TanenbaumCHAT’s charitable status must be revoked. Canada’s largest private high school is a racist, genocide-promoting institution that shouldn’t receive any public subsidy.
In a recent article I wrote about the Toronto high school sending students on a “Solidarity Mission to Israel” where they cooked for soldiers on an army base. Earlier, the school also sent hundreds of students to promote genocide at rallies in Ottawa and Washington DC. In response to the widely circulated piece a former student, Amir Fleischmann, wrote about his personal experience at TanenbaumCHAT:
“My high school, everybody! 13 years on and I’m still filled with resentment and shame about having gone here. They deserve to have their charitable status revoked. Here’s some highlights from what I saw there:
“They recruit West Bank settlers to come teach in Canada for 2-3 year stints. A teacher described to me, without an iota of shame, how during the 1948 Nakba his grandfather climbed on the roof of his house, fired a rifle into the air, and expelled all the Arabs from the village.
“The principal had his personal friend Melanie Philips (a British crypto-fascist) give a speech at the school about how Muslims could never live peacefully in the West. I was the only person who didn’t participate in the standing ovation.
“No surprise, then, that a student in one of my classes made a comment some other time implying that all Muslims should be kicked out of Europe. I lost my cool at her, nobody else seemed to think that comment crossed a line.
“They once had a person give a pro-Palestine presentation to our class. Finally, I thought, we can hear from the other side. NOPE! It was a fake out presentation to ‘expose the lies’ of those who support Palestine.
“This is all in addition to the usual clichés Zionist institutions tell you. That the Palestinians left in 1948 of their own accord. That the Palestinian people doesn’t exist. That the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. That the IDF is the most moral army.
“TanenbaumCHAT nearly pushed me away from Judaism completely. Only years after leaving, when I discovered authors like Isaac Deutscher and Walter Benjamin on my own was I able to make our tradition meaningful to me.
“TanenbaumCHAT, like too many Toronto Jewish institutions, is complicit in Israeli apartheid and the ongoing Nakba. Our community needs to reckon with that fact.”
Fleischmann’s testimony went viral with 2,300 retweets, 11,000 likes and 1.3 million impressions on X. Hopefully other students with similar experiences bring them forward. We need to expose TanenbaumCHAT’s role in breeding advocates for racism and genocide.
Beyond publicly shaming the school, it’s imperative to weaken it financially. The registered charity issues many millions of dollars in tax receipts for donations every year. Last year a complaint was filled calling on the Canada Revenue Agency to investigate whether TanenbaumCHAT was violating its regulations for charities. An updated complaint will be delivered to the CRA soon.
There may be other ways to pressure this genocide promoting school. One individual noted on X, “A Palestinian attorney in Toronto should file a war crimes complaint against the headmaster. I’m not kidding.”
