Car: Choose Respect

2023/11/07 Leave a comment

Winnipeg MP on the importance of dialogue, listening and respect:

How can you say you care about combatting Islamophobia or the lives of innocent children without calling for a ceasefire? How can you say you care about the loss of innocent Palestinian life if you attend a vigil for kidnapped Israelis? How can you say you care about defeating Hamas if you want Israel to respect calls for humanitarian pauses so that aid can flow?

These are several of the questions I have faced from people upset with the perspectives I have shared in relation to what has been happening in the Middle East. For some, it does not matter that I am speaking with members of both the Jewish and Muslim community every day. It does not matter that I have called for more aid to flow to Gaza, for the hostages to be released by Hamas, or for a two-state solution that can bring peace to this conflict. It does not matter that I am actively organizing meetings with police, elected officials, community leaders and experts to address the rise in hate against both the Jewish and Muslim community.

Every single word we utter, every single action we take, is parsed through by too many who are looking for some iota of ammunition they can use to establish what they believe to be an allegiance to one side or the other. It is not always about choosing a side, it is not always black and white, and it is certainly not always static.

It is possible to disagree on the ways in which we solve conflicts, without having to denigrate the character, morals, or intentions of the person with whom we disagree. President Obama said recently that “we should choose not to always assume the worst in those with whom we disagree.” How we conduct our behaviour towards others is a choice, and it is a choice we should pause to consider often.

I have had many respectful and productive conversations about the conflict recently with constituents, some Jews, some Muslims, and many from neither community. What made them respectful and productive?

First, we listened to each other. No interrupting, no positioning for the last word, just moments of genuine pause and reflection as the other spoke. Second, we were calm. No shouting, and no attempts to leave scars behind. Third, they were honest. The words conveyed stayed true to the values of those conveying them, and in that, each maintained their integrity. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the objective in that moment was not to change the mind of the other – or to see the inability to do so as a failure – however, it was to leave the other with a broadened understanding of an opposing point of view that provided an opportunity for further reflection. It is this that contributes to the meaningfulness of thinking critically through difficult issues.

I am grateful to those who are continuing to reach out. However difficult the discussions, they need to happen. I hope that when they do, they can unfold in the ways I have highlighted from recent experiences noted above.

Protesting outside of businesses owned by members of a specific religious community, with calls to boycott them, simply because they are members of that community, is wrong. Intentionally intimidating people in the streets, is wrong. Calling for Jews to be flushed into the sea, or for Muslims to “go back to where they came from”, is wrong. These actions are not only hateful, they also prevent the conditions necessary to foster healthy relationships and peace from taking root.

As an educator, I often worked with kids and families who had experienced traumas in their lives. In order to help heal, it required trauma informed language and practices. This means reframing our own bias, making an effort to shift from asking “what’s wrong with you?”, to “what happened to you?’. We must do our best to move from judgement to curiosity.

These are fundamental principles in a trauma informed approach to conflict resolution. The intention is not to adjudicate on questions of who or what is “right” or “wrong”. The intention, is to guide us towards greater understanding of one another’s perspectives, and to restore a sense of humanity to a societal dialogue that has become increasingly void of it.

As difficult as the conversations are that we are having right now, we must have them. One day, we all hope soon, this war will end. When it is over, we will still be neighbours, co-workers, and family. We will still want the best for our kids and our communities. In order for us to overcome the trauma and wounds left behind from this current crisis here at home, we will need to lean as heavily as ever before, on the principles of respect, compassion, and love, while choosing to see the best in one another. That starts now.

Ben Carr is the Member of Parliament for Winnipeg South Centre

Source: Choose Respect

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Goldberg: When It Comes to Israel, Who Decides What You Can and Can’t Say?

2023/11/06 Leave a comment

Good discussion of the players and the issues:

Last week, the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law sent a letter to nearly 200 college presidents urging them to investigate campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine for potential violations of federal and state laws against providing material support to terrorism. As evidence for these very serious accusations, the ADL and the Brandeis center offered only the student group’s own strident rhetoric, including a sentence in its online tool kit, which praised Hamas’s attacks on Israel and said: “We must act as part of this movement. All of our efforts continue the work and resistance of the Palestinians on the ground.”

Under the direction of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has also ordered state universities to shut chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine. Citing the same tool kit, DeSantis said, “That is material support to terrorism, and that is not going to be tolerated in the state of Florida, and it should not be tolerated in these United States of America.” Virginia’s Republican attorney general has opened an investigation into American Muslims for Palestine, a national group that, according to the ADL, helps coordinate the activities of Students for Justice in Palestine, “for potentially violating Virginia’s charitable solicitation laws, including benefiting or providing support to terrorist organizations.” Several Republicans, including Donald Trump, have called for revoking the visas of pro-Palestinian student activists.

Ever since Hamas’s slaughter and mass kidnapping of Israelis on Oct. 7, there has been mounting fear and fury over the mistreatment of Jews at American colleges and universities. The Homeland Security, Justice and Education Departments are all taking steps to combat campus antisemitism. Congressional resolutions have condemned it. But while plenty of pro-Palestinian students have behaved in appalling ways, many also feel besieged, and for good reason.

For Palestinian and Muslim students, the invocation of terrorism law is especially frightening. Attempts to curtail anti-Zionist activism are not new; about 35 states have laws targeting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. But now advocates for Palestinian rights describe a new level of repression. “The ADL is calling for the mass violation of students’ rights in a manner that’s reminiscent of the post 9/11 environment, but with a more intensely Palestinian twist,” said Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at the civil rights organization Palestine Legal. She predicts that if federal and state governments follow through on the ADL’s demands, Palestinian activists will be subjected to an increase in surveillance, infiltration and investigation, even though their groups “pose zero threat and have done nothing but engage in speech 100 percent protected by the First Amendment.”

Columbia University’s Rashid Khalidi, a pre-eminent historian of Palestinian history, readily acknowledged a rash of recent antisemitic incidents on college campuses. But he drew a distinction between interpersonal harassment and an institutional crackdown. “Both sides have feelings of being victimized,” he told me, but the forces arrayed against them are not the same. “The Patriot Act may be mobilized to shut down speech” deemed supportive of Palestinian terrorism. “That’s the difference.”

No one should underestimate how awful the campus climate is for many Jewish students, who’ve experienced a surge in violence and abuse. At Cornell, an engineering student was arrested after threatening to shoot up a kosher dining hall and calling for Jews to be raped and murdered. Demonstrators at a rally in support of Palestinians assaulted Jewish counterprotesters at Tulane; one student had his nose broken. In October, Erwin Chemerinsky, the law school dean of at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote an opinion essay headlined, “Nothing Has Prepared Me for the Antisemitism I See on College Campuses Now.” In it, he told of a student who insisted that she would feel safe on campus only if the school got “rid of the Zionists.”

This hostile environment stems, at least in part, from the nearly vaunted role played by the Palestinian cause in the left’s understanding of global dispossession. Because America helps underwrite Israel’s military occupation, Palestinians are often viewed as singular symbols of imperialist oppression. For decades, radical Black activists in America have seen, in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, a mirror of their own subjugation, and that identification was supercharged during America’s 2020 racial justice protests, when a mural of George Floyd appeared in Gaza City. In some social justice circles, then, support for Israel is viewed as something akin to support for the K.K.K.

This contempt for Zionism has only accelerated with the pulverizing bombing of Gaza and its thousands of civilian casualties. And too often, on hothouse campuses full of young people with half-formed ideas and poor impulse control, anti-Zionism segues into hatred directed at Jews.

For some Jews on campus, the vituperation against Zionism has been particularly disorienting because, for years now, they’ve been trained in exquisite sensitivity to identity-based slights.

Not all Jews identify with the state of Israel, of course, and activists from Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have led protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. But many Jews see their relationship with Israel as an essential part of their Jewishness, and even some fierce critics of Israel’s government were shaken by the widespread demonization of the country so soon after Hamas’s atrocities. When they say that the campus climate makes them feel unsafe — a rhetorical trump card in other contexts — they expect official action.

On Wednesday, the presidents of several Israeli universities wrote a letter to their international colleagues calling on them to accord Jewish and Israeli students and faculty members “the same respect and protections as any other minority.” Citing principles of safety and inclusivity, the letter said, “Just as it would be unthinkable for an academic institution to extend free speech protections to groups targeting other protected classes, so too should demonstrations that call for our destruction and glorify violence against Jews be explicitly prohibited and condemned.”

But this demand for protection can collide with the First Amendment rights of Zionism’s critics, and with academic freedom more broadly. “I wouldn’t compare this with the internment of the Japanese Americans in World War II, but the point I’m making is that there are times when people get really upset about what’s happening in the world and do things that are unwise at best and really harmful to people and democracy at worst,” said Kenneth Stern, director of Bard College’s Center for the Study of Hate and author of “The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate.”

Stern occupies a unique position in this profoundly polarizing debate. He’s a liberal Zionist and an expert on antisemitism, as well as a committed civil libertarian who critiques the way mainstream Jewish groups wield institutional power to try to silence pro-Palestinian voices.

As he describes in his book, in 1982, he resigned from the left-wing National Lawyers Guild rather than face what felt like a purge for refusing to sign onto a strictly pro-Palestinian line. Years later, he became the in-house antisemitism expert at the American Jewish Committee, but eventually left in part over concern that, in its ardent defense of Israel on college campuses, the group was forsaking a commitment to academic freedom. He helped draft an internationally adopted definition of antisemitism that includes some forms of anti-Zionism. He’s also inveighed, in opinion essays, congressional testimony and in his 2020 book, against the use of that definition, put out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, to traduce the free speech of Israel’s critics.

“The complexity of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict should make it an ideal subject to teach critical thinking and how to have difficult discussions,” writes Stern. “Instead, it is being used as a toxin that threatens the entire academic enterprise.”

As with the conflict between Israel and Palestine more broadly, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a libertarian-leaning free speech organization, shared data with me showing that, since 2002, there have been more attempts made to de-platform pro-Palestinian campus speakers than pro-Israel ones. But attempts to shut down pro-Israel speakers, by disinviting or disrupting them, are more likely to be successful.

Both sides, then, have credible stories to tell about being censored and intimidated. The difference is where that intimidation is coming from. For supporters of Israel, it largely comes from peers and, in some cases, professors. For supporters of Palestine, it comes from powerful outside institutions, including the state.

There is little reason to think that the pressure brought to bear by these outside institutions is making Jewish students any safer. One result of the denunciatory mood that overtook many progressive spaces toward the tail end of the Trump years was to give reactionary ideas a rebellious frisson. You could see this in the little subculture of New York scenesters who adopted the trappings of conservative Catholicism as a rebuke to liberalism, but also in more significant cultural phenomena, like the popularity of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast and the right-wing radicalization of Elon Musk. Among young people, the appeal of right-wing heterodoxy was limited by the fact that relatively few want to give up either a commitment to human equality or premarital sex. Anti-Zionist activism, by contrast, offers something that’s been missing from left-wing politics for years: the chance to stand up for the downtrodden and scandalize elites.

“By trying to censor anti-Israel remarks, it becomes more, not less, difficult to tackle both antisemitism and anti-Israel dogma,” Stern writes in his book. “The campus debate is changed from one of exposing bigotry to one of protecting free speech, and the last thing pro-Israel advocates need is a reputation for censoring, rather than refuting, their opponents.”

Of course, Israel’s partisans already have that reputation. “What can you say about what settlers are doing in the West Bank?” asked Khalidi. “What can you say about ethnic cleansing in 1948,” the year of Israel’s founding? “How can you defend any of those things? They don’t have an argument. They have to shut down debate.” Those who disagree with him might try to prove him wrong.

Source: When It Comes to Israel, Who Decides What You Can and Can’t Say?

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Trump-era antisemitism policy expected to fuel flood of student lawsuits against universities

2023/11/06 Leave a comment

As so often happens, lawsuits emerge, more broadly than just antisemitism:

As campuses across the country continue to erupt in protests over the Israel-Hamas war, a little-known 2019 presidential executive order is expected to fuel a flood of student legal claims against universities.

Attorneys — from a mix of white-shoe corporate firms to Jewish advocacy groups — are meeting with students who say their schools are failing to protect them from antisemitic or anti-Israel conduct.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump signed an order instructing federal officials to expand the interpretation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include “discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism” as a form of discrimination based on race, color and national origin — prohibited behavior for programs that get federal funding. Trump signed the order amid a series of violent incidents against Jews, including the 2018 killing of 11 congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue and a 2019 attack that killed three inside a Kosher supermarket in New Jersey.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not include the word “religion” as a subject of discrimination. Because the law does not list religious characteristics, legal experts say, federal officials have gradually expanded interpretations to include ethnoreligious groups.

Trump told federal agencies “to consider” using the Sweden-based International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which includes “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

The alliance promotes Holocaust education and research, and has come under criticism by both Jewish and non-Jewish groups for suggesting that broad criticism of Israel can be construed as antisemitic.

In January 19, 2021, the day before Trump left office, the U.S. Department of Education, released a five-page questions and answers memo defining what constitutes antisemitism at schools.

An NBC News review of the department’s current investigations showed 15 pending cases related to race or national origin. The most recent filing listed was against Oberlin College in Ohio, dated a week before the Hamas attacks on Israel. Melissa Landa, an alumna of the college, told NBC News that she filed the letter because the school didn’t intervene after a professor taught students that “Israel is an illegitimate settler colonial apartheid regime,” according to Landa.

“I think that students need to file Title VI complaints so that universities can have federal money withheld from them, and maybe that will make them act,” Landa said. “I hope that my Title VI complaint will serve as an example for them.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Education said that since Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis, “we have seen an uptick in complaints and the department is assessing them all.”

Lawyers said they have received an overwhelming number of calls from across the country from Jewish college students and their parents requesting representation in Title VI claims. Kenneth Marcus, who ran the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights during the Trump and George W. Bush administrations, said he is getting many calls.

“Oh, my God, I can’t tell you how many campuses we’re dealing with every single day. We have never been so inundated with cases,” said Marcus, who now runs the Brandeis Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit focused on protecting the civil rights of Jews.

In recent years, the Brandeis Center has filed Title VI complaints against the University of Vermont and the State University of New York at New Paltz on behalf of Jewish students who said their universities have allowed antisemitism to fester on campus.

In April, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said it found that the University of Vermont failed to investigate student claims of antisemitism and did not examine whether the complaints had created a hostile environment for Jewish students.

The University of Vermont signed a resolution agreement with federal officials later that month vowing to enact reforms such as expanding the school’s discrimination policy to include protections for students based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism. In June, the Office for Civil Rights opened a formal investigation into SUNY-New Paltz.

For years, Marcus has also been fighting to broaden Title VI protections to members of other ethnoreligious groups. He said prior to the Trump administration, he wrote guidance memos that said Title VI could be interpreted to include protecting members of other ethnoreligious groups such as Sikhs and Arab Muslims. But in 2019, Trump kept his executive order focused on protecting Jews.

In September, President Joe Biden issued a statement noting that Title VI also prohibits Islamophobic activities in federally funded programs. But the U.S. Department of Education has not released a detailed memo that defines Islamophobia as it has done for antisemitism.

Gadeir Abbas, a senior litigation attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said his team is preparing discrimination complaints on behalf of Muslim and pro-Palestinian students, who he says are being unfairly labeled as Hamas sympathizers or unfairly accused of providing support to terrorists.

“I think that pro-Israel groups, groups that are seeking to marginalize Palestinian voices on campus, see the Title VI claim as a way of attacking not the administration, but the other student groups,” Abbas said. “The idea is that [they’re] going to censor or penalize or punish any advocacy for equal rights of Palestinians.”

As a result, he said, Palestinian students — or students who say they support Palestinian civilians in Gaza — feel vulnerable on campus and in their communities, and some are considering filing their own Title VI claims.

NBC News has reported that bias incidents against Muslims are on the rise. CAIR said that it received 774 reports of bias incidents and requests for help from Muslims across the country from Oct. 7 through Oct. 24, nearly triple the number compared to a similar time period last year.

Abbas said that students, like all Americans, have a right to protest in the United States. “In a conflict between the First Amendment and Title VI, the First Amendment wins,” Abbas said. “Those student groups are participating in lawful activity. They’re recognized willingly by their colleges and universities.”

Three weeks before the Hamas attacks and the subsequent protests on American campuses, Palestine Legal, an advocacy organization for Palestinian rights, filed a Title VI complaint with the U.S. Department of Education. Attorneys demanded a federal investigation after the University of Illinois Chicago barred students “with Arab sounding names” from attending a January 2023 informational session on a university-sponsored Israel study-abroad program.

Legal experts said they expect the largest number of future Title VI cases to be filed against universities by Jewish students. The Anti-Defamation League recently reported that nationwide, “incidents of harassment, vandalism and assault increased by 388 percent over the same period last year.”

One of the most outspoken advocates for Jewish students’ use of Title VI since Oct. 7 has been the Lawfare Project, a nonprofit that represents Jewish clients. Lawfare staffers have met with Jewish students on campuses, posted solicitations for cases in Jewish WhatsApp groups, and used the organization’s social media accounts “End Jew Hatred” to recruit young clients.

“While we always had students reaching out to us, after Oct. 7, that became a flood,” said Lawfare senior counsel Gerard Filitti, while standing on the sidelines of a recent pro-Israel rally at Columbia University. “The phone was ringing nonstop.”

Georgetown Law student Julia Wax, 25, was also at the Columbia rally. Wax said she is in talks with Lawfare to file a Title VI lawsuit against her law school, claiming that pro-Palestinian student organizations on her campus have been publicly supporting Hamas.

“I think in a perfect world, Georgetown would create some sort of an open forum for this conflict to be discussed,” said Wax, adding that she wants Georgetown to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

In February 2020, Lawfare represented one of the first Jewish college students to file a Title VI complaint against a university after Trump’s executive order. Jonathan Karten, then 24, was a Columbia University student who said he was harassed by members of the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine. (The group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Karten’s complaint said students called him “racist” and a “Zionist pig.” Tensions further escalated as professor Joseph Massad, who teaches modern Arab politics and has a history of criticizing Israel, referred to the military wing of Hamas as “armed resistance,” according to the complaint. Karten’s uncle was killed by Hamas militants in 1996 while hitchhiking in Israel.

“My professor endorsed the very same monsters,” Karten, who recently rejoined the Israeli army, said in a WhatsApp message.

The Department of Education declined to comment on the status of the case.

Karten’s younger brother, Isidore, also a Columbia alumnus, is pressuring the department to do more. Since the Hamas terrorist attacks, he has also helped organize pro-Israel events around the city and says he is frustrated by what he sees as Columbia’s muted response to antisemitism.

On Wednesday, Columbia University announced it was starting an antisemitism task force to come up with changes to academic and extracurricular programs. Columbia spokesperson Samantha Slater said in a statement that the university is beefing up security.

“Over the past few weeks, we have increased our public safety presence across all our campuses,” Slater wrote. “We are also working closely with outside security firms and are in regular contact with the New York City Police Department.”

Isidore Karten said he and other young Jewish activists continue to feel that Columbia can do more. “I don’t think they are doing enough,” he said

Source: Trump-era antisemitism policy expected to fuel flood of student … – NBC News

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Chris Selley: Teaching kids about the Holocaust won’t cure us of our antisemites

2023/11/04 Leave a comment

Valid caution:

In 2019, the Pew Research Center polled Americans on their knowledge of the Holocaust and their attitudes toward Jews. The results were intuitive: The more people knew about Hitler’s rise to power, and about how many millions of Jews were murdered, the “warmer” their feelings were.

“Warmer feelings” seems to be the basic goal British Columbia and Ontario have in mind in beefing up Holocaust education in elementary and secondary schools, after Hamas’s Oct. 7 pogrom in southern Israel led to celebrations on the streets of Canadian cities, and later the targeting of Jewish-owned businesses for protests and various other antisemitic acts.

“If we really want to fight hate in this province, if we really want to stand up to antisemitism, it is critical that we learn from the past,” B.C. Premier David Eby said this week. “We know how threats and hate can accelerate into violent acts and into horrific outcomes. We must ensure that the same horrors are not repeated.”

“By including new mandatory learning in Holocaust education in elementary and secondary schools, we are ensuring students are never bystanders in the face of hate and division,” Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce averred.

It would be very difficult to argue against Holocaust education, unless you think students needn’t know about seminal events in human history. (Astonishingly, only Ontario and B.C. mandate any at all. Expect that to change.) But as a means to a greater social end, Holocaust education isn’t necessarily as effective as people might hope.

A cautionary note from the Pew survey: The “warm feelings” gap between the informed and uninformed really wasn’t very big. The people who were most informed about the Holocaust measured 67 out of 100 on Pew’s “feeling thermometer.” The least informed were at 58.

And another cautionary note from the British Centre for Holocaust Information: Just because you teach kids something doesn’t mean they’ll believe it or remember it. In a 2016 survey of nearly 10,000 English secondary-school students, the centre found that “despite the Holocaust being a staple in the curriculum for almost 25 years, student knowledge and conceptual understanding is often limited and based on inaccuracies and misconceptions.”

Just over 10 per cent of students believed “no more than 100,000 lives were lost (in the Holocaust),” the study reported.  “Most (students) had little understanding of why (the Jews) were persecuted and murdered,” with most assuming it was simply a matter of Nazis abhorring “difference” of all kinds. The understanding of antisemitism specifically — past and present — was so weak that “68 per cent of students (were) unaware of what ‘antisemitism’ meant.”

Teaching about the Holocaust in isolation from antisemitism, from Jewish history, and from Jews in the modern world, is one of the key pedagogical pitfalls American essayist Dara Horn identified in a fascinating recent piece at The Atlantic. Horn quoted Charlotte Decoster of the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum: “Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”

“When anti-Semitism is reduced to the Holocaust, anything short of murdering six million Jews — like … taunting kids at school, or shooting up a Jewish nonprofit, or hounding Jews out of entire countries — seems minor by comparison,” Horn argues.

“Holocaust education remains essential for teaching historical facts in the face of denial and distortions,” she concludes. “Yet over the past year, as I’ve visited Holocaust museums and spoken with educators around the country, I have come to the disturbing conclusion that Holocaust education is incapable of addressing contemporary anti-Semitism.”

Indeed, it strikes me that the worst things I’ve heard Canadians says since Oct. 7 have come from conspicuously educated people who surely know what the Holocaust was. “How beautiful is the spirit to get free that Palestinians literally learned how to fly on hang gliders,” Harsha Walia jaw-droppingly effused on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery. She has a law degree from UBC. She was director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, for heaven’s sake, until she cheered the burning of churches on First Nations.

It seems safe to say, knock wood, that Canada isn’t quite as deep into this problem as some of our peer nations. By the Anti-Defamation League’s definition, eight per cent of Canadian adults harbour antisemitic views. In France it’s 15 per cent, in Belgium 22 per cent, in Spain 26 per cent. We don’t have France’s soul-crushing banlieues — ghettoes fine-tuned to turn bitter, unemployed young Muslim men into extremists. We have freedom of speech: We let pro-Palestinian activists say their piece, disturbing as it might be, rather than turning the water cannons on them.

Pew found that simply knowing something of another faith (or none) significantly warmed feelings toward that faith: Atheists scored just 38 degrees on the “feeling thermometer” among Americans who don’t know any, and 51 degrees among Americans who do. Catholics enjoyed the same 13-per-cent jump. Those with personal connections were 10 degrees warmer to Hindus, Jews and Mainline Protestants. Canada is a country where people of many faiths and of no faith work and socialize together — even those who might have been raised with prejudicial attitudes toward others. That ought to help.

But of course, it only takes one pathetic, bigoted freak to lose the plot before something horrific happens. Sticking to our values is all we can do, in my view, and that should absolutely include well-designed Holocaust and antisemitism curricula. But no one should assume it’ll be enough. This problem didn’t emerge on Oct. 7, after all. Oct. 7 simply shined a blinding light on it

Source: Chris Selley: Teaching kids about the Holocaust won’t cure us of our antisemites

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The DEI industry has an antisemitism problem – UnHerd

2023/11/02 Leave a comment

Of note:

The diversity, equity and inclusion industry has been dented by several recent antisemitism disputes. George Washington University postponed a diversity summit last week over concerns about the “current climate”, after a student group projected messages onto a campus building reading “glory to our martyrs”, “free Palestine from the river to the sea” and “GWU is complicit in genocide in Gaza”. The university wrote that the postponement was related to campus safety as well as the “pain” felt by students.

Institutions across the country — and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) departments in particular — appear to be reckoning with the same problem. The advocacy group StopAntisemitism found in its 2022 report that the majority of universities it evaluated did not include Jews in their DEI programs.

Speaking to UnHerd, Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson claimed that at his university “opponents of Israel seek to racialise what is a religious and national conflict to put together coalitions of students ‘of colour’ versus ‘white’ Israel and Jews”. He suggested that this process has accelerated since the university announced an anti-racism initiative in early June 2020, following the killing of George Floyd.

Cornell came under scrutiny after history professor Russell Rickford said he was “exhilarated” by the 7 October Hamas attacks, and the FBI is currently investigating recent antisemitic threats made against its Jewish student centre.

“I’ve not seen any response from feminist and women’s rights groups, which overlap significantly with the pro-Palestinian groups, to the use of rape and sexual abuse by Hamas, including rape of dead Israeli women,” Jacobson said. “It may be old fashioned Jew-hatred, but I think more likely it is because campus ‘social justice’ movements, including at Cornell, have been conditioned by the DEI obsession with race to view Israeli Jews as so uniquely evil that resistance ‘by any means necessary’ is promoted, embraced, and excused.”

In March, Tabia Lee found out the extent of the DEI industry’s targeting of certain viewpoints. A former faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, California, she was fired from her position after hosting Jewish speakers on campus to discuss antisemitism and the Holocaust, and attempting to host a multifaith heritage event.

“I saw antisemitism on a weekly basis in my two years as a faculty ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ director,” she wrote in the New York Post this month. “Toxic DEI ideology deliberately stokes hatred toward Israel and the Jewish people.” Lee characterised the industry as “built on the unshakeable belief that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.” Within this, “Jews are categorically placed in the oppressor category, while Israel is branded a ‘genocidal, settler, colonialist state’”, and  “criticizing Israel and the Jewish people is not only acceptable but praiseworthy.”

Last week, Sophia Hasenfus — a diversity, equity and belonging officer at MIT — came under fire for liking a tweet which claimed that Israel is guilty of genocide and does not have a right to exist.Meanwhile, City University of New York (CUNY), which has been subject to several Title VI complaints for alleged antisemitic discrimination, hired Saly Abd Alla, a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) supporter and former civil rights director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), as its chief diversity officer in 2021.

The problem isn’t limited to academia: former head of diversity at Google Kamau Bobb was moved to a different department at the company in 2021 after a blog post in which he wrote that Jews have an “insatiable appetite for war” and an “insensitivity to the suffering [of] others” resurfaced.

In the same year, a report from the conservative Heritage Foundation found widespread and inordinate hostility towards Israel in the Twitter activities of university DEI staffers. Tweets they wrote, shared or liked about Israel included numerous mentions of apartheid, colonialism, genocide and the targeting of children, the report found. While Israel was referenced three times as often as China, 96% of the tweets about Israel were deemed negative. The corresponding figure for tweets about China was 38%.

Source: The DEI industry has an antisemitism problem – UnHerd

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Black feminists in defence of Sarah Jama and Palestinian human rights

2023/10/24 Leave a comment

Remarkable demonstration of willful blindness and ideological blinkers. Not a word about the Israelis slaughtered by Hamas. And how can self-styled feminists be supportive of the Islamist and anti-feminist Hamas?

Most other commentary criticizing the Israeli government’s response to the Hamas attacks acknowledges the brutality of the Hamas killings and kidnappings.

Even the equally biased message from TMU law students (since taken down), “condemned Hamas’ recent war crimes killing 1300 Israelis” but then reverts to form by stating “Israel is therefore responsible for all loss of life in Palestine.”

That three academics at UofT failed to do so acknowledge Hamas’s brutality, will legitimately be used as an example of the “rot” in academia.

Sad:

We are Black women scholars writing with the strongest concern for the possible censure of MPP Sarah Jama at Queen’s Park. As Black women, we live with the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism. We feel a responsibility, like many Black women before us, to oppose all forms of racist dehumanization.

We are outraged that Sarah Jama, a Black woman and Hamilton Centre MPP, may be silenced — unable to speak in the provincial Legislature — for the duration of her elected term. Jama has been targeted by Premier Doug Ford, and reprimanded by her own party leadership, in response to a statement in which she called for a de-escalation of violence.

The attack on Jama comes amidst deepening government repression of those who speak out in defence of Palestinian life.

Jill Dunlop, minister of Colleges and Universities, has named and condemned university students and faculty who authored or signed statements, even those who have defended Palestinian human rights on social media, calling for them to be disciplined for “supporting the atrocities that have been committed against innocent civilians.”

Are Palestinian civilians not also “innocent?”

We mourn the loss of all civilian life and we also stand with those who speak out in support of Palestinian human rights and against government efforts to intimidate and silence dissenting voices.

The siege on Gaza is a humanitarian disaster, described by UN experts as “collective punishment” and “ethnic cleansing”. Since Oct. 7 and of writing this article on Friday, the Israeli army has dropped over 6,000 bombs in Gaza, killing 3,478 people, with one Palestinian child killed every 15 minutes. Israel has launched 136 attacks on health-care services across Palestine, killing 28 medical staff. Over a million Palestinians have been displaced, with corridors for humanitarian aid closed. Human Rights Watch has documented the use of white phosphorus, a chemical that “burns at temperatures hot enough to melt metal.”

On Oct. 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced “a complete siege … no electricity, no water, no food, no fuel,” saying, “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” In a since-deleted tweet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the siege on Gaza as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” These statements justify the ongoing attack on Gaza, constituting what Israeli Holocaust Scholar Raz Segal deems “an intent to commit genocide.”

Black people too have often been likened to animals and relegated to the realm of darkness and “the jungle.” Sarah Jama’s words emerge from a long tradition of Black women standing in support of Palestinian human rights and against apartheid, from Toni Morrison to Audre Lorde, Angela Y. Davis, June Jordan and Dionne Brand.

On our campus and in our movements, we work from Indigenous lands and across geographic and socially erected borders, with scholars of all backgrounds — including Palestinian, Indigenous and Jewish — to stand for justice and against dehumanization. Black feminists have not only the right, but the duty, to take a stand against genocide, militarism, and occupation, and to challenge the Canadian government’s complicity in it, whether in the current attack on Gaza, its initial failure to condemn South African apartheid or its leading role in the destabilization of Haiti.

Nobody should be censored or disciplined for condemning what the UN and Amnesty International have documented for decades: that Palestinians have been subjected to Israeli military occupation and apartheid and that Gaza has been under siege since 2007.

We cannot allow Sarah Jama to be silenced and we will not be silent or complicit with genocide. Our voices echo a global majority that supports an immediate ceasefire, as well as an end to the conditions that have been at the devastating heart of this issue: an end to apartheid and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Robyn Maynard, Nisrin Elamin and Alissa Trotz are professors at the University of Toronto.

Source: Black feminists in defence of Sarah Jama and Palestinian human rights

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , , ,

Canada’s envoy on the Holocaust departs and has a final warning

2023/10/18 Leave a comment

Of note. Lyons good replacement given her extensive experience:

Former Liberal cabinet minister and global human rights advocate Irwin Cotler exited his role Monday as Canada’s special envoy on Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism with a warning: hatred against Jews is the “canary in the mine shaft” of human evil.

Cotler said his three years in the role have seen a marked escalation of antisemitism around the world. He cited the hate flourishing on social media, rising numbers of people who hold antisemitic beliefs, and an increase in hate crimes being carried out against Jews.

The attack last week in Israel by the militant group Hamas must also be understood to have global implications for hate, he said.

He called the organization, which Canada and other countries consider a terrorist group, not just an enemy of the Jewish people but of Palestinians as well.

“It’s an enemy of peace itself,” he said.

“And that’s what we’re up against, and regrettably, the Palestinian people end up being human shields and end up themselves being hostages to this murderous terrorist, antisemitic group, letting us understand once again that while it begins with Jews, as we say, it doesn’t end with Jews.”

Cotler has now passed the baton for the role to Deborah Lyons, who has been both Canada’s ambassador to Israel and also the head of the United Nations’ mission in Afghanistan.

“Our world is hurting. We’re a little bit broken. And we are hurting,” she said in her inaugural remarks at a press conference Monday.

“But as we make our way together, through this permeating sense of helplessness, I know that as Canadians, with our wonderful leaders, we will come together, we will see the challenges, and we will face that incredible work that needs to be done.”

Lyons said she’ll emphasize antisemitism education, both on university campuses and in the corporate sector, as well as ensuring more robust data collection to help improve the safety and security of the Jewish community. She also called upon faith leaders and politicians to do their part.

“Please unite us and inspire us through your actions to continue to build that diverse and inclusive Canada, which all your constituents deserve,” she said.

Lyons was asked Monday what, as a non-Jewish person, she brings to the job, and she pushed back saying that all Canadians have a role to play supporting one another.

“What I bring to this job is a commitment as a Canadian.”

The Liberal government created the special envoy role in 2020, following through on previous commitments to international Holocaust remembrance efforts. Lyons is the second person to hold the job, after Cotler. Her’s is a two-year appointment.

The announcement she is taking over from Cotler came at the start of a two-day conference in Ottawa organized by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs on fighting antisemitism.

Former Conservative cabinet minister and Alberta premier Jason Kenney, among the speakers Monday, said that while for now there is cross-partisan consensus in Canada around the moral need to combat antisemitism, there is a blunt reality: the Jewish community is small, and must remain vigilant.

“Do not take for granted the positions being expressed here in Ottawa today,” he said.

“You must redouble your efforts intelligently to build coalitions across the pluralism of this country and to be voices of clarity and courage.”

Source: Canada’s envoy on the Holocaust departs and has a final warning

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Howard Anglin: What did you think they meant by ‘decolonization’ anyway?

2023/10/16 Leave a comment

Painting an overly broad brush but nevertheless interesting take on the differences among individuals and groups on how they use the term:

Just as Parliament’s recent reminder of the complexities of the Eastern Front and the existence of “literal Nazis” gave Canadians reason to reconsider our casual use of that term in day-to-day debate, perhaps the live-streaming of a 21st century pogrom will make our leaders and our media think twice before blithely tossing around words like “racist” and “hate” to describe merely disapproved beliefs.

As Orwell once said of the word “fascism,” these words have become so devalued by over-use in our political phony-wars that they often seem to have no meaning except to signify “something not desirable.”

Shielded from most of the world’s problems, we have become too comfortable describing minor offences in terms that have truly vile referents in the world beyond our shores. An obvious example this week is the term “decolonization,” which has been eagerly adopted by Canadian governments, universities, elementary schools, libraries, bookstores, and even coffee shops. Most people who implement these policies probably think of “decolonization” as something benign like the inclusion of more representative works and stories from underrepresented—and in Canada especially Indigenous—voices. If that is all it means, and if “representation” doesn’t become an excuse for sacrificing intellectual rigour and aesthetic quality (and it shouldn’t and needn’t), then it is a good thing.

Within this broad majority, however, I would distinguish between those who are earnestly working to bind our society together and tend sensitively to old wounds, and those who go further, embracing the symbols of the revolutionary counter-culture while turning a blind eye to its real-world implications. Among the latter are the sort of people who wear Che Guevara t-shirts to show that they are the “good guys,” not because he took sadistic pleasure in shooting reactionary peasants and boasted that “Hatred is the central element of our struggle! Hatred … so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him [a] violent and cold- blooded killing machine.” They don’t mean that Che, of course, if they’ve even bothered to learn who he was.

Beyond this majority, there is a smaller group for whom the idea of “decolonization” has a harder edge. They welcome it as a chance to turn the tables on our country’s historically-dominant European majority, not by supplementing our traditional symbols with new ones but by disparaging them as shameful and displacing them. These are the people who saw the burning of churches two summers ago and took pains to explain why the (often Indigenous) congregations had it coming. They are motivated by a retributive impulse that is often indistinguishable from revenge (or in the case of the white progressives who make up much of this class, masochistic self-flagellation). Unfortunately, this group is the movement’s avant-garde. Their energy and ideas drive and direct the policies in practice, while the well-meaning are carried along because they don’t have the words or courage to distinguish their good intentions from this destructive agenda.

But as we learned this week, there is buried within this last group a hardcore faction that would go even further. When they talk about decolonization, they mean it literally, with all its blood-soaked consequences. Symbolic change won’t cut it for them; they want action. They are the ones who read Frantz Fanon’s Damnés de la terre(and Sartre’s revolting introduction) not with the detached pose of most Western progressives but with lurid visions of incarnadine vengeance. They read things like “Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect” and they don’t just believe it intellectually, they howl for it viscerally, palpably, urgently.

Twitter has exposed them as cheerleaders of rape and infanticide, of “literal racism,” and “literal hate.” Sure, they were tweeting from the safety of their faculty lounges with the security of tenure and they might not be so sanguine about murder when it isn’t mediated through a small screen, but this much was clear: they saw the same images that sickened and revolted normal people and their first reaction was to justify and celebrate them. They rushed into the digital public square to explain that the shooting of young people attending a “peace” concert was an act of “anticolonial resistance,” they denied that settlers were “civilians” (and so off-limits for targeted killing), and they wondered, rhetorically, what everyone thought the words “[p]ostcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial” meant? It’s a question their colleagues should be thinking hard about today, especially those with “settler” in their bios.

It was a revelatory moment. Perhaps these armchair Amins and tenured Tourés have spent so long insisting that “words are violence” that they can no longer tell the difference between a micro-aggression and a massacre. Perhaps they have spent so much time in a world of relative truths that they can’t bring themselves to accept the objective reality of evil when it bares its fangs. And perhaps we collectively bear some of the blame for this. Our schools, businesses, and governments have ignored or indulged them for so long that they may have believed, with good reason, that there would be no consequences for airing their zealotry this time too. But now that we’ve seen it, we should not forget it. We need to make sure they play no further role in shaping Canadian social policy. They have done far, far too much damage already.

Source: Howard Anglin: What did you think they meant by ‘decolonization’ anyway?

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Rota debacle renews calls to examine history, including war crime records

2023/09/29 Leave a comment

Needed:

Canada could revisit calls to declassify documents about the presence of Nazi war criminals in the country, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said Wednesday, as the fallout continued over Parliament’s recognition last week of a man who fought for the Nazis.

“Canada has a really dark history with Nazis in Canada,” Miller said, heading into the weekly Liberal caucus meeting.

“There was a point in our history where it was easier to get (into Canada) as a Nazi than it was as a Jewish person. I think that’s a history we have to reconcile.”

Many Jewish organizations in Canada say doing that requires a public airing of information, and that means all the records Canada has about the presence of war criminals must be opened up.

“I think part of the problem here is that the records are closed,” said B’nai Brith senior lawyer David Matas in an interview.

“You can’t remember the past unless you know the past, and you can’t know the past unless you get the records.”

B’nai Brith Canada and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center both reiterated their long-standing calls this week for the government to make public all records about the admittance of former Nazi soldiers.

That includes the entirety of a 1986 report from a public commission on war criminals, which is often referred to as the Deschênes Commission for the judge who led it.

The report has never been fully released, including an appendix with the names of 240 alleged Nazi war criminals who might be living in Canada that the report recommended Canada investigate.

“It’s now time for Ottawa to not only release the unredacted files related to the Deschênes Commission, but to also address the stark reality that there are still former Nazis with blood on their hands living in Canada,” said Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center President Michael Levitt.

Matas noted that in June, a House of Commons committee studying Canada’s access-to-information system recommended all historical documents be released in full after 25 years.

He said implementing that recommendation would fulfil the desire to see Canada’s war criminal records.

Currently, records can be released 20 years after someone’s death. But Matas said that rule doesn’t apply in this case, because information about people who died can’t be accessed unless their names are available.

He said it’s not that every person named in the records is guilty, but that a justice system relies on openness, and you can’t have justice without transparency, whether you’re guilty or innocent.

There is also little to no information publicly available about what follow-up was done to investigate alleged war criminals named in the Deschênes report, or bring any of them to justice.

All of this comes after what some have called the most embarrassing international debacle in Canadian history.

On Friday, during an official visit by Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the House of Commons Speaker pointed to a guest in the gallery he identified as a war hero.

Parliamentarians and dignitaries who were present gave two standing ovations to a 98-year-old Ukrainian Canadian war veteran without knowing or understanding that the unit he fought with was formed by Nazi Germany to fight against the Soviet Union.

Speaker Anthony Rota, who said he did not know about Yaroslav Hunka’s background, apologized for making an egregious mistake inviting him to Parliament. He announced Tuesday that he would resign from the role.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued an apology on behalf of Canada and all parliamentarians for the debacle.

University of Alberta professor John-Paul Himka pointed out that nobody seemed to immediately understand how Hunka’s military history implied he would have fought with the Germans.

That’s because of a great lack of understanding of history, even among elected MPs, he said.

“I mean, this man was introduced as somebody who fought the Russians during World War II. Who was fighting the Russians during World War II? It was the Germans,” he said.

Matas concurred.

“I mean if Rota didn’t know about this whole issue and he was the Speaker of the House of Commons, you can imagine how widespread the ignorance is,” he said.

Still, said Matas, the uproar has rejuvenated the discussion about exposing that history, including all the records.

“This is on the radar, now, I think,” he said. “They’re paying attention to it.”

Miller said he has read the Deschênes report twice since this all happened, and encouraged all Canadians to do so.

He also said he knows there are many people demanding the release of the records, and it is something the government “could possibly examine again.”

But he said because he doesn’t know exactly what is contained in the documents, he doesn’t yet want to say if he backs their full release.

“But again, in a country like Canada that has not only a difficult history with Nazis in Canada, but also one of the most important diaspora of Jewish people, including some of the largest proportions of Holocaust survivors, impunity is absolutely not an option,” he said.

Mental Health Minister Ya’ara Saks, whose York Centre riding in Toronto has about one-fifth of its population identifying as Jewish, said Canada should look at what it can do to help provide answers and closure to Jewish Canadians.

She said opening the records is something to be looked at.

Source: Rota debacle renews calls to examine history, including war crime records

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Palestinian politicians lash out at renowned academics who denounced president’s antisemitic remarks

2023/09/15 Leave a comment

Sigh:

Palestinian politicians on Wednesday raged against dozens of Palestinian academics who had criticized President Mahmoud Abbas’ recent remarks on the Holocaust that drew widespread accusations of antisemitism.

They lambasted the open letter signed earlier this week by over a hundred Palestinian academics, activists and artists based around the world as “the statement of shame.”

The well-respected writers and thinkers had released the letter after footage surfaced that showed Abbas asserting European Jews were persecuted by Hitler because of what he described as their “social functions” and predatory lending practices, rather than their religion or ethnicity.

“Their statement is consistent with the Zionist narrative and its signatories give credence to the enemies of the Palestinian people,” said the secular nationalist Fatah party that runs the Palestinian Authority.

Fatah officials called the signatories “mouthpieces for the occupation” and “extremely dangerous.”

In the open letter, the legions of Palestinian academics, most of whom live in the United States and Europe, condemned Abbas’ comments as “morally and politically reprehensible.”

“We adamantly reject any attempt to diminish, misrepresent, or justify antisemitism, Nazi crimes against humanity or historical revisionism vis-à-vis the Holocaust,” the letter added. A few of the signatories are based in east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

In Geneva on Wednesday, Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, blasted Abbas’ comments as “overtly antisemitic” and distorting of the Holocaust. She said the open letter from the Palestinian academics was “stronger almost than what I had to say.”

“There’s no question about it: These kind of statements must stop, because they do nothing to advance peace, and worse than that, they spread anti-Semitism,” Lipstadt told The Associated Press outside an event on antisemitism attended by dozens of diplomats on the sidelines of a session of the Human Rights Council.

The chorus of indignation among Palestinian leaders over the letter casts light on a controversy that for decades has plagued the Palestinian relationship with the Holocaust. The Nazi genocide, which killed nearly 6 million Jews and millions of others, sent European Jews pouring into the Holy Land.

Israel was established in 1948 as a safe haven for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust, and remembering the Holocaust and honoring its victims remains a powerful part of the country’s national identity.

But the war surrounding Israel’s establishment displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, who fled or were forced from their homes in what the Palestinians call the “nakba,” or catastrophe. Many Palestinians are loathe to focus on the atrocities of the Holocaust for fear of undercutting their own national cause.

“It doesn’t serve our political interest to keep bringing up the Holocaust,” said Mkhaimer Abusaada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. “We are suffering from occupation and settlement expansion and fascist Israeli polices. That is what we should be stressing.”

But frequent Holocaust distortion and denial among Palestinians has only drawn further scrutiny to the tensions surrounding their relationship to the Holocaust. That unease may have started with Al-Husseini, the World War II-era grand mufti of Jerusalem and a Palestinian Arab nationalist. He was an enthusiastic Nazi supporter who helped recruit Bosnian Muslims to their side, and whose antisemitism was well-documented.

More recently, Abbas has repeatedly incited various international uproars with speeches denounced as antisemitic Holocaust denial. In 2018, he repeated a claim about usury and Ashkenazi Jews similar to the one he made in his speech to Fatah members last month. Last year, he accused Israel of committing “50 Holocausts” against Palestinians.

For Israel, Abbas’ record has fueled accusations that he is not to be trusted as a partner in peace negotiations to end the decadeslong conflict. Through decades of failed peace talks, Abbas has led the Palestinian Authority, the semiautonomous body that began administering parts of the occupied West Bank after the Oslo peace process of the 1990s.

Abbas has kept a tight grip on power for the last 17 years and his security forces have been accused of harshly cracking down on dissent. His authority has become deeply unpopular over its reviled security alliance with Israel and its failure to hold democratic elections.

The open letter signed by Palestinian academics this week also touched on what it described as the authority’s “increasingly authoritarian and draconian rule” and said Abbas had “forfeited any claim to represent the Palestinian people.”

Source: Palestinian politicians lash out at renowned academics who denounced president’s antisemitic remarks – Yahoo! Voices

Filed under Antisemitism, Holocaust Tagged with , , ,

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