian cause to the flat-earth movement.

Teachers at the EMSB high school had warned their principal about Berger’s controversial takes in a letter signed by 24 staff members. While reiterating the staff’s support for Holocaust education, the March 9 letter goes into Berger’s well-documented history of denying human rights abuses against Palestinians and her conflation of the anti-war movement with antisemitism.

Teachers were also concerned about her association with Warren Kinsella and Ben Mulroney. In a 2023 column for the Postmedia network, Kinsella wrote that pro-Palestinian protesters in Montreal were “paid up to $50 for each protest they attend.” Kinsella also claimed the protests were mostly attended by “students from Arab countries” but provided no evidence to support his claims.

Both Mulroney and Kinsella accepted paid trips to Israel at a time when the country’s leader is the target of an international arrest warrant for using starvation as a weapon of war and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Mulroney, Kinsella and Berger were featured in an article by The Canadian Jewish News where they claimed the word “genocide” was being weaponized by pro-Palestinian activists against Israel. Although they claim the word is being “thrown around” by anti war activists, their perspective is now a minority opinion in the face of a growing international consensus and polling that shows the majority of Canadians believe Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.  

In the letter from staff, they also expressed concerns that associating the pro Palestinian movement with antisemitism negates the activism of groups like Independent Jewish Voices and Jewish Voices for Peace, which advocate for a free Palestine. Staff also reminded their principal of a previous incident, at an EMSB school, where a Holocaust educator injected anti-Palestinian views into his presentation.

During a video conference with students at Westmount High School in 2022, Steven Rambam said claims that Palestinians suffer human rights abuses in Israel are “a bunch of crap.”

“I lived in Israel,” he said. “Trust me, they’re doing everything but abusing the Palestinians.” In point of fact, the International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel imposes racial segregation and apartheid against Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Following their letter about Berger, staff members say the school board doubled down on its support for the lecture, and elected commissioners even sat in the front row of the auditorium during the speech. 

“I have never seen any of the (commissioners) at any other lecture,” said one teacher. “It was like they were sending a message to us. Like they were telling us whose side they had chosen.”

Despite being a school board whose mandate is to advocate for English-speaking students, the EMSB has received blowback from parents, teachers and students regarding its steadfast support for Israel. In March, spokesperson Mike Cohen used the EMSB’s Instagram account to ask parents to support three students heading to Israel despite the country being in an active war with Iran.

The school board was also reprimanded by Quebec’s student ombudsman in February for suspending a student who posted “Fuck Israel” on her private Instagram stories. 

Finally, after an ethics commissioner suspended EMSB councillor Julien Feldman for smearing a rival candidate as “Ms. Gaza” during the 2024 school board elections, the elected councillors voted to rescind his punishment. Despite the investigation finding the councillor was not a credible witness, that he has a track record of abusive behaviour towards political rivals and that his actions were “neither dignified nor in keeping with his office,” his colleagues sided with Feldman.

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