On Monday morning, York University informed Imagine With Us campus partners Christians United for Israel (CUFI) that the university was cancelling the event due to the fact that Imagine With Us did not meet their requirements. York had required that the organizers include a formidable police and campus security presence paid for by the organizers, a list of all attendees in advance, a minute-by-minute synopsis of all speakers’ talking points and a ban on public advertising of the event at York and on satellite campuses.Welcome to Egypt. York is now a place where you're either thug or dhimmi - no other way is known to the administration. This of course is not the first implicitly antisemitic decision of the York administration when it comes to defending, or not, the free speech of public defenders of Israel. No one should mistake this place (or respect its degrees) as a genuine provider of education. Boycott! (HT: Catfur)
York University has said that the requirements were demanded of the event organizers due to the participation of individuals who they claim invite the animus of anti-Israel campus agitators.
In an interview with the Jewish Tribune, Rob Kilfoyle, director of security at York, confirmed the event had been cancelled and stated that the need for security at events is determined on a case-by-case basis and that the participation of speakers such as Dimant and Pipes was the cause of the stringent requirements. When asked why similar demands were not made of the organizers of Israel Apartheid Week events, Kilfoyle stated that even though the organizers of those events will not be paying for their own security – as the university had demanded of Imagine With Us – York will be there “to monitor the activities.”
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Why Good Canadians must have nothing to do with York University
Jewish Tribune - York University discriminates against Christian and Jewish coalition ahead of Israel Apartheid Week
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"York University has said that the requirements were demanded of the event organizers due to the participation of individuals who they claim invite the animus of anti-Israel campus agitators."
A smokescreen. As usual. As long as you pay lip service to the opposition, anything that happens is accounted for. Nothing to see here, folks, move along. Next week: Palestinians prove Americans are pigs! Extra credit in Ms. XYZ's Cultural Diversity class if you attend!
And, it's not like the "anti-Israel" meme isn't championed by the mainstream media, anymore. Eeee-vil Jooooz!
(/sarc)
**************
Just finished posting a comment on a blog elsewhere that sometimes, we wish certain things were black and white for us, but they're not; and am convinced, just now, saying this, that modern anti-Semitism, specifically anti-Jew, occupies, perhaps, one of the biggest gray areas of all. Why? Because Jewish tradition -- the law, as it was in the beginning, and how it has been debated since -- is a Fundamental.
A building block of how we are. Today, yesterday and always.
I'm beginning to think that is why Jews are the natural target of where civilization-at-large is trying to blame its shortcomings.
Because life isn't black and white, though we children wish it were.
(Lewis Carroll: "We are but children, dear, who fret to find our bedtime near.")
Chalk it up, perhaps, to modern abilities to parse and sift today's eddies -- at long last, might Chaucer, Shakespeare et al. have hoped. (And, dare I say, Talmudic arguers long before them.)
Trouble is, only some of us sift, while the rest of us languish in undegraded, unfermented clusters. A proper pie crust, versus a clump of flour, baking powder and water. (If that makes sense.)
Well, if you ask me, not no way, not no how, will ANY of this transitory, self-induced mind-@#$% on the part of mainstream anti-Semitism make a particle of difference.
Numbers 14:11: ADONAI said to Moshe, "How much longer is this people going to treat me with contempt? How much longer will they not trust me, especially considering all the signs I have performed among them?"
A little while yet, maybe :)
Eowyn, I don't know if this will help, or deserves any comment, but here is something (slightly edited) I just wrote to a friend about the York situation.
The knee-jerk Canadian norm is to seek disinterested neutrality in the name of (false) "tolerance". Disintersted thought is a fine thing in some instances, like in true academic thinking. But what most Canadians can't see is that when it comes to the (continuing) world historical centrality of Jews and Israel, we must choose that there either is or isn't a legitimate reason for this centrality that need not offend our desire for disinterested thought or multicultural neutrality. Israel either is a necessary model for all nations, because it's based on a universal (theological or anthropological) truth, or it isn't. (But how many Canadians even know the first thing about thinking about the necessity of an idea of God?)
What's more, we might aspire to show, the very possibility of disinterested neutrality, in its proper place, is somehow related to the revelation into G-d that Israel has provided the world. For this reason, ultimately, I don't think one can be neutral about Jews/Israel. One is either antisemitic or philosemitic (an idea which threatens most "neutral" Canadians, though we can be, and most of us are, depending on circumstances, both...) just as there are only really two positions in relation to belief about G-d, faith or disbelief/false certainty: the "agnostic" tries to justify a third position by mistakenly believing that the believer simply believes, that faith is not always a struggle with doubts/unknowing. Likewise, one either believes in the necessity of Israel as a living embodiment/reminder of a necessary aspect of our humanity/God, or one does not.
But I can lecture on this to any length and I'm not sure it would have much effect, even if the idea is right. The problem is to find ways to show this truth to Canadians in a way that is accessible via their involvement in events. How to tear down antisemitic campus signs - on a campus that bans philosemitic speech - without just offending a false sense of neutrality? How to show that Jewish freedom is a necessary sign of everyone's freedom?
"How to show that Jewish freedom is a necessary sign of everyone's freedom?"
To me, it goes back to the old saw that there ain't no atheists in foxholes.
:)
Ok, but how do you convine an antisemitic theist in your foxhole? Say a Muslim? How do you show that the idea of chosenness, that God must first make a covenant with one people in order to be revealed in his universality to the world is true?
"Ok, but how do you convine [sic] an antisemitic theist in your foxhole?"
You don't. The moment does it for you.
I use foxholes here as the metaphor as it was originally intended, back in the 1940s, when life-or-death decisions assaulted ordinary people with frightening speed.
Most of life is a long, slow, lazy drift down Twain's Mississippi. But the wolf is always at the door (not to mix TOO many metaphors, *sheepish grin*).
Some argue that this kind of fight-or-flight response -- and the decisions made therein, in such microscopic increments -- is Darwinian. Perhaps. But it is also Shakespearean. That is: the choices we make, especially in extremity, mark us.
The truth is, that is what not only makes us human, but also divine.
It is my belief that Jews have -- though modernity may have clouded this insight somewhat -- always known it. That is the point of endless Talmudic dissections. That is the point of a Seder dinner. That is the point of a character in a Leon Uris novel who, said, "We are not barbarians. We are Jews."
In order to be fully human, we must accept that life spins on a dime. How best we come to terms with that has been the Jews' task from the beginning.
People have to be in a foxhole in order to truly understand. We have orchestrated modern life to remove uncomfortable realities. Therefore, we hem, haw, invent socialist utopias, whatever, to hide from the foxhole moments that always await us, patiently, inexorably, since we crawled out of the primordial soup. (Our child has cut herself badly. She'll bleed to death UNLESS. ... I just got fired from my job. We need money. I MUST ... you get the idea.)
When push comes to shove, the foxhole moment dictates. If we have always known what God (and, well, yes, Jesus, sorry *s*) have told us, it's axiomatic that we'll make the right decision. Sometimes it doesn't seem right. But it usually is.
The details -- that is, finer points of argument -- are doze-inducing. The bottom line still remains the bedrock.
Give me anyone -- atheist, Islamist, white supremacist -- in a foxhole. We'll see how well their ideology comforts them, versus a clean bullet that zaps their enemy.
And, frankly, if anyone, anywhere, has any humanity at all, they need to worry first about a Green Zone, and then how they can elevate themselves -- and, by extension, all of us -- in the process.
(History 101.)
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