Love of the Land: Anti-Israel Bigotry Week

Anti-Israel Bigotry Week

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
02 March '10

This afternoon, I attended a reception at the House of Commons given by the All-Party Parliamentary Committee against Antisemitism. As its splendid and doughty chairman the Labour MP John Mann observed, it is heartening to find MPs from all political parties taking a lead in fighting the re-emergence of this disgusting prejudice. This week provides evidence of why such a defence is tragically so necessary with Anti-Israel Bigotry Week (aka Israel Apartheid Week), a global campus hate-fest whose message, that Israel is fundamentally illegitimate, is in effect a call for Israel’s destruction and is therefore an incitement to genocide.

In Canada, the fact that the University of Toronto is hosting this odious travesty has caused one of its alumni, Howard Rotberg, to return the degrees he obtained there. He wrote to the President of his old university thus:

We have now reached a stage where Jewish students and others identifiably Jewish fear for their safety at various universities in North America and Europe, and where various Jewish speakers are denied permission to speak because of Islamist intimidation. We have now reached a situation where various student groups, such as the Muslim Students Association are being funded by radical Islamist groups, and where various University departments across the ‘free world’ are becoming beholden to radical Islam due to financial funding from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

I am sure you have read how young Muslim students are being ‘radicalized’ at universities in England, and such was the case with the attempted terror attacker on the Delta airlines jet on Christmas Day.

The situation at English universities and even at York University has gotten out of hand. To the extent that your views are infused with cultural and moral relativism, I suggest that the University of Toronto is poised to eventually join those institutions where Jewish students will be viewed as ‘offensive’ per se to Muslim students and other illiberal antagonists who apply double standards and factually incorrect legal and historical judgments against the Jewish State, and interpret Islam as holding Jews and Christians to be second class citizens, which is the real apartheid that your University will not allow to be discussed. Moral equivalency is not appropriate between liberal democrats and terror supporting illiberals.

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Love of the Land: Anti-Israel Bigotry Week