Some Canadian Universities Have Not Stood up to Antisemitism

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post & News

The war between Israel and Hamas has exposed for all to see just how nasty some of our institutions of higher learning have become.

Today the “woke” left, which seems to have attained ideological hegemony on many campuses, provides a model of the world in which many conflicts are viewed as a struggle pitting settler-colonist-Europeans against indigenous/BIPOC people. It follows from their critique that the legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed.

It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of colour.” It describes Israel as an “imperialist-colonialist” force, Israelis as “settler-colonialists,” and contends that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors.

So “freeing Palestine” is a resistance against foreign settler colonialists, a revolution in which violence against civilians is defended as a legitimate means of achieving racial justice.

Some of this stems from the writings of anti-colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, among many others. In Les Damnes de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), Fanon maintained that the violence of colonialism can only be met by the violence of the colonised.

But this decolonization logic ignores the fact that more than half of Israel’s Jewish population does not have European, but North African and Middle Eastern, origins and came to Israel after themselves suffering ethnic cleansing.

Yet since Oct. 7, the day Hamas massacred some 1,400 Israelis, marches and demonstrations have continued across Canada, many openly supporting their murders.
There were gatherings to celebrate the attacks as an act of “resistance,” to cheer on the “martyrs” who perpetrated them. They usually featured some iteration of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a call to continue until the State of Israel is eradicated by force.

A group called Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights McGill immediately described the attack in Israel as “heroic” in posts on social media. Along with three other pro-Palestinian groups, they called the Israeli regime “fully responsible” for the ongoing violence, describing it as “a consequence of decades of oppression” of the Palestinian people.

Answering their call, hundreds of people marched through the streets of Montreal Oct. 8 to “celebrate the resistance’s success.” At another pro-Palestine rally, held off-campus five days later, it was estimated that at least 2,000 people attended, greatly outnumbering the overall Jewish student body at the university. A further rally was held Oct. 20.

That same group issued a joint statement with Palestinian student groups at Concordia University and two Montreal-area CEGEPS stating that Hamas had “no option but to resist.”

“A Statement of Solidarity with Palestine” was released Oct. 12 by the York University Graduate Students’ Association, the York Federation of Students, and the Glendon College Student Unions from York’s Glendon Campus.

The groups reaffirmed “our solidarity with the Palestinian people” against “settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.” It also accused “so-called Canada” of complicity with “so-called Israel.” York and its Federation of Students are now facing a $15-million class-action lawsuit related to decades of alleged antisemitic incidents.

University of Toronto’s downtown campus saw pro-Israel and pro-Palestine students facing off on Oct. 17. Posters of missing Israelis kidnapped by Hamas were torn down and a Palestinian flag was painted on the steps of the building where the rally took place. At McMaster and Western — where a demonstration took place Oct. 29 — students were seen ripping down posters of Israeli hostages. 

At Toronto Metropolitan University’s law school, some students wrote a letter Oct. 20 arguing that Israel “is not a country,” and called for “an end to the entire system of settler colonialism that has strangled Palestine for the last century.”

Student newspapers followed suit. In the Varsity, the student newspaper at the University of Toronto, one writer referred to Israel as “an apartheid state that is breaking international law to wipe out an indigenous population.”

The Link at Concordia University published articles replete with anti-Israel content accusing Israel of committing ethnic cleansing. A piece in the student newspaper at Queen’s University, the Queen’s Journal, claimed Israel’s response was aimed purely at “collective punishment” and “achieving the mission of ethnically cleansing historic Palestine of its Indigenous Arab population.” A column in the Manitoban, the University of Manitoba paper, asserted that Hamas’ attack on October 7 was a “response” to “Israeli settler colonialism.”

On October 20, a group of anti-Israel demonstrators protested on the Edmonton campus of the University of Alberta. The next day, the Gateway, a student newspaper, quoted one student asserting that people in Gaza “are resisting over 75 years of oppression, systematic genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.”

So here we are. “We need to challenge our policy at universities and the governments that fund them,” maintained former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, speaking at a conference on anti-Semitism in Ottawa Oct. 16-17. Thousands, he said, were “celebrating the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.”