Love of the Land: Canadian Leaders Standing Tall Against Israel Apartheid Week

Canadian Leaders Standing Tall Against Israel Apartheid Week

Barbara Kay
Pajamasmedia.com
04 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

In the aftermath of what emerged, against early predictions, as a wildly successful Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, Canadians are basking in an uncharacteristically bullish glow of national pride. With a stunning fourteen gold medals to the USA’s nine, Canadians are relishing their moment in the sun.

The road to this overflowing pot of Canadian gold was paved with a costly and therefore somewhat controversial “Own the Podium” funding program for athletes’ development and expenses. But $66 million of taxpayers’ money now seems a small price to pay for a formerly unassuming nation’s long-deferred sporting honor.

Hard on the winged heels of an inebriating Olympics that sought to ennoble the ideal, for two weeks anyway, of a mature global polity, with nation rivaling nation through positive, amicable achievement, there slouched into Canada (amongst other countries) a rough beast that shames the very idea of man as political animal: the annual eight-day immiseration known as Israel Apartheid Week (IAW).

IAW is something like a multi-site Olympiad itself, except that in this cheerless, failure-glorifying anti-Olympiad, the world does not come together. Instead, it is prised apart in a scapegoating orgy of thinly disguised Jew-hatred.

On this front, ironically without spending a cent, by dint of political courage and real leadership, Canadian politicians have begun in earnest to take ownership of a long-empty moral podium by addressing the escalating pathology of anti-Semitism fueling IAW and reaffirming Israel’s legitimacy — and more, Israel’s importance to Western interests.

Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) has for some years now been a well-oiled engine of hate belching toxic black smoke as it chugs in full-throated spate across a good part of the academic globe. It may have reached a tipping point of its own making in Canada (whose University of Toronto campus “boasts” the dubious distinction of having provided the venue for this continent’s first IAW).

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Love of the Land: Canadian Leaders Standing Tall Against Israel Apartheid Week

Love of the Land: “Israeli Apartheid Week”: Festival of bigotry kicks off across the globe but it’s not going according to plan

“Israeli Apartheid Week”: Festival of bigotry kicks off across the globe but it’s not going according to plan

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
02 March '10

This week saw the start of the annual festival of bigotry known as “Israeli Apartheid Week” (IAW). In the UK, universities from the London School of Economics, University College London (alma mater of the would be Detroit panty bomber) to Oxford join forces with places of “learning” in more than 40 cities across the world. The aim is to deligitimise Israel with a view to the Jewish state’s eventual destruction.

But it is not all going according to plan. In Canada, there are signs that the organisers may already have run into some embarrassing problems. As the National Post reports in a scathing editorial which rightly describes the event as “an odious and bigoted annual ritual” a motion denouncing Israeli Apartheid Week has been unanimously passed (even leftist members of parliament supported it) in the Ontario provincial parliament. This is a serious blow since Canada has been one of the worst offenders in the Western world in terms of anti-Israeli bigotry and has traditionally been at the forefront of IAW campaigning.

While it is still early days, what is going on in Canada should serve as an inspiration to those opposed to anti-Israeli extremism worldwide. Careful and consistent campaigning in favour of reason and decency over Israel can pay off, leaving the opposing camp looking isolated and obsessive.

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Love of the Land: “Israeli Apartheid Week”: Festival of bigotry kicks off across the globe but it’s not going according to plan

Love of the Land: Something's seriously wrong at York University

Something's seriously wrong at York University

David Frum
National Post
27 February '10

Next week, York University will once again open its halls and classrooms to “Israel Apartheid Week,” so-called. This year as every year, militants and activists will use the taxpayer-funded facilities of York to vilify the Jewish state. Well, that’s free speech, isn’t? Everybody gets to express his or her point of view, no matter how obnoxious, right?

No, not right. Not at York. At York, speech is free — better than free, subsidized — for anti-Israel haters. But for those who would defend Israel, York sets very different rules.

In advance of York’s annual hate-Israel week, the campus group Christians United for Israel applied to use university space to host a program of pro-Israel speakers. The university replied that this program could only proceed on certain conditions. It insisted on heavy security, including both campus and Toronto police — all of those costs to be paid by the program organizers. The organizers would also have to provide an advance list of all program attendees and advance summaries of all the speeches. No advertising for the program would be permitted — not on the York campus, not on any of the other campuses participating by remote video.

These are radically different and much harsher terms than anything required from the hate-Israel program. The hate-Israel program is not required to pay for its own security. It is free to advertise. Its speakers are not pre-screened by the university.

The pro-Israel event, scheduled for this past Monday, Feb. 22, was cancelled when the organizers declined to comply with the terms. A university spokesman told the Jewish Tribune that it insisted on the more stringent requirements on pro-Israel groups “due to the participation of individuals who they claim invite the animus of anti-Israel campus agitators.”

The logic is impressively brazen: Since the anti-Israel people might use violence, the speech of the pro-Israel people must be limited. On the other hand, since the pro-Israel people do not use violence, the speech of the anti-Israel people can proceed without restraint.

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Love of the Land: Something's seriously wrong at York University

Love of the Land: Countering Canadian Campus Media Bias Against Israel

Countering Canadian Campus Media Bias Against Israel

Mike Fegelman
Honest Reporting Canada
12 February '10

On March 1, Canadian university and college campuses will host the anti-Israel week odiously known as Israel Apartheid Week (IAW).

IAW leave Jews and pro-Israel supporters on campus feeling isolated and intimidated, all while demonizing Israel and fuelling anti-Semitic animus. As a possible precursor to these festivities, it's already been reported that two Jewish students at Toronto's York University were assaulted on February 1 during a pro-Israel activity. A matter which is now being investigated by the school's administration. In the U.S., eleven people were arrested at the University of California, Irvine on February 8, as Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, was repeatedly interrupted during his address to the school.

HonestReporting Canada will be keeping a close eye on Canadian campus media to ensure that Israel is fairly and accurately represented before and after IAW.

In our most recent communique, we alerted you to a CKUT radio program called "Under the Olive Tree," a self-described "Canada-wide Palestinian community radio show" based in Montreal at McGill University, which lent credence to bizarre claims of Israeli culpability for the notorious 2004 Iraqi prisoner abuse atrocities at Abu Ghraib.

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Love of the Land: Countering Canadian Campus Media Bias Against Israel

Love of the Land: More Proof That "Pro-Palestinians" Aren't Really Pro-Palestinian

More Proof That "Pro-Palestinians" Aren't Really Pro-Palestinian

Proud Zionist
04 February '10
Posted before Shabbat

How does supporting Hamas help the Palestinians? Why does it appear to be only Zionists who try to expose Hamas' corruption, thereby benefitting the moderate Palestinians who don't want to be drawn into Hamas' war games?

In an op-ed in November, Khaled Abu Toameh wrote:

"If anyone is entitled to be called 'pro-Palestinian,' it is those who are publicly campaigning against financial corruption and abuse of human rights by Fatah and Hamas. Those who are trying to change the system from within belong to the real 'pro-Palestinian' camp.
These are the brave people who are standing up to both Fatah and Hamas and calling on them to stop killing each other and start doing something that would improve the living conditions of their constituents...
...The 'pro-Palestinian' activists in the West clearly do not care about reforms and good government in the Palestinian territories. As far as these activists are concerned, delegitimizing Israel and inciting against 'Zionists' are much more important that pushing for an end to financial corruption and violence in Palestinian society."

An incident that recently occurred at Toronto's York University is exactly the problem Toameh is citing.

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Love of the Land: More Proof That "Pro-Palestinians" Aren't Really Pro-Palestinian