A Distorted Vision of IAW

Judy Rebick, a well-known and controversial figure as a feminist and former head of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, currently the Canadian Auto Workers' Sam Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University has found common cause with Alan Sears, also at Ryerson University, his expertise in the areas of theory, sexuality and labour studies.

Where both may have assembled a respectable knowledge of their spheres of study and teaching, their fragile understanding of the complexities of anti-Semitism and the plight of the Palestinians as relating to the State of Israel demonstrates amply through their recently published article in the National Post - "Israeli Apartheid Week no 'hate-fest'" - their severe paucity of intelligence on this matter.

Illuminating the genesis of their condemnation of protests against the iniquitously slanderous "Israeli Apartheid Week" and their 'understanding' and support of the Palestinian supporters. That the pair blandly describes the offensive poster in question as simply "The poster", and the threat "to pull funding from immigration settlement programs administered by the Canadian Arab Federation betrays either a selectively incomplete grasp of the facts or deliberate obtuseness.

According to these two academics, well steeped in academic liberal-left ideology, it was quite simply wrong for the decision taken by Carleton University, University of Ottawa, and Wilfred Laurier University administrators to order the offensive Israel-defaming poster in question from public view. Their reason for removing the poster was that they deemed it to be offensive, and that it constituted an offence against the Ontario Human Rights code.

Well, it went far beyond that, in fact. It demonized a democratic state whose very existence is under constant threat by its neighbour-states, and by sizeable contingents of strident opponents to its existence; a country under siege, attempting to defend itself against a clear existential threat, characterized as a demonic genocidal beast ravening in its need to murder innocent children.

The dynamic duo find it appalling that Jason Kenney threatened to withdraw public tax dollars that the federal government apportions to ethnic groups for immigration settlement programs. This pair of denouncers must surely be aware that the CAFederation does not merely 'advocate' for Palestinian rights; they align themselves staunchly in the camp of the terror groups directly responsible for mass bloody murder of Israelis along with threats against Israel's longevity.

Canada, they might like to remind themselves, encourages immigration from a huge number of sources around the world. The country seeks to accommodate emigrants from countries whose traditions and cultures and religions are very unlike what is recognized as traditional in Canada. Minorities by law are guaranteed protection from hatred in this country. This protection is granted them with the expectation that they too will obey the law and refrain from spreading hatred against others.

This is a country of great tolerance, guaranteeing freedoms not readily available in most other countries of the world; most notably those countries from whence those currently attacking the legitimacy of the Jewish State and by extension Canadian Jews' support for that state. Our tolerance is a double-edged expectation. Freedoms extended are fairly all-encompassing, but they do not preclude the necessity of demonstrating respect and civility toward others.

And despite their protestations to the contrary, the students who so fervently supported and took part in "Israeli Apartheid Week" did indeed extend flagrant hatred toward other students; otherwise known as anti-Semitism. The universities they deplore for having submitted to 'false charges' levelled against the IAW organizers did otherwise permit the events to proceed.

Rebick and Sears trumpet that the event organizers and 'most university administrators' were not intimidated by false charges of anti-Semitism. On the contrary, what most universities did was succumb to the intimidation of the organizers who mounted this yearly spite-fest. They speak to the temper of these trying times.

Not so trying if you're an agitator against Israel, claiming it to be fully invested as an apartheid state, but compellingly trying if you're a Jew, or a Zionist or as often happens, both, and witness and suffer yet again the miserable sting of anti-Semitism however else it's cloaked.

It's quite wonderful to read that Rebick and Sears steadfastly cling to the belief that the IAW organizers are 'committed to freedom of speech and to working against all forms of oppression, including Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism or discrimination based on religion, nationality, gender or sexual orientation", overt demonstrations to the contrary.

How dreadfully peculiar that all of those other designated human rights areas somehow became indistinguishable from the paramount function of the event, whose label defined the singular purpose of all that 'suffering humanity' activity.

Their carefully righteous defining of 'apartheid' fitting the State of Israel neatly into the definition quoted from the International Criminal Court is disingenuous beyond words. This is a country fully democratically extending equal citizenship rights to Jews, Christians and Muslims. Where else does that inclusiveness exist in the Middle East, let alone within other Islamic countries?

The country's fully independent judiciary treats the law equally without distinction of ethnicity, orientation or religion. The country seeks to live in peace, but finds it elusive given the determination of the very terrorist entities that the IAW supporters clarify as democratically elected representatives. There's something truly amiss in the lack of neutrality evidenced here.

If, in a search for full understanding and co-operation among mutually engaged groups on university campuses, differences in perception aside, the goal is to find a way to resolve problems, then some modicum of respect must first be evidenced, and a willingness to come together in a fair and equally-open theatre of legitimate debate.

By deliberately marginalizing, defaming, blaming, threatening and ostracizing Jewish students and viciously slandering Israel, it becomes abundantly evident there was no intent to educate, to bring intelligent rationality and objectivity to the debate, but to spread the blight of racial hatred.

The State of Israel may find that it has much to answer for, to itself, in its clear desire to be that which it and its citizens may be proud of. Its presence in a sea of oppressive totalitarian regimes none of which celebrated its presence on their common soil, has been a long season of holding its own against tremendous odds. The country agonizes over the lack of choices it is given by its adversaries.

A week of introspection into the entire situation of one small country being encircled by wealthy, racist and powerful nations with a democratic deficit whose intolerance of the presence of a perceived alien state has led them to continual intimidation and harassment of that state and its people, inclusive of ongoing terrorist attacks, might have been more to the point.

Then the superficial arguments against the anti-humane presence of a protective wall encircling the country to ensure its citizens were not continuing to present as death-delivering fodder for religious psychopaths embracing their divine duty to Allah as honoured martyrs to the cause might be seen in a different perspective.

One's patience is most certainly challenged reading the pair's assertion that Israel "...assaulted the mostly civilian population causing more than 1,000 deaths..." Somehow conveniently managing to overlook that Israel has suffered assaults on its border towns by terror groups in Gaza for far too long. That the assault was not upon the civilian population, but upon the Hamas terrorists.

Overlooked as well was the inconvenience that it is Hamas that installs its militias, its weapons depots and its rocket launchers among the civilian populations, and it is Hamas, like its Lebanese alter-ego Hezbollah, that has perfected the use of civilian human shields. It must also have slipped their minds that hundreds of Hamas terrorists were killed in the assault.

While their elite commanders hid in underground bunkers, and those to whom they answer to, urged continued 'resistance' to the 'occupiers' and continue to do so from the safety of Lebanon and Syria. Doing their duty to those who train and supply them with cash and armaments, from Iran.

In short, Judy Rebick and Alan Sears have pawned themselves by a circuitous but nonetheless logical manner to the aspirations of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This may surprise them, but no less than the Canadian Jewish public is surprised by their fervent support for anti-Semitism clumsily masked as a humanitarian appeal on behalf of the Palestinians.

Peace may eventually come to the region, and when it does the Arabic world of Islam will have to look elsewhere for excuses explaining why it remains mired in tribalism and human rights abuses, practising true apartheid, where it remains a death sentence to become an 'apostate', a homosexual, and where women can still be stoned for adultery.

Have Judy Rebick and Alan Sears contemplated striving to persuade the oppressive Islamic regimes to think seriously of Islamic reform and entry into the 21st Century?