Several courageous Jewish university students spoke out on Parliament Hill this week about the #antisemitism they've been facing, incl. Claire Frankel and Anastasia Zorchinsky.
Jewish students do not feel safe. Our public officials and university administrations must act NOW. pic.twitter.com/47AT2xwg88
— Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center (@CanadianFSWC) May 10, 2024
BCAA wholeheartedly welcomes the new student-led organization, the Canadian Union of Jewish Students, officially launched last Friday. They are planning to have chapters at universities across Canada, and we are hoping there will be one at Brock University. We certainly need one!
While Canadian campus protests have not turned violent, there are anti-Israel encampments at a number of major Canadian universities, including McGill University in Montreal, the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia.
“We hope to really just be the voice of all Jewish students in this country and be able to get Jewish students engaged in a lot of things, but also something that is really important for us is to create a safe space, where a lot of us feel isolated on our campuses,” said founder Nati Pressman in an interview.
So far, the new organization has 300 members, and aims to represent Jewish students while “engaging in global Jewish matters.”
“With the help of social media, the CUJS is dedicated to being a platform where Jewish students can voice their opinions and concerns to university administrations and other organizations,” a press release says.
Yom HaShoah service will be held in the Sanctuary of Congregation B’nai Israel, 190 Church Street, downtown St.Catharines. Pre-registration is encouraged, to help with security planning. Please pre-register no later than Sunday, May 5th @ 4:00 pm. If you are unable to pre-register but wish to attend, you will be registered at the door, but please allow for extra time.
Brock University Professor of Sociology, Tamari Kitossa, wrote a paper for the Journal of State Crime, which was rejected by the journal through peer review. The paper argued that that “Zionism is a colonial project that intended from the start on lebensraum, a project of ethnic cleansing that preceded the coalition of German industrialists, US bankers and Hitler’s gang of thugs that formed the Third Reich”. Kitossa holds BA and MA degrees from York University and a PhD from OISE, and his “research and instruction interests include Blackness, anti-Blackness, Black masculinities, African Canadian leadership, anti-criminology and counter-colonial criminology and interracial unions.” Undeterred, Kitossa then posted the rejected paper on his personal blog, The Professor’s Corner, in four parts. The latest one, Zionism-as-Nazism, Still: Genocide was always the plan, from April 9, 2024, caught the eye of a National Post reporter, and its blatantly antisemitic tone was deemed important enough to deserve a front-page story. Within the story, Gil Troy, a well-known Professor of History from McGill University, is quoted as describing the series of posts that he reviewed at the request of the reporter as “unhinged, wildly inaccurate, sloppy, and offensive”.
I hate to give this so-called “social scientist” any air time, but here’s a sample of the good professor’s reflections on the “Zionist sociogenic propaganda”, as he puts it. I think Professor Troy’s characterization is pretty accurate:
[N]either Jew nor Palestinian is free, though the burden of that slavery is immediately manifest in the breaking of the bones, the starvation, degradation, cultural destruction, land theft and dispossession and indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians, while Jews, because of Zionism and their commitment to their ‘Golden Calf’, the State of Israel, suffer an ongoing moral and spiritual decay that makes them insensible to love and their own humanity. As a discursive formation that is deeply neurotic, Zionism is a moral philosophy of hate which is inherently genocidal.
When contacted for the story, Brock University provided the following response:
Maryanne St. Denis, manager of content and communications at Brock University, said the school was unaware of Kitossa’s blog posts until National Post brought them to the school’s attention. “We are currently reviewing this matter,” the school said.
St. Denis added that Brock has a “range of policies in place to ensure a safe and welcoming campus environment. There is absolutely no place on our campus for hate of any kind.”
Today is Day 199. Tomorrow is the first day of Passover, Day 200. It is believed that 129 of the 253 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza — “not all of them alive”. “About a 100”, they say.
Round numbers. I remember the grimness of the death of the 100th child in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; it took less than a month of war. I remember how the Russian military jargon of “Cargo 200” (transportation of soldier’s bodies, also a title of a cult Russian film) from the Soviet-Afgan war was resurrected for the XXI century. A few days ago, on April 13th, “over 300” ballistic missiles, drones, and cruise missiles were launched at Israel by Iran.
The dead children count in Ukraine at the end of February, 2024, stood at the not-so-round 587, with 1298 injured. Far more obscure Cargo 300 (injured), Cargo 500 (refusing to serve) are now also familiar to those who follow the news from the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022, in its not-so-round 789th day today.
Round numbers. They bring a certain sense of closure, of some important marker of time, of life lived. Except for those “about 100” that are still held hostage, this round marker of 200 days in hell is not bringing any closure. There is no celebration, just marking of another day, life suspended.
Some families will be using a Haggadah sold by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum and produced by the print shop at Kibbutz Be’eri, where 90 residents were murdered and 20 taken hostage on October 7. The Haggadah features an essay by Goldberg-Polin and her husband, Jon, that adds a fifth question to the holiday’s traditional four: “Why are our loved ones not sitting at the table with us?”
In Israel, the head of the Tzohar rabbinical organization, Rabbi David Stav, said it was “impossible to celebrate this holiday without calling out to the heavens that the captives should be taken out from the darkness in which they are being held in and into the light of freedom.”
There is logic to calling on the Israeli government to resign: the appalling failure to anticipate October 7 rests squarely on their shoulders, and the end to the war is not in sight. There is logic to setting aside all political considerations for now and speaking with one voice, since divisions simply encourage Hamas to not give in, to wait it out until our will weakens. As the international media focuses on the competing demonstrations on Israeli streets, everyone who visits Israel today reports an incredible sense of a country united, arguing among themselves, but absolutely united.
In the 1969 Soviet-Italian film, The red tent, the ghost of Umberto Nobile who chose to be rescued from the wreckage of his polar expedition ahead of his men, justifies his choice by saying he wanted to go and turn around the disarray of rescue efforts, which was exactly what he did, saving many. He is challenged by the ghost of Roald Amundsen (the inimitable Sean Connery) who perished while searching for the Nobile wreck, and he suddenly recalls that a fleeting thought of a hot bath passed through his mind as he was boarding the two-seat rescue plane. “And that”, paraphrasing Amundsen, “was the reason why you should not have agreed to being rescued first”.
I want to believe that if a thought of a decisive success in the Operation Swords of Iron salvaging his legacy – yes, saving the hostages, destroying Hamas, but also salvaging the legacy – passes Bibi’s mind, he will have the integrity to resign immediately. Bibi detractors will say “not in a million years”; supporters will say “of course”.
Just like I had hoped that our Canadian political leaders have the integrity to not let the fleeting thoughts of electoral advantage calculations determine the moral choices they make. There is much to question that integrity, though as always, there are bad news (first) and good news.
On April 4, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) together with Canadian families of Hamas victims filed a case against the Canadian Government over its decision to resume funding for UNRWA:
On Thursday, 30 days after the Government of Canada decided to resume funding for the controversial United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Canadian families who lost loved ones in the horrific Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, together with CIJA, filed a Federal Court application for judicial review contending that the decision to do reinstate funding to UNRWA was patently unreasonable because it violates Canadian law. It lays out the arguments of why UNRWA cannot be the agency to fulfill this responsibility and should be disqualified from funding. […]
“UNRWA’s ties to Hamas have long been known and ignored, allowing them to operate with impunity. However, in a post-October-7 world, to deny reality or to continue to remain silent in the face of these facts is complicity. Canada should never have restored funding; to do so was tantamount to giving them permission to continue as a proxy for Hamas.” Lawrence Greenspon, Senior Partner, Greenspon Granger Hill
On April 17, a large group of professionals (lawyers most prominently) published an open letter to the Prime Minister, fashioned after the famous 1898 J’Accuse! by Émile Zola, written in response to the events of the Dreyfus affair, which led to a dramatic change in French society and the political landscape of France of the early XX century. The writers clearly hope for a similar outcome: they do not mince words. They even bring up the specter of Jews leaving Canada, expressing in stark terms the feeling of unease that is shared by many today:
[W]e accuse you and your government, through your actions and inactions, of having contributed to the antisemitism we see running rampant in Canada today. You have permitted it to fester and rage like a fire burning out of control. Your indifference and relative silence in response to antisemitism contribute to the marginalization and isolation of Jews in Canada and their erasure from the public square.
We accuse you and your government of abandoning Canadian Jews in our time of great peril. Your failure to speak out against the attacks on Jews, the threats to Jewish schools, the targeting and vandalism of businesses and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and places of worship is incomprehensible. How do we explain your inaction to our children? How are Holocaust survivors to make sense of your silence?
[…] We accuse you and your government of contributing to the normalization of antisemitism in Canada. Instead of forcefully and repeatedly condemning Hamas, demanding the unconditional release of hostages, and assigning blame to Hamas for hoarding weapons in schools and hospitals and using civilians, including children, as human shields in Gaza you have triangulated your support so as not to offend anyone.
[… W]e accuse your government of supporting Israel’s enemies who indeed are the enemies of all the world’s democracies, and of adding to the hatred directed toward the Jewish community.
[…] The writing is on the wall for Canadian Jews who have been present in Canada for over 250 years. Canadian Jews have made immense contributions to every aspect of Canadian life–to business, industry, academia, science, the professions and to Canadian culture.
[…] Despite the Jewish community’s lasting and important contributions to Canada, our children and grandchildren are harassed, maligned and intimidated on university campuses across the country. Beginning April 22, Jews will be celebrating Passover and as they gather around the Seder table, many may be questioning whether they have a future in Canada if antisemitism continues to rage without abatement.
[…] If our 250-year story in Canada is to end and Jews decide to leave Canada, it will be because they feel that they can no longer live safely and freely as Jews and choose to endure no longer the ceaseless antisemitism pervading every aspect of our life in Canada.
[…] As Dr Martin Luther King Jr said so eloquently almost 60 years ago, “The time is always right to do what is right.” Prime Minister Trudeau: The time for action is now!
But not all news is about Jews finding themselves in opposition to the Government of Canada. On the good-news side,
[…] the 2024 Federal Budget includes significant security measures in response to the increased number of hate crimes targeted at Canada’s Jewish community, including $32M over six years to further enhance the Security Infrastructure Program; $7.3M over the next six years to support Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism; $5M for the establishment of a National Holocaust Remembrance Program; and over $180M in programs that will help combat antisemitism in Canada’s Action Plan on Combatting Hate. The Government of Canada is also allocating more than $180M in programs that will help combat antisemitism in Canada’s Action Plan on Combatting Hate.
On November 14, 2023, the Department of Politics at York University, a self-described “vibrant, internationally recognized community of educators, scholars, practitioners, activists and engaged citizens” formed the Palestine Solidarity Committee with a mandate to draft “a departmental definition of anti-Palestinian racism.” Their recommendations are now ready.
According to an April 5 “recommendations report” leaked to National Post, an official committee within York’s Department of Politics has proposed that any defence of Israel be viewed as “anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, and anti-Arab.”
[…] The document concludes that the university’s pledge to ‘fight racial inequity’ can’t be done unless administrators actively seek to isolate and destroy the Zionist ‘settler colonial project’
[…] The document not only recommends a broad definition of anti-Palestinian racism, but demands that the university implement a streamlined system for “reporting anti-Palestinian racism and harassment.”
As part of this, they propose heightened consequences for anybody falling within their definition of anti-Palestinian racism. “We propose that the department advocate for a more transparent and effective University process for handling complaints and violations of the code of conduct, including reparatory justice and/or grounds for suspension or removal for individuals who violate the code of conduct and community safety standards,” it reads.
The Department of Politics is ultimately told that they cannot hope to fight York’s apparent crisis of “anti-Palestinian racism” until they issue a departmental statement that endorses an Israeli boycott and supports “the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”
What would it take for all other University Presidents, maybe even Brock’s President Rigg, to issue a statement like that?
Occupy for Palestine (O4P) has called on the University to “terminate all partnerships with Israeli academic institutions that operate in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, or sustain the apartheid policies, occupation and illegal settlement of these territories.” This demand is at odds with the University’s longstanding opposition to academic boycotts, dating back at least to the 1980s.[1] Such demands are antithetical to the University’s firm conviction that the best way to protect human rights is by staunchly defending and promoting academic freedom, freedom of expression, and the unfettered circulation of ideas within the global scholarly community. We have consistently emphasized that it is both inappropriate and, ultimately, counterproductive to single out academics working or studying in a particular country, and to hold them accountable for the actions or policies of their country’s government. Faculty and students are often among the most trenchant critics of their own government’s policies or actions. Events over the past year confirm that Israeli academics – as well as university leaders – have been amongst the most vociferous critics of the current government and its policies.
Moreover, academic collaboration and the free circulation of ideas and people on a global scale are essential to universities’ collective mission of producing new knowledge and advancing understanding. Especially in troubled times such as these, universities have a special responsibility to further enlightenment, and to enable and accommodate dialogue. Today’s pressing issues will be best addressed by scholars – protected by academic freedom – working together to deepen our understanding of these challenging issues and contribute to finding solutions.
For these reasons, the University of Toronto has engaged in longstanding partnerships with institutions globally, including some Israeli universities. Current collaborations between faculty at the University of Toronto and Israeli universities include a joint project to address hate speech in the region and to foster supportive engagement with Palestinian students.
Because academic boycotts of any kind are antithetical to the University’s fundamental mission and values, we firmly reject O4P’s demand to terminate such partnerships.
Yale university’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department is co-sponsoring a seminar on the failure of the human rights movement to address the sexual violence against the Jewish women on October 7. Right along the lines of what BCAA did last week, thanks to our two wonderful panellists. Except… the WGSS site, or their Facebook page, have no mention of their own event, apparently the electronic poster was distributed through targeted email list only.
The Brock News this morning (April 11) advertised a visit to Brock by the Ontario’s Minister of Agriculture, and used this cover photograph:
Malkie Spodek (left), Entomology Scientist with Brock’s Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute and Adjunct Professor in Biological Sciences, explains her research to Ontario Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Minister Lisa Thompson (right), who looks through a microscope at grape mealybug eggs. The grape mealybug is an insect vector of grapevine viruses.
This Brock News’ article, proudly announced in an email sent out yesterday morning temporarily disappeared from the Brock website, which had us worried, but it has now been restored. The cover image has changed, but the above photo depicting a BCAA member wearing her yellow ribbon to raise awareness of the hostages still held in Gaza, is included in the expanded version of the article.
Perhaps, BCAA advocacy is making a small bit of difference?
We wish our friends at the other co-sponsoring organizations at Yale University: the Yale Friends of Israel and the Yale’s Law Students for Israel (an unofficial unapproved student group, so no link) the best in their efforts to turn around their University.
[Edit: an earlier version of this post was called Missing Links, but happily, the Brock News link has been restored, hence a change in the title and tone of the post.]
I try to avoid being partisan in my posts (in my life I had voted for both Liberal and Conservative candidates) but the contrast in the style of how our political leaders present themselves to the electorate on the current hot issues that trouble the Canadian Jews has been rendered in particularly stark contrast this week.
The previous week, an NDP/Liberal motion passed in Parliament that many in Canada and abroad describe as rewarding Hamas for its attack on Israel. All Conservatives and three Liberals voted against. A dissenting Liberal MP for Mount Royal Anthony Housefather said the motion created “a false equivalency between the state of Israel and the terrorist organization of Hamas.”
Contacting the Jewish community in the aftermath was in order. Taking a cynical point of view, Liberals needed to perform damage control and Conservatives wanted to press the electoral opportunity that this represented, especially since in December, 2023, our Liberal government had already received a public expression of gratitude from Hamas themselves, which did not look that great given that Hamas is a terrorist organization:
On Dec. 20, Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas leader, posted a short video [in which he] thanked Canada, as well as Australia and New Zealand, for their help in isolating the Israeli government.
But let us focus on the style if not the substance (which we may disagree on) of the responses to the “Jewish issues” of the day, that could be summarized as “does Canada stand with Israel?” and “are Jews safe in Canada?”
On March 27, 2024, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Liberal, for readers outside of Canada) met behind close doors with a handful of Rabbis arranged by the Liberal MP for Vancouver-Granville (where most Jewish facilities are in Vancouver). The meeting was off-the-record, so no read-out followed, but the PM office posted on X a photo of Trudeau shaking hands with a Rabbi, and that’s how we first learned about the meeting. [Full story]
On March 26, 2024, the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre delivered a “barn-burner of a pro-Israel” speech in front of a packed Beth Israel Beth Aaron synagogue, with 1300 people in attendance, in which he demonstrated both a commendable mastery of the Jewish traditions and a sense of humor. You can see it for yourself, because it was recorded and shared widely.
I know, one is a sitting government, the other is the opposition in attack mode, and can promise things he may not deliver when he becomes the government, but still – the contrast could not be more stark.
BCAA wholeheartedly welcomes the new student-led organization, the Canadian Union of Jewish Students, officially launched last Friday. They are planning to have chapters at universities across Canada, and we are hoping there will be one at Brock University. We certainly need one!
Brock University Professor of Sociology, Tamari Kitossa, wrote a paper for the Journal of State Crime, which was rejected by the journal through peer review. The paper argued that that “Zionism is a colonial project that intended from the start on lebensraum, a project of ethnic cleansing that preceded the coalition of German industrialists, US bankers and Hitler’s gang of thugs that formed the Third Reich”. Kitossa holds BA and MA degrees from York University and a PhD from OISE, and his “research and instruction interests include Blackness, anti-Blackness, Black masculinities, African Canadian leadership, anti-criminology and counter-colonial criminology and interracial unions.” Undeterred, Kitossa then posted the rejected paper on his personal blog, The Professor’s Corner, in four parts. The latest one, Zionism-as-Nazism, Still: Genocide was always the plan, from April 9, 2024, caught the eye of a National Post reporter, and its blatantly antisemitic tone was deemed important enough to deserve a front-page story. Within the story, Gil Troy, a well-known Professor of History from McGill University, is quoted as describing the series of posts that he reviewed at the request of the reporter as “unhinged, wildly inaccurate, sloppy, and offensive”.
Brock Coalition Against Antisemitism 