The University of Toronto is the birthplace of “Israeli Apartheid Week” (IAW), an annual, week-long, anti-Israel symposium with associated anti-Semitic activities that in four years has spread to campuses throughout Canada, as well as in the United States, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The IAW includes presentations by individuals that are on record either calling for the destruction of Israel, supporting terrorism against Israel, denying the Holocaust, and/or expressing anti-Semitic views.
Naturally, the University of Toronto Chapter of SPME has evolved in response to the annual hosting of IAW on our campus. After many futile attempts to convince the administration to stop this hateful event, including a letter to the President signed by 70 Professors, we placed a one-page ad in the National Post on March 22, 2008. The ad, which was signed by 125 faculty members at UofT, stated the following “We, the undersigned faculty members of the University of Toronto, oppose the hosting of the Israeli Apartheid Week at our Institution, and request that the administration stop this hateful and divisive event from returning to our University in future years.” The ad has been echoed by press releases by B’nai Brith Canada and Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. Several Toronto Jewish newspapers and a medical magazine, the Medical Post, as well as the Jerusalem Post have been covering this protest.
Stopping the IAW will continue to be the focal center of our efforts. In addition, UofT SPME members were involved in earlier efforts to prevent the British attempt to boycott the Israeli academia, encouraging the UofT administration to publicly denounce it.
A third major direction we have undertaken is to challenge anti-Israel biases by University professors at UofT. In particular, we are following very closely professors that use the umbrella of freedom of speech as a license to lie and distort historical facts about the Israel-Arab conflict.
We are working closely with student organizations at UofT (Hillel and Betar-Tagar) as well as other SPME chapters to coordinate our efforts.
