Barbara Kay reports on an initiative underway on Canadian college campuses to take back Canada’s colleges from the virulent anti-Semitism that has dominated so many campuses for the past six years.
The coming milestone of Israel’s 60th anniversary next spring is ratcheting up anti-Zionist organizations’ zeal for greater impact during the 2007-08 academic year. Like most such initiatives — Israeli Apartheid Week is an American import — their new projects will soon make their way to Canadian campuses.
Look for an “Apartheid Bus Tour,” featuring a Palestinian Arab, an Israeli Jew and a South African black, who will travel between campuses, teaching students that Israel is morally and socially equivalent to South Africa’s formerly racist regime. There will also be reinvigorated divestment drives, led or supported by faculty, pressuring universities to pull funds from Israel, such as the “Hang Up on Motorola” drive to discourage Motorola from providing services to the Israeli military.
[…] Campus Zionists are becoming pro-active: A number of groups have emerged over the past few years. Hasbara, for example, an Israel-sponsored leadership training program, has shown canniness and courage at York University in pushing back against intimidation, last week holding their own against a “pack of wolves,” as one Israel defender described a mob surrounding his anti-Ahmadinejad display table.
I’m personally following with great interest a pilot program offered to university and cegep students here in Montreal: Student Israel Advocacy Seminars (SIAS), sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research. The endeavour correctly identifies the battle against Israel hate as the front line in combatting the greater malaise of our universities’ alarming decline in moral and intellectual integrity.
Barbara is on the board of advisors to Montreal’s Canadian Institute of Jewish Research, the organization behind this wonderful movement. Kol hakavod, Barbara, and to the students putting themselves out there to fight the lies and the professional “activists” that the Muslim world has been sending to discredit Jews.