Newsletter

April 2008

Israeli Apartheid Week

Barbara Kay

In
her Feb. 12 Globe and Mail column, Margaret Wente leads off with a
sympathetic salute to University of Toronto president, David Naylor, who admits
that “this isn’t his favourite time of year.” Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW),
which just withdrew its troops after its annual invasion of his campus is, he
says, “the consistently worst week of a president’s life.”

I
can sympathize somewhat as well. Dr. Naylor, like all university presidents
these days, is a magnet attracting angry filings from students, community
leaders and disgruntled high-flying donors, who are disgusted by the obsessive
anti-Zionist vitriol being pumped across the campus like a week-long oil spill
on a Caribbean beach.

Dr.
Naylor has nailed his colours to the mast of free speech. In response to
objections from Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies,
Dr. Naylor signed a statement declaring, “We do, in fact, recognize that the
term Israeli Apartheid is upsetting to many people, [but] we also recognize
that, in every society, universities have a unique role to provide a safe venue
for highly charged discourse.”

I
couldn’t agree more. And yet somehow this seemingly high-minded declaration
rings a little hollow when one considers just how far Dr. Naylor is prepared to
go to guarantee a “safe venue” for what everyone knows, but is not allowed to
characterize as hate speech, incitement to hatred and in all but the title of
the law, incitement to violence.

Consider,
for example, a Feb. 9 session of IAW, which took place at the Ontario Institute
for the Study of Education of the University of Toronto (OISE), entitled
“Founding Conference: High schools Against Israeli Apartheid (HAIA). Appended
were the words “Note: this conference is for high school students only.”

By
this it meant that the organizers of the session were only allowing into the
building for five solid hours youngsters with high school student cards. What
they undoubtedly did in those five hours – we can’t really know, since it was
closed to the public – was to pump as much hatred of Israel as possible into
those young, impressionable minds.

Now
the organizers of the session were not high school kids themselves – if they
were, I wouldn’t be writing this post – but adults. So what we have here, with
the university’s blessing, is a “safe venue” for the probable proliferation of
hate by adult activists to a group largely composed of children (legally
speaking), with attendance by their parents or guardians or other members of the
public forbidden.

The
right to freedom of speech in a free society implies that one is prepared to say
what one has to say in the public forum. In this way those who disagree can have
their say as well. To protect the rights of those who abuse the privilege of
free speech to spew hatred is one thing; to give a “safe venue” for the
protected indoctrination of the most vulnerable minds in our society is quite
another.One of the more harrowing scenes in George Orwell’s Animal Farm has the
elite pigs appropriating the puppies born on the farm in order to train them
secretly to become attack dogs and protect the pigs in their nefarious scheme to
seize total power.

Dr.
Naylor should reread Animal Farm. He must be more vigilant in drawing the
line between freedom of speech and facilitating the corruption of youthful
minds. If the IAW organizers want to speak to high school kids next year, let
the light shine in on them. No more closed IAW sessions on the University of
Toronto campus!

Posted by Yoni Goldstein, February 14, 2008, National Post, Full Comment.