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Sadikov, a third-year student of political science and math, said by email that he has not decided whether to step down. His message, which he deleted Thursday afternoon, was intended to express “opposition to the dispossession and colonization of Palestinian land and to the mistreatment of Palestinian people,” he said. He said he does not condone or advocate “violence on the basis of membership in any identity group.”

Simon Paransky, a McGill law student who helped bring the tweet to the public’s attention, said Sadikov is active in left-wing campus politics and in issues related to Israel and Palestine.

“It’s appalling that a student representative is calling for violence against a certain group of people,” Paransky said. “And it is not an isolated incident. It is happening in a context of increased hostility to students on campus, mostly students of Jewish faith but also students of non-Jewish faith who are allies of Jewish students.”

Last year, the Students’ Society of McGill University voted in favour of joining the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, but the vote was overturned in an online vote. Paransky said that following the BDS debate, some Jewish students experienced harassment on campus.

The student newspaper the McGill Daily, for which Sadikov was previously news editor, has an editorial policy of not publishing articles that “promote a Zionist worldview.”

This tweet was not an attack against Jewish students, but on the adherents of a political philosophy that has detrimental impacts on Palestinians on a daily basis, and one which, as Jewish people, we should not support

The BDS debate and the student newspaper’s stance led the New York-based Jewish publication Algemeiner to rank McGill fourth last year on a list of North America’s 40 “worst” campuses for Jewish students. (University of Toronto was ranked third.)