Quebec minority, female patients - wonder about your doctors

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Canadian Jewish nonprofit B’nai Brith has reported on antisemitic and other hateful content spread by Quebec medical school applicants and students on a social media platform server available to some 1,400 people.

On the public Discord server, the “aspiring doctors openly posted Holocaust denial, praise for the ‘Final Solution,’ hurled racial slurs, glorified terrorism, and degraded women,” B’nai Brith said in a statement, releasing screenshots of the French-language posts.

The watchdog Doctors Against Racism and Antisemitism (DARA) also highlighted the posts in a statement Friday.

One post read: “Don’t worry. You can trust me as long as you don’t have a kippa under your wig.”

Holocaust-related content included a remark proposing “a coalition of doctors to pressure the government and call it ‘The Final Solution Bill'” and another that imagined telling SS officers to “gas the attic as fast as possible” if Anne Frank was hiding in a neighbor’s roof space.

Another appeared to call for an “Islamic State of Quebec,” and alleged that “Quebec is done. We’ll dominate soon.”

While the hateful posts shared on the Discord channel were largely antisemitic, posters also made other racist and misogynistic comments.

“The downfall of society came when women had the right to vote and work,” one poster commented.

“No, the downfall happened when Jews got rights,” another answered.

Another poster said: “I don’t understand why women take our places in medicine when the majority of them become housewives.”

When talking about admissions to the university, one poster said, “Blacks are often poor so double bonus,” apparently referring to the odds of getting into medical school.

“They are just Negroes,” another poster said.

“This content wasn’t buried. It was shared in open channels, visible to over 1,400 members. Almost no one spoke up. These aren’t anonymous trolls. They are future doctors. And this kind of hate doesn’t stay online. It follows them into classrooms, clinics, and operating rooms,” B’nai B’rith said.

The posts “are the culmination of the inaction and silence of the medical school and university leadership across Canada since October 7, 2023, to skyrocketing antisemitism in their faculties of medicine,” DARA said, a reference to the date when Palestinian terror group Hamas led over 5,000 attackers to invade southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

Philip Berger of DARA told The Gazette outlet in a Saturday report that “we couldn’t find a single objection by anybody” on the server.

A spokesperson for Discord told the Gazette that the San Francisco-based app has a “zero-tolerance” policy for hate speech and that it will quickly deal with the issue.

“I was shocked by the individuals, the 20 to 30 people who were posting this antisemitic stuff. They were so blatant about it,” a McGill University medical student told the outlet.

The Jewish Clinicians Against Antisemitism filed a complaint with Montreal police against one user who it claims is a student at Dawson College, The Gazette reported.

In a statement, the school told The Gazette: “The matter you refer to is being investigated.”