London, Ontario JCC Speech

Thank you for that warm introduction. I am pleased and honoured to have been asked to speak to the London community tonight on a subject of great importance to all Canadian Jews.

If you read my column this morning, you will know that any minute now I am going to be holding a book aloft, but before that, I’m going to begin by plagiarizing myself with an anecdote I used to begin a recent column:

A 1930s Jewish joke has two Polish yeshiva students walking down the street, suddenly aware of a pair of anti-Semitic thugs behind them brandishing sticks. The boys flee, the hooligans in hot pursuit. As the chase continues, one Jew asks the other: “Why are we running? There are only two of them, and we are two. “Yes,” says his friend, “But they are together and we are alone.”

I chose to open with this darkly clever observation because it is a longstanding Jewish tradition to leaven bitter truths with humour, and because it is a pretty concise summary of my theme for tonight, which indeed concerns itself with bitter truths. Fittingly enough, I am speaking to you on the eve of Israel Apartheid Week, which is taking place in several Canadian universities in sync with universities all over the world. Israel Apartheid week is a now-annual five day hatefest of anti-Israel events, anti-Semitic pep rallies in the guise of “lectures” and calls for boycotts, divestment and other exclusionary strategies aimed at making Israel a pariah state with a longer term goal of making it a non-existent state.

These “apartheid” weeks – the word, which used to be so shocking, is now a commonplace and used as though this vile calumny were received wisdom, are internationally coordinated, professionally organized and increasingly sophisticated. These publicly marketed “conferences” are only the visible tip of the enormous, treacherous icebergs sitting at the heart of almost every large university. We don’t see them, but Jewish students on campus can’t ignore them.

In a preface to a new book of essays that I reviewed in my column this morning, Academics Against Israel and the Jews, edited by Manfred Gerstenfeld, of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Natan Sharansky speaks of the many visits he made to university campuses when he was minister of Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs. The visits were a specific response to the beginning of the Israeli university boycott campaign, initiated in Britain, but also to assess in general the extent of what Daniel Pipes calls “the palestiniazition of the academy” in the Diaspora.

Sharansky’s first campus visit in 2003 took place at Toronto’s York University. He spoke to a large and sympathetic audience. He says a Jewish student asked the first question: “Please explain why we need Israel. For me as a Jew, the existence of Israel is a big problem. I want to be a normal person, and I am being identified by my colleagues with an immoral state. If Israel did not exist, I would feel much easier.”

Sharansky says that in various forms the question was repeated again and again in western countries, confirming what he already knew: that even in North America, where anti-Semitism is not in general a problem in the greater society, one will find in the academy what he calls “little islands of Europe,” because, as this book makes clear, anti-Semitism is a feature of life in general once again, but in the universities, in the guise of anti-Zionism, it may be said to run rampant.

How very different is the experience of Jewish students today from my own. I speak for many of you when I say that my sense of myself as a Jews was formed in the Golden Age of Diaspora Jewry. We were children when Israel became a state in 1948. This was the great redemptive miracle that permitted our community to believe that the nightmare of the Holocaust, however unspeakable its horrors, was the last nail in the coffin of serious international anti-Semitism, and that a new day had dawned for Jews worldwide.

When Israel took its rightful seat amongst the nations, we all felt that our situation, once and for all, had become normalized. We were for the first time in 2000 years equal in dignity and opportunity, but most important in security, to everyone else.

And because our cohort has been perhaps the first in Jewish history to experience this self-confidence, and blessed in having had objective grounds to take it for granted, many of us have for that reason found great difficulty in accepting that this period was not the norm, but merely a golden interlude, which we in our lifetime will not see again. That is a bitter cultural pill to swallow, but it is the truth.

Last September National Post columnist George Jonas suggested that if universities had been abolished in 1900, we would have avoided the rise of the twin evils of Nazism and Communism, for it was the intellectuals in the universities who were most responsible for advancing their bloody reigns of terror. I am in gloomy agreement, but would add that their abolition would also have precluded the virulent anti-Zionism methodically working its way through Britain and Europe, and attempting to do the same in North America. So far the virus here has not been unleashed into the general culture, but has been confined to professional intellectuals and union elites.

Our universities are not the “ivory towers” of animated, respectful intellectual give and take I remember. They have become arenas of ideological turf battles, with enormous political dividends paid to the winners. For it is the ideas and values of the reigning orthodoxies on campus that are disseminated into the larger society through graduates who go on to become our influential political and cultural elites. Campus culture today is dominated by forces that are quite left wing. And unfortunately the left, as a whole, has succumbed to a fever of anti-westernism that has seduced its most vocal and influential members into a strategic alliance with the worst enemies of the Jewish people.

Intellectuals have always been excited by liberationist ideologies with a revolutionary arm. In the 30 and 40s, the left identified with the global cause of workers, which led to support for the false god of Communism. Communism was covertly anti-Semitic. In the 60s it was the civil rights movement and a flirtation with the murderous Black Panthers, who were incidentally, but more aggressively anti-Semitic. Today the left is allied with international Islamism, which is existentially and lethally anti-Semitic. Thus the most extreme manifestations of Israel hatred have found a comfortable and largely unchallenged home on university campuses.

And let’s be clear about one thing. Anti-Zionism is indeed the latest manifestation of anti-Semitism (first was religious, then nationalist/ethnic, and now Israel as the collective Jew). Its perpetrators insist that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, but there is a big difference between criticism of Israel, which is of course legitimate, and what we are seeing on campus today. As Natan Sharansky writes: “The infrastructure for future crimes or even genocide is being laid by ideologists at universities in the free world. To demonstrate how academic freedom is regularly abused on campuses I have developed the three “D’s” test, which stands for Demonization, the application of Double standards against Israel, and its Delegitimization.”

In short, when you see analogies made between Israel and the Nazis, between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz, you are seeing Demonization. When you see an obsession with the sins of Israel and no other country, as we have seen and are already seeing again in the UN – sponsored Durban conferences on racism, you are seeing Double standards, and when it becomes clear that of all the countries in the world that came into being as homelands for a particular collectivity, only Israel’s right to exist is threatened, you are seeing a concerted effort at the delitimization that may well lead to dissolution, if Israel’s friends are not vigilant and proactive.

The toxin of the new anti-Semitism is manifest on many campuses - not all; obviously the presence of significant numbers of Jewish students is strongly correlated to the degree of tension - a climate of fear has engulfed Jewish students. Part of the fear comes from real physical aggression against them by student militants. (I say students, but they are anything but: They are funded, fulltime activists whose job it is to colonize the student unions and organize anti-Israel demonstrations, mount exhibits and disrupt pro-Israel activities.)

I could cite as evidence of the intimidation tactics so many examples we would be here all day, and not just the most dramatic examples, like the 2002 Concordia riots when former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s talk was cancelled (and by the way, to this day, no Israeli leader has again been invited to speak at Concordia, nor has Netanyahu been asked back, which is shameful). As Ed Morgan, CJC chair has pointed out, “the sheer quantity of anti-Israel programs, courses, brochures, posters, banners, guest lectures, newspaper articles, photo exhibits, rhetoric and graffiti found on some campuses can present an overwhelmingly hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students.”

A hostile environment that routinely crosses the line from symbol to act. In November we saw a typical garden variety incident, when Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus, came to speak at York University. The room was packed with the usual anti-Zionist plants, outnumbering the Jewish students 7-1.  Immediately after the talk, a Jewish student who rose to speak was swarmed and screamed at, and then the activists surrounded Marcus “like a pack of lions,” as one observer noted.

The brazen anti-Jewish strategies of the professional campus militants are a direct reflection of the accommodationist atmosphere they sense around them. When pro-Israel scholar Daniel Pipes spoke at York University in 2002, he was subjected to a chilling encounter with the Toronto police and warned not to violate Canada’s anti-hate laws. But York officials did nothing to impede the hateful message of invited guest Imam Mohamed Al-Asi who attributes 9/11 to a Jewish conspiracy conceived to discredit Islam.

When a front page photo appeared in The University of Toronto’s student newspaper The Varsity, displaying graffiti openly advocating the killing of Jews, the university promised to look into it, but did nothing.  And Waterloo officials have resisted all calls to censure engineering professor Mohamed Elmasry for publicly stating that all Israelis are legitimate targets for terrorism.

But when in February of 2006 philosophy professor Peter March at St Mary’s University in Halifax posted the famous Danish cartoons on his office door - hardly a parallel to the open advocacy of murder - campus officials, citing Muslim sensibilities, ordered them removed. To paraphrase George Orwell, in the world of political correctness, all people’s sensibilities are equal, but some are more equal than others.

It is clear that when it comes to campus anti-Semitism, most university administrators just don’t want to go there. In a National Post interview with 10 university administrators, “most of them denied the problem exists on their respective campuses. If they did acknowledge its existence, they said it wasn’t serious.”

But it is. The complacency around, and in many cases the support for, a terrible imbalance within the faculty is near-total on many campuses. In this unhealthy climate, Jewish students have few authority figures to turn to.  As Professor Martin Lockshin, a Biblical studies and humanities professor at York University notes, “This fear is not caused by other students but by professors; professors who are misusing the pulpit and bringing their own personal politics into the classroom, using the power relationship to intimidate and inundate students with political propaganda.”

The dominance of anti-Zionism amongst faculty has become so pervasive that it is an act of real courage for a university professor to speak out in Israel’s defence. Even those who do with impunity, like History professor Gil Troy at McGill, have told me they feel professionally and intellectually isolated.

A quiet campus doesn’t mean a lack of anti-Zionism, it means a low Jewish presence and/or a lack of expressed pro-Israel sentiment. Probably no one here is familiar with the name of Stephen Schechter, but his case, which had almost no exposure outside of Quebec,  profoundly shook me and other Montreal Jews. Schechter was a respected academic and writer, fluently bilingual and well integrated into the francophone community. For over 25 years he had been teaching Sociology and Political Science at UQAM, an institution with very few Jewish faculty and probably not a single Jewish student. Hatred of Israel was not an obvious feature of campus life until Schechter dared to stand up for Israel in class in 2003. Then students blocked the entrance to his classroom, chanting “Israel assassin, Schechter complice”. Defiantly Schechter draped himself in an Israeli flag. This prompted a physical attack on him - not by activists, but by his colleagues. Shaken to the core, Schechter took early retirement.

One of a handful of pro-Israel francophone intellectuals in Quebec, Jean Renaud, who edits the small, but courageous conservative Catholic magazine Egards, had this to say about Quebec universities: (my translation – Egards, #13, p.14-15): “The official doctrine of Quebec’s media and universities consists in effect of a leftwing catechism imposed on suggestible students [whose principal exhortation is] that you will hate the state of Israel with all your heart, especially when she defends herself against her enemies. The abstract and academically accredited anti-Zionism of such an intelligentsia meets up with the nihilist and genocidal bitterness of the Islamists: [The intelligentsia] is [simply] [Islamism’s] pedagogical wing.”

The most demoralizing aspect of the new anti-Semitism and its campus breeding ground is that so many of its perpetrators and fellow travellers are themselves Jewish intellectuals, leftists so invested in the ideals of a political philosophy that was once compatible with Jewish and Zionist self-esteem that they cannot bear to acknowledge that they have become in Lenin’s famous phrase the “useful idiots” of a profoundly anti-Semitic movement. Particularly troubling are radical Israeli leftists, few in number, but vociferous and influential, who look for any opportunity to denounce Israel and Zionism.

If you do a quick sweep of who is leading the divestment campaigns, who is calling Zionism fascism, who is pronouncing Israel an apartheid regime, who is initiating and vigorously promoting boycotts of Israeli universities, who is insisting that Holocaust deniers are not anti-Semitic, who have been recruited as the spokesmen for campus anti-Zionist groups like Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, and who are the featured speakers on campus lecture tours during the invidious Israel Apartheid weeks that have mushroomed on campuses across North America, you will find that a disproportionate number of them are not only Jews, but even Israelis, such as the notorious, globe-trotting  Ilan Pappé of Haifa University, a favourite on the Israel Apartheid campus lecture circuit. That Israeli academics feel free to vilify their country with complete freedom and professional security is an ironically eloquent reminder that Israel really is the only democracy in the Middle East and not the fascist regime its enemies portray.

Not only are Jews disproportionately represented in anti-Israel circles, many of them exploit their Jewishness to enhance their credibility. After I published two columns in the Post on academic bias against Israel last month, a pro-Israel academic wrote to me from the University of California Santa Cruz. She noted that at an anti-Zionism conference on her campus, all five of the participants were Jews, “and each stated that fact proudly at the outset of his or her talk.” The conference organizer was Jewish, as were most of the heads of the eight sponsoring departments. The University Chancellor and Executive Vice-Chancellor were also Jewish.

The same syndrome is operative on some of the larger urban campuses in Canada. The most egregious example of this unique phenomenon - and I say unique for I cannot think of a single other religious, racial or cultural group so intent on compounding the marginalization of their own people - is the case of Michael Neumann, a professor of philosophy at Trent University, who claims that Jews bear a collective responsibility to speak out against Israel, applying the usual bogus and malicious comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany. But he goes further:

“[My aim is to] help the Palestinians [and] I am not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose...If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews don’t come to light, I don’t care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility to Jews, I also don’t care. If it means encouraging vicious racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don’t care.”

The university’s president, Bonnie Paterson, told the Canadian Jewish Congress when they expressed concern about these incendiary remarks that “the free expression of ideas in university [is] essential to our teaching.” Her perverse defence of Neumann’s open mockery of intellectual integrity is tantamount to a hospital president defending a surgeon’s right to operate with rusty scalpels. This vignette tells us  that the gangrene has spread to the top of an infected intellectual food chain, for can anyone here doubt that the same words so inimical to both Jews and academic integrity would be censured if applied to blacks, women, Muslims or natives? In such instances one must yet again fall back on George Orwell, who understood the moral blindness of some intellectuals so well: “Only an intellectual could say something such a thing. No ordinary man could be so stupid.”

Neumann is an extreme example of what I call the “ring of fire” syndrome. In a scene in his series The Raj Quartet, which is an authentically and brilliantly realized recreation of the end of Britain’s imperial reign in India, novelist Paul Scott describes some Indian boys playing a sadistic game. A scorpion is placed on the grass inside a kerosene-soaked circle which is set ablaze. The boys watch with fascination as  the heat forces the scorpion to curl backwards until it dies by its own sting. Leftwing Jews too stubborn to admit they backed the wrong political ideology for too long are like those scorpions in that they have chosen to sting their Jewishness to death rather than leap out of the ring of anti-Semitic fire. Unlike the scorpion, they could have stepped out of the ring when they saw the match being lit, yet chose not to. But those who pour the kerosene and light these fires are not grateful for their sacrifice. They use them, but they have the greatest contempt for these self-hating Jews, as well they might.

Meanwhile the example these eager campus quislings set of pusillanimity and intellectual corruption is a demoralizing and complicating factor for pro-Israel Jewish students struggling to hold their own against a near-solid phalanx of unremitting hostility and pressure.

The problem is then compounded by the fact that Jewish students have been trained their whole lives to be model minority citizens, to respect diversity of opinion, debate with civility on rational and factual grounds and avoid confrontation. Then they arrive in a no-holds-barred arena where civility, facts and respect for opponents’ opinion are no longer assets, but impediments to success. They can hardly be faulted for withdrawing from engagement in combat, as most tend to do.

This is all very depressing. What can be done? What is being done? Lots, and hopefully not too little too late. Frankly, our community was slow in developing effective strategies in the face of a clear and present danger, hoping it would go away if Jews only kept their cool and refused to repay aggression with our own counter-aggression.

As an illustration of the principle that things here could be much worse, and in keeping with the Jewish tradition of lacing bitterness with humour, I am reminded of the joke about the funeral of the most hated an in town. The presiding rabbi confesses he did not know the man well and asks that one of the townsman come up to eulogize him in a personal way. No one comes forward. The rabbi asks again, but there is silence. Finally, in exasperation the rabbi says he will not conclude the funeral service unless somebody from the community comes forward to say a good word about the deceased. After a prolonged and awkward silence, one man from the congregation reluctantly comes to the microphone and after a short pause in which he is clearly struggling for words, he mutters: “His brother was worse.”

That is the situation in North America vis a vis Europe. Anti-Semitism on North American campuses is bad, but not nearly as bad as in Europe. Here our university presidents have been staunchly anti-boycott and publicly so, a moralizing factor, and here at least our campuses are not surrounded by an environment that is hostile to Jews. There are far fewer Muslim students here than abroad, of course, an extremely pertinent factor. And while 15-20% of young people matriculating in America’s top universities are Jewish and feel psychologically if not literally protected by the many Jewish organizations and agencies that participate actively in the general social life and are respected by fellow citizens, Europe’s larger universities can muster perhaps a tenth of that figure, and their community infrastructures are skeletal, weak and fearful of the covertly hostile environment they must operate in.

There are a variety of initiatives now in progress covering a spectrum of approaches from quiet political diplomacy behind the scenes to the totally apolitical to the politically provocative. On the general North American scene, we have the group Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the only group actually operating on campus all the time, insiders who follow events on a daily basis and know all the players intimately.
Then (in the US) there is the Israel on Campus Coalition, a network of over 25 national organizations (including Hillel and AIPAC).

There is a group called Stand With Us founded in 2001.

The David Project has been effective. They produce pro-Israel materials for distribution in Jewish high schools and they produced the movie Columbia Unbecoming, which documented anti-Semitic behaviours in the Middle Eastern Studies dept at Columbia U, and got very wide exposure embarrassing to the university.

Off the radar screen peer dialogue is taking place  through official community back channels with networking amongst faculty and administration, which serves to educate those in leadership positions.

Here the Canada and Quebec-Israel committees, for another example, have for some years been taking handpicked non-Jewish community leaders and promising students to Israel, who inevitably come back with a positive image and a willingness to step up to the plate.

At York University, a a pro-Israeli Jewish student and a pro-Palestinian Muslim formed Shalom-Salam, a student peace group with 200 members. There is a similar group, Muslim-Arab-Jewish Dialogue (MAJD) at the U of T, and I know of another such group on Montreal. According to Compass pollster Conrad Winn, “Some people may be surprised that there is a persistent minority of Muslims - approximately one fifth - who think that Israel is right on in just about everything.”

At UWO, within the Richard Ivey School of Business, members of the Israel and Jewish Affairs branch of London Jewish Campus Services is organizing a trip to Israel for 28 of their fellow business students, 10 Jews, the rest ethnically diverse, including an Arab student. The trip is subsidized. The focus will be Israel’s dynamic technology industry. That’s a wonderful way to demystify Israel and provide networking opportunities for future business relationships.

On January 11, 2004 the Canadian Federation of Jewish Students was formed to plan national programs and “to create one voice that represents Jewish Canadian students,” which hopefully will strengthen their hand in the same way SPHR does for pro-Palestinians on a national and international level.

Special admiration must be accorded groups like Hasbara, which is an Israel-sponsored leadership training program and Betar-Tagar. These students are more geared to crisis intervention and standing up to aggression with counter-measures that pack a punch, such as Betar-Tagar’s Know Radical Islam/Radical Islam Awareness Week on the University of Toronto and McGill/Concordia campuses. These young people are putting themselves on the front line, they are at times in physical danger, and they get very little recognition or encouragement in official quarters.

For the consensus seems to have emerged that taking the high road suits the Jewish temperament best. In terms of public perception, mixing it up in open confrontation never favours the more rational side, and the public reaction to these melees has not been to parse the issues, but to recoil from both sides with distaste. Personally however, I think the negative public perception of confrontations must be balanced against our enemies’ perception of Jewish investment in defending Israel. We must show them we cannot be intimidated, whether the public finds confrontation distasteful or not.

But all approaches are valid and laudable. We are, for example, seeing more emphasis on cultural events and positive pushback to negative campaigns. Concordia mounted a recent concert by the Israeli band Shemesh Ve Kochavim. Its organizer, Marcel Cohen noted: “The arts are effective because they have a powerful way of affecting people in a visceral way that no speech ever can. ...[The pro-Palestinian activists] come for a fight and walk away frustrated...when [the head of the Palestinian Student’s Association]...saw the outpouring of love for Israeli music, he got up and left...”

Similarly the University of Toronto’s “Love Israel” week ran concurrently but not in opposition to Israeli Apartheid Week, and in showcasing Israel’s many accomplishments offered a sharp moral contrast to its Israel-demonizing counterpart. This is the principle of  “refutation without confrontation.” in action. (Braun, Second Class Citizens: Jews, Freedom of Speech, and Intolerance on Canadian University Campuses,  Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice).

I know I am not covering every initiative in this talk and I apologize to those whose organizations I have overlooked, but I am invoking he speaker’s privilege to spend my remaining few minutes on a project dear to my heart personally, and that is an initiative called the Student Israel Advocate Seminars (SIAS). This is a pilot project currently in progress in Montreal under the auspices of an independent think tank called the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, conceived and implemented by Profesor Fred Krantz, who teaches the History of Anti-Semitism at Concordia and who is also the director of the Liberal Art College within Concordia.

SIAS combines the principle of refutation without confrontation with the idea that confidence in defending Israel can only come from a deep understanding of Jewish history and a detailed knowledge of the history of Middle eastern affairs. The three fundamental elements of the Seminar curriculum are: i) The history of the Jewish people, Zionism and Israel, and Middle eastern politics; ii) The nature, history and contemporary expressions of anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Anti-Israelism and Holocaust Revisionism;  and iii) Speaking, Writing and Organizing Skills.

The core of SIAS is a series of training seminars and colloquia led by local professors and also by outstanding invited Middle east and Israel advocacy specialists. I was privileged in Novemberccs to attend the first colloquium with Gabriel Schonfeld, senior editor of Commentary magazine and author of The New Anti-Semitism. The students were engaged by his scholarship and moral clarity. One student said in the Q and A that she had felt alone in this struggle, but that 11the colloquium, attended by an enthusiastic quorum of community supporters of the program had made her feel part of a larger movement, and therefore more motivated to take up the challenge.

Hopefully, if the money can be raised, when the seminars finish, the handpicked dozen of students enrolled will spend time in Israel and intern with Israeli think tanks.

SIAS is an easily franchised operation. It is not a quick fix, but it offers the optimal combination of education and pragmatism that I favour.

Mandatory retirement has been abolished in universities, and the problem of extreme anti-Israelism is not going away any time soon. When a Jew becomes uncertain of Israel’s legitimacy as a nation, it is but a short step to becoming uncertain of the legitimacy of Jewish peoplehood. Manfred Gerstenfeld says that because we are few in number, we must be smarter is dealing with our enemies.

In closing I would remind you that Israel Apartheid Week this year is being “celebrated” for the first time at Palestinian universities. Also for the first time it will include the founding conference of “High Schoolers Against Israeli Apartheid.” Even though you see no publicity about it, indoctrination against Israel does begin in high school, for our high school teachers are graduates of the system in which anti-Zionism festers. I have many letters in my files from students on this subject that testify to the phenomenon.

The cancer is spreading even as I speak. Young Jews on campus must not feel alone while their enemies feel together. They must take back their pride in Israel, and our communities must in turn support them in an effective resistance movement that uses not violence, intimidation or lies, but ideas, reason and truth, as befits the ideals that have inspired our people since time immemorial.

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