SPME Editor’s Note: These pieces are reprinted from the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research Daily Israenet Briefing of March 6, 2009. from their series, “When Free Speech Becomes Hate Speech.”
ANTI-SEMITISM FUROR AT UNIVERSITIES
Amy Minsky
The Concordian, March 3, 2009
Anti-Jewish sentiment is rising on campuses across Canada, according to Concordia University professor Fred Krantz. The trend, said Krantz, has been energized by the expanding anti-Israel movement. The discussions might not be new, but the way they are being manifested on university campuses has become worrisome.
York University has been the centre of attention lately, with a surge of reports of anti-Semitic uprisings. On Feb. 11 Jewish students there felt compelled to take refuge in their Hillel office while crowds outside chanted anti-Israel slogans. Toronto police, who are investigating a potential hate crime, were eventually called in to escort the Jewish students off campus. A few days later a pro-Israel student allegedly received a phone call from someone who threatened to harm him and his family. The RCMP recently began an investigation into a claim that two Jewish students at University of British Columbia were assaulted by a pro-Palestinian student.
This wave of anti-Semitism has been growing over the past several years, said Krantz. Canadian Jewish News columnist Mark Masters published an article last month about when he was running for student body president at Carleton University in 2007. When he arrived at school one day he found his campaign posters had been defaced; swastikas had been drawn on some, others had Hitler moustaches painted over his face.
Concordia was the eye of the storm in 2002. Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters stormed the Hall building during a visit from the former Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. “I remember it,” said Krantz. “They rampaged through the university. People smashed windows. The Hall building was filled with tear gas and smoke. They were hurling chairs in the mezzanine, screaming.”
The combination of the resurgence of active fighting in Gaza and the launch of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) has fuelled renewed tensions on campuses. IAW began in Toronto in 2005. This year’s edition launched March 1 on campuses in over 40 cities across the globe. Organizers say the lectures and films presented during the week will help reveal “the true nature of Israeli Apartheid.”…
Professor Krantz, however, has issues with applying the “apartheid” label to Israel. “Arab citizens of Israel are a minority,” he said. “But they have rights. They have language rights. Arab citizens of Israel elect people to the Knesset.”… Krantz said he believes an anti-Israel view is usually an anti-Semitic one. And, he says, the motivation behind events like IAW is an attempt to de-legitimize the Jewish state prior to its destruction. “The minute you say it’s an apartheid state,” he said, “you’re saying it doesn’t have the right to exist. The moment you take away its right to exist, you’re reinforcing the campaign to destroy it.”
Krantz said criticisms of Israel become anti-Semitic when other states aren’t held to the same standard as Israel. “If a person says they’re critical of Israel, but are not an anti-Semite, you have to raise an issue with them,” he said. “What else are you critical of in the Arab world? Which is the worst state: Israel or a Hamas-run Palestinian state? Israel or a Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon?”… The fact remains, Jewish students have been subject to hate on Canadian campuses. “IAW groups are not here to engage in debate and discourse,” Krantz said. “A university should be a place where you can seek the truth. And this is not the path to truth, this is the path to violence and exclusion.”…
Nineteenth century British philosopher John Stuart Mill said truth comes from the clash of opinion. “But if opinion is only one sided, if one side excludes the other,” said Krantz, “that is not the way to the truth.”
(Frederick Krantz is a professor (history) at Liberal Arts College, Concordia University.)
PROFESSORS CAN STOP CAMPUS HOOLIGANS
Gil Troy
Toronto Star, March 5, 2009
Day after day we read about aggressive student protesters and dithering administrators at universities across Canada, but particularly at York University. Radical student hooligans there intimidated and even temporarily incarcerated Jewish students last month as cries of “Die, Jew, get the hell off campus,” were heard.
This week, tensions are bound to escalate at York and other campuses as Palestinians try equating Israel with the now-defunct racist South African apartheid regime. Even the posters advertising the week have sparked tensions. Recoiling at the violence at York and elsewhere, we need to ask: Where are the professors?
During times of political trouble we tend to forget that campuses are primarily educational institutions. They are also the professional homes of professors who need to take a stand when violence and hooliganism invade their academic sanctuary.…
Professors underestimate their own moral authority. Our power goes far beyond the ability to give out As or Fs. We are the university’s public face, the basic service providers, the campus role models. The human dimension in education remains central in our hypertechnological age. Our students are always watching us. They learn from our actions-and our inactions.…
For starters, a broad range of York professors, from different fields and from across the political spectrum, should denounce the violence. Professors highly critical of Israel should take the lead, teaching that the issue is not about Israel, pro or con, but about student security and campus civility.… [P]rofessors should turn these traumatic events in the university’s life into what we in the education biz call “teachable moments.” Both regular class time and special teach-ins should be devoted to learning about free speech; about the mutuality of rights so we don’t have “free speech for me and not for thee”; about the centrality of civility to campus life; and about the historic roles of campuses as centres of civility.…
Since the 1960s, we as professors have abdicated responsibility for campus life outside the classroom, ceding it to students and administrators.… Unfortunately, the ugly violence that now threatens York’s reputation and its future demands professional action and leadership. Students and administrators have failed. Donors are understandably getting restive. Parents and potential students are worried.
York professors have a responsibility to defend their academic home and a great opportunity to heal it.…Teaching is not just a job, it is a calling. It is time for York’s professors to answer the call and redeem their university.
(Gil Troy, a CIJR Academic Fellow, is Professor of History at McGill University.)
GETTING THEM WHILE THEY’RE YOUNG
Barbara Kay
National Post, March 4, 2009
In George Orwell’s dystopian allegory, Animal Farm, the pigs assume governance of a farm the animals have seized from their oppressive human owner. Not content with contingent power, the pigs appropriate the farm dogs’ newborn puppies. Trained in secret, knowing no other way of life, the puppies grow up to be fearsome, loyal guard dogs. From then on, the pigs’ power to dictate “politically correct” thinking amongst the animals is absolute.
Last year, a February session of Israel Apartheid Week at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) campus of the University of Ontario featured the founding conference of High Schools Against Israeli Apartheid (HAIA), sponsored by the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA). Appended to advertisements for the event were the words: “Note: this conference is for high school students only.” The organizers-not themselves high school students, but the “pigs” in this neo-Orwellian story-only allowed “puppies”-high school students with identifying student cards-to attend a five-hour session of anti-Israel propaganda. No teachers, parents or media were permitted to attend, so we really have no idea of what went down there.
The Student School (TSS) is an alternative high school in downtown Toronto with a specialty in “social issues.” Its 185 students and eight staff are a tight-knit group. Decisions about which issues will be promoted are taken in weekly council meetings, where students and faculty are equally represented. TTS welcomed CAIA recruiters to its classrooms two years ago. Under its aegis, HAIA took official form in 2008 and the school, guided by university activists, became a hotbed of political agitation. Last year, a newly arrived Israeli student at TTS felt too frightened by the hostile atmospherics to remain at the school.
Thankfully, an investigation by the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is underway. According to Trustee James Pasternak, “Spreading this insidious anti-Israel ideology by recruiting teenagers in public schools is repugnant. We will use every legal means possible to stop intolerance in public schools.” The TDSB might begin by explaining the role of an educational institution to TTS administrator John Morton, who is fiercely proud of his school’s partisan involvement with HAIA.…
I left three messages for John Morton at TSS, but received no response. If he had granted me an interview, I would have asked him if-since his students have watched the incendiary film, Occupation 101, standard Palestinian-friendly fare-he would be willing to have his students watch law professor and pro-Israel polemicist Alan Dershowitz’s excellent new film, The Case for Israel, which will have its official Canadian premiere in Ottawa on April 13. I would have suggested that his students might benefit from the mind-expanding exercise of seeing-here’s an apparently radical concept-both sides of the story, and then engaging in debate.…
TTS is committing an intellectual crime against its students. As Stefan Braun, civil liberties lawyer and hate/censorship expert put it in an interview: “We’re dealing with a captive audience of impressionable school children. Those pushing HAIA are not interested in promoting critical independent thinking but in shutting it down. Preaching is not teaching. No one has the right to turn our schools into safe havens for indoctrination. To speak out against HAIA is not censorship. It is to uphold freedom of speech against those who would smother it in its infancy.”
Just so. George Orwell said it with puppies and pigs, but the message was the same: HAIA, whose reach is extending into other high schools as I write, is dangerous to democracy and must be stopped.
