Supreme Court slammed after anti-racism advocates ‘disinvited’ from presentation over posts on Israeli-Palestinian conflict

2024/02/09 Leave a comment

I check the twitter feeds of two of the complainants, “El Jones, a poet, activist and political science professor at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, and DeRico Symonds, director of justice strategy with the African Nova Scotian Justice Institute,” definitely activists, the former particularly so given virtually all of her tweets pertain to Israel/Gaza, but did not cross the line IMO.

The irony, of course, is that practitioners of cancel culture are surprised and outraged when they become victims themselves. A lesson here, one that I doubt will be learned:

…There has been widespread debate in recent months about when anti-Israel sentiment crosses over into antisemitism, and about the boundaries of acceptable political advocacy.

University of Waterloo political science Prof. Emmett Macfarlane, who has written several books on the top court , said it is important to know the details about the online posts that were red-flagged, and that the court’s lack of transparency about the content of those posts is a concern for him.

Even so, he said the Supreme Court of Canada was in a “severe double-bind” from the outset: it faces the same workplace challenges in navigating conflicting views among employees as other Canadian workplaces, and in respecting honest concerns that some people may feel “like they are being discriminated against by virtue of people who have expressed certain views.”

“Layered on top of that,” he said, is the court’s “broader institutional concern with being above reproach politically and being perceived as politically neutral.” Once the court became aware of views that someone tagged as controversial, he said, it was in a “no-win situation.”

“You either proceed and allow all the people to come to speak, and then you could get accused of having a bias by allowing people who have been controversial online to speak, or you do what they did and uninvited people, but then you get accused of bias on the other side.”

Macfarlane said it’s not just a question of “de-platforming” guest speakers, or “the potential for hate speech and all that” — which he said is not easy to grapple with at the best of times — but that the Supreme Court faces the added challenge of being “very sensitive to perceptions that it is being politicized.”

For the anti-Black racism researchers, who noted to the Star that this is Black History Month in Canada, the court erred on the wrong side….

Source: Supreme Court slammed after anti-racism advocates ‘disinvited’ from presentation over posts on Israeli-Palestinian conflict

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Chris Selley: Backing the Houthis exposes the raw Jew-hatred of the pro-Palestinian protesters

2024/01/19 Leave a comment

Such extremism has little place in Canada and those publicly supporting such extremism need to reflect more on the impact of their actions:

Canada is broken in many ways, but the ability of different people from very different backgrounds to get along has not thus far been one of them. That’s very much at risk. Obviously many Jewish Canadians arrived many weeks ago at where I now find myself: Overt public support for Hamas, which is only slightly more subtle about its genocidal aims than the Houthis, has destroyed friendships and professional relationships, and weakened confidence in Canada as a safe place for Jews to live.

I abhor the idea of asking any individual Muslim (or any other Canadian) to explain and justify his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We’re allowed to think whatever we want about geopolitics inside our own heads, so long as we can be civil to each other out in the real world. But more and more, these protests are becoming an overt rejection of that latter.

Calling for an end to Israel’s war against Hamas is fair enough. The death toll is appalling, the prospects of a lasting victory uncertain. But if they’re as worried about Islamophobia as they claim to be, Muslim organizations and advocates desperately need to repudiate the naked extremism that now seems to have free run within the cause.

Source: Chris Selley: Backing the Houthis exposes the raw Jew-hatred of the pro-Palestinian protesters

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White Americans who dislike Jews also tend to endorse anti-Muslim attitudes, study suggests – PsyPost

2024/01/18 4 Comments

Survey dates from 2014 but likely same trends apply:

The researchers focused on responses that reflected attitudes towards Muslims and Jews. Questions in the survey pertained to the cultural belonging of Muslims and Jews (e.g., whether participants would approve of their child marrying a Jew or Muslim, their agreement with a Muslim or Jewish ‘vision of America’), their loyalty, assimilation, and perceived power (e.g., ‘more loyal to their religion or Israel than to America’, ‘less like other Americans’, ‘have too much power’), and associated problems (e.g., ‘a threat to public order and safety’, ‘do not share my morals or values’, ‘take jobs and resources’, ‘are intolerant of others’, ‘want to take over political institutions’, ‘do not contribute to my community’, ‘are dependent on welfare and government’).”

The results showed that levels of anti-Muslim sentiment were several times higher than anti-Jewish sentiment. A clear majority of participants disapproved of a marriage between their child and a Muslim and roughly two thirds considered Muslims to be more loyal to their religion than to America. About one in four participants associated Muslims with public safety issues, while one in three believed they did not share their moral values and were intolerant.

In contrast, only about 17% of participants objected to their child marrying a Jew. Thirteen percent disagreed with Jews’ ‘vision of America’, 14% perceived them as more loyal to Israel than to America, and other negative views were less frequent.

Further analysis identified four distinct groups among the participants. The largest group, comprising 54% of participants, held few or no negative views towards both Muslims and Jews (low anti-Muslim, low anti-Jew). Another group, encompassing 26% of participants, exhibited moderate anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish views. The third group, making up 17% of participants, held strong anti-Muslim views but low anti-Jewish attitudes. The smallest group, approximately 4% of participants, harbored highly negative views towards both Jews and Muslims.

Membership in these groups was not associated with education. Men were twice as likely as women to hold high anti-Muslim, but low anti-Jew views. Older individuals were also more prone to this configuration of views. People with lower income were more likely to be in the fourth group (strong negative views of both groups). Republicans and evangelical Protestants were much less likely to be in the first group than in any of the other three groups.

“Although anti-Muslim opinion is more extensive, the two track together empirically and share a cultural logic as connected forms of ethno-religious boundary-making. Latent class analysis shows that anti-Semitism is nested within anti-Muslim attitudes, with political and religious identifications as consistent predictors of opinion,” the study authors concluded.

Source: White Americans who dislike Jews also tend to endorse anti-Muslim attitudes, study suggests – PsyPost

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With Islamophobic incidents on the rise, Muslim Canadians are worried 

2023/12/09 Leave a comment

Of note:

Clearly, people are hurting, and will need time to heal. In the meantime, we should allow people to express their deep pain and loss in a humane way. Perhaps this will open a window for Muslims, Jews, Arabs, Palestinians and Israelis to recognize their common humanity, thus forging bonds of mutual respect here. Finding meaning in adversity is the foundation of resilience, which all communities will need going forward.

Sheema Khan is the author of Of Hockey and Hijab: Reflections of a Canadian Muslim Woman.

Source: With Islamophobic incidents on the rise, Muslim Canadians are worried 

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Globe editorial: Who we are, and must be, as Canadians

2023/11/15 Leave a comment

Same principles, of course, apply to any form of racism, discrimination and hate:

…Solidarity can take many forms. Tearing down posters of those held hostage by Hamas is a hateful act; do not let that happen unopposed. Go out of your way to solicit businesses that have been targeted for being Jewish-owned. Most of all, reach out to your fellow citizens to let them know that they are not alone.

That is who we want to be, who we must be, as Canadians…

source: Who we are, and must be, as Canadians

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Chait: It Is Actually Possible to Oppose Bias Against Jews and Muslims at the Same Time – New York Magazine

2023/11/07 Leave a comment

Indeed, but not so simple in practice:

Here is a simple proposition: You can oppose antisemitism without condoning hatred of Muslims or Arabs. Likewise, you can oppose bias against Muslims and Arabs without condoning antisemitism.

This may sound like a simple idea. Yet it is one the entire Republican Party seems unable to grasp.

Last May, the Biden administration announced what it called the most ambitious strategy to oppose antisemitism ever undertaken. In the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attack last month, President Biden and Second Gentleman Douglass Emhoff held a roundtable with Jewish leaders to express support for Israel along with opposition to antisemitism. And as antisemitism has grown on campuses, the administration recently announced new stoops to combat it.

Republicans insist Biden and his party are complicit in antisemitism. The main reason they give is that the Democrats also oppose bigotry against Muslims and Arabs.

Given that I am accusing the Republicans of failing to grasp a principle a literal child could easily understand, you may be justifiably suspicious I am either making it up or picking on one or two random outliers. So I am going to supply several examples, all taken from published journalism, not random social-media posts.

Daniel Henninger has written a Wall Street Journal column headlined, “Democrats Have an Anti-Semitism Problem.” Many of the examples he cites consist of people protesting the Democratic Party’s positions (progressive activist groups released a “Gaza 2024 statement” asserting they won’t vote for Joe Biden “if he does not end U.S. support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. … Anti-Israel protesters paraded in front of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s house in San Francisco last Saturday evening.”), which is obviously evidence for the complete opposite of his point.

But in the midst of that confusion, he cites this as evidence for Democratic antisemitism:

Because the Democrats now consider Muslim Americans an important part of the party’s voting coalition, meetings were held this week at the White House with Muslim leaders. Mr. Biden in his national address last month spoke at length against ‘Islamophobia.’

In a National Review column headlined “Why Joe Biden Is Caving on Israel and Antisemitism,” Charles C.W. Cooke asks, “Why, at this moment, is [Biden] launching a bizarre ‘National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Related Forms of Hate,’ when everyone with eyes can see that we are in the midst of the worst bout of antisemitism in recent memory?”

The Federalist’s John David Danielson sneers:

On Wednesday, the White House announced a “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia,” the necessity of which, according to awkwardly scripted remarks by Vice President Kamala Harris, is that Muslims endure a disproportionate number of ‘hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents,” Leave it to the Biden White House to pick a moment when a wave of antisemitism is surging across America to announce this.

The New York Post has a news story asserting, “The Biden administration faced backlash Wednesday after announcing that it would develop ‘the first ever US National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia’ in the US amid rising levels of antisemitism.”

Tom Cotton attacks the administration for calling Islamophobia America’s top concern.

If you watch even a few seconds of the video he links, you can see Kamala Harris labels hatred the top concern, and defines this to include hatred against both Jews and Muslims or Arabs.

Cotton is simply lying about this, but there’s a genuine confusion in the right-wing mind about the relationship between Islamophobia and antisemitism. It is true that, broadly speaking, the conflict between Israel and Arabs has pitted antisemites and Islamophobes against each other. But that does not mean that opposing one form of prejudice requires accepting or embracing the other. Not every political conflict must be resolved in zero-sum terms.

Conservatives — ironically, like many radical leftists — see the world in zero-sum terms, so that opposing prejudice against one party to a conflict means accepting it toward the other. Segments of the anti-Israel left cannot bring themselves to denounce antisemitism precisely because they see doing so as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause. The right’s mentality is a mirror image of that thought process.

But the conservative refusal to denounce Islamophobia is an important reason why it is necessary for liberals — especially liberals who support Israel — to do so.

Muslims and Arabs do, in fact, face a lot of prejudice in the United States. This prejudice is routinely inflamed by Republican leaders. Donald Trump has routinely attacked Muslim Americans as foreign and unworthy of participation in civic life, smeared with fake claims of having supported 9/11, and recently vowed to keep them out of the United States unless they accept “our religion.”

The American conservative movement is institutionally committed to ignoring Trump’s flagrant racism, even while it hyperactively engages with the most deranged claims about institutional racism from activists and academics. Meanwhile, Trumpian racism against Muslims and Arabs has spread quickly within the party.

In recent days, prime time Fox News host Jesse Watters said:

“I want to say something about Arab Americans and about the Muslim world. We — and when I say we I mean the West and western technology — have created the Middle East. We made them rich. We got that oil out of the ground, our military protects all of these oil shipments flying around the world, making them rich. We fund their military. We respect their kings. We kill their terrorists. Okay? But we’ve had it. We’ve had it with them!”

Notice how Watters, not unlike Trump, conflates “Arab Americans” with people living in the Middle East, dismissing them all as enemies. It is almost impossible to find Republicans who will denounce any of this rhetoric.

The Republican idea that the Democratic Party’s opposition to prejudice in general somehow weakens any of the particulars is a projection of their own ethnographic view of the world. What they are attempting, instead, is to leverage their dehumanization of Arab and Muslim Americans into a play to attract Jews. But the ultimate safeguard of Jewish security in America lies not in subjugating and demeaning other minorities, but in enshrining the principle of civic equality.

Source: It Is Actually Possible to Oppose Bias Against Jews and Muslims at the Same Time – New York Magazine

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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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Canadian Muslim charity wins ‘milestone’ settlement after being falsely accused of funding terrorism

2023/06/12 Leave a comment

Of note and welcome accountability:

One of Canada’s largest faith-based charities has won a settlement over a set of publications that falsely claimed it was a “front” to fund terror groups abroad.

Islamic Relief Canada reached the out-of-court settlement earlier this month in a lawsuit against Thomas Quiggin — a former military officer turned self-described researcher who last year emerged as one of the more recognizable names in the truck convoy protests — and six others who it argued made “false, malicious and defamatory” statements aimed at harming the charity.

Along with Quiggin, the $2.5-million lawsuit from December 2018 took aim at Benjamin Dichter, who later emerged as a convoy spokesperson; writer Tahir Aslam Gora and an online television channel of which Gora is CEO; writer Raheel Raza and her husband Syed Sohail Raza; as well as a Yarmouth-based man named Joseph Hazelton who interviewed Quiggin about the charity in a YouTube video that garnered over 10,000 views.

Source: Canadian Muslim charity wins ‘milestone’ settlement after being falsely accused of funding terrorism

Filed under Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with , , , , ,

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