The ebb and flow of Canadian academic freedom

First the evil news from scaramouche:

Déjà vu at York U: Don’t look now, but Toronto’s York University has morphed into a German campus circa Der Fuhrer—or a Gaza campus circa today. I just received the following desperate plea via e-mail:

To Whom It May Concern:
As students at York University Keele Campus we would like to urgently bring to your attention several appalling incidents, which took place today, February 11th 2009 on our campus.

After an attempted media conference, regarding a successful campaign of “Drop YFS”, a racial riot broke out deeming the members of “Drop YFS” racist. “Drop YFS” is a student led group with students from different backgrounds, faiths and beliefs. In addition, the Jewish students involved in “Drop YFS” belong to Hasbara at York, Hillel at York, and other Jewish groups on campus.

“Drop YFS” is a student run initiative to have the executive members of YFS (the undergraduate student government) held accountable for their inactivity during the strike. The media conference was put in place to thank the students for their 5000 signatures, and to congratulate the students for their success.

The conference was interrupted by mobs of people who broke into chants, racial slurs, and anti-Semitic threats. Students fearing for their lives at York University had to be protected and escorted out of the room by Toronto Police - as they were trapped inside this room unable to leave, afraid. The entire Jewish population of York is intimidated, and no longer feels secure on campus. The Jewish members of “Drop YFS” were solely targeted today for their religion and their political views.

There is video footage of this taking place, and we are more than willing to answer any of your questions. Please contact us:
Aaron Rosenberg
aaron_r123@hotmail.com
Elinor Izmaylov
elinorizmaylov@hotmail.com
Please forward this to as many people you can – the community at large must become aware that Jews on campus no longer feel safe regardless of their political views.

Enraged mobs of Jew-haters hurling threats and racial slurs? Where are our politicians? Where are the media? Where’s the Canadian Jewish Congress?
Where’s Barbara Hall?

As far as i can tell, the video is not yet on the web. Background on this story here.

We previously reported on Queen's University's own speech enforcers here Today comes the welcome news that Queen's is dropping the crazy idea. But in true Canadian slackademic fashion, the Americans are to blame for the crazy idea in the first place!

Calling it "incompatible with the atmosphere required for free speech," Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., on Wednesday scrapped its controversial "dialogue facilitator" program.

It caused a scandal last year when it was revealed the six student "facilitators" were mandated to intervene in private conversations to encourage discussion of social justice issues and discourage offensive language.

In a report to the administration, a panel of experts expressed "strong reservations about unsolicited interventions into the lives of students" because of the risk of "making students feel unsafe or under surveillance because of their opinions."

The panel included Leora Jackson, the school's rector, John Meisel, an emeritus professor of political science, and Keith Norton, the former head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. They had "serious concerns" with how the program was set up.

The panel faulted Dean of Student Affairs Jason Laker for importing an American model of diversity promotion, from the National Coalition Building Institute, while failing to research any comparable programs at Canadian universities.

It's time we all stood up as Canadians and let York University officials know that theirs has become a pariah institution and that it is completely unacceptable that they have become a place for antisemitic riots. From my own experience of York, I blame not only the left-Islamist student alliance, in support of CUPE teachers and their union's official antisemitism, but also the ideologies promoted by many of the senior non-CUPE faculty.(HTs: Blazing Cat Fur)

---------------
UPDATE: Here is a first-hand account of the York incident and here is the B'nai Brith press release (via email):

‘Pandemonium at York University reflects dangerous trend
of anti-Jewish agitation on campuses,’ says B’nai Brith Canada –

B’nai Brith delegation to visit York campus this afternoon

TORONTO, February 12, 2009 – B’nai Brith Canada has expressed deep concern over disturbances yesterday at York University, with reports of Jewish students fearing for their safety and being escorted off campus by police. Turmoil erupted following a press conference by some students to announce that they had successfully garnered 5,000 signatures on a petition demanding the recall of York Federation Student leaders. Amidst the pandemonium, Jewish students were pushed and shoved, antisemitic slurs were shouted, leaving Jewish students to seek refuge in a locked room away from the frantic mob.

“We are disturbed and appalled by reports of Jewish students fearing for their safety and being scared to be identified as Jews on campus,” said Frank Dimant, B’nai Brith Canada’s Executive Vice President. “Just last week we met with York University student leaders who communicated incident after incident of deliberate intimidation of Jewish students, and marginalization and isolation on campus.

“We have requested an urgent meeting with York University’s administration to ensure that immediate measures be put in place to restore order and safety to campus life.

“We have already been in communication with police and demanded that the safety and security of Jewish students at York University and other campuses be dealt with as a matter of top priority.

“A senior delegation of B’nai Brith Canada officials will be on campus this afternoon to witness first hand a day in the life of a Jewish student on the frontlines against antisemitism, anti-Zionist and radical forces that care nothing about democracy, human rights and the rule of law.”

----------------

UPDATE 2: Video showing the aftermath of the riot (with police escorting students out of the Hillel centre while the mob chants) are here.

Joe the Plumber Must Die.

I picked up the following story from Mary at Freedom Eden, linked below.


Barack Obama supporter Karel, a weekend radio host on San Francisco's KGO-AM, had one of those unfortunate open mic incidents.

Remember when a mic picked up Jesse Jackson saying that he wanted to castrate Obama?

Of course you do.

Anyway, on KGO, during an ABC newsbreak, there was a sound bite with John McCain mentioning Joe the Plumber.

In the background, supposedly out of earshot, Karel (aka Charles Karel Bouley) can be heard shouting about Joe.

Transcript

KAREL: F--- G-- damn Joe the G-- damn m-----f---ing Plumber. I want m-----f---ing Joe the Plumber dead.

That's harsh.

If you don't think so, I think you've got a problem.

Hear the audio.

http://freedomeden.blogspot.com/2008/11/karel-wants-joe-plumber-dead.html

****

BBC: Innocent Victims Wantonly Murdered by Yankee Imperialist War-Criminals

The BBC produces anti-American war propaganda on behalf of the Syrian government. It makes no pretense to being other than that. What do you do? What do you want to do?

By Paul Wood
BBC News, Sukkiraya

Souad Khousaim lay very still on her hospital bed and in a quiet voice wracked with pain told me she was one of the innocent victims of Sunday's raid by US special forces.

"I went outside to get my son and the Americans shot me," she says. "They were very close, five metres away. I was screaming, terrified."

Her husband was among the seven Syrian men who died, but hospital officials have not told her this yet.

The US military sent troops 8km (five miles) into Syria, to the village of Sukkiraya, to take action which they hope will help shut down al-Qaeda's secret pipeline into Iraq for men, weapons and money.

The mission was to capture or kill, Abu Ghadiya, an Iraqi-born al-Qaeda cell leader the US says has helped to bring thousands of jihadist fighters across the border.

'Over in minutes'

We went to the place where the raid is said to have happened - a breeze-block compound on the banks of the Euphrates, which flows gently from Syria into Iraq.

The compound's wall was peppered with bullet holes. A villager told me that two helicopters had hovered overhead, firing at the compound. Another two landed, allowing soldiers to dismount.

The Americans searched the place, then left, the villager said. It was all over in minutes. A few bullet casings remained behind in the compound, along with scattered shoes belonging to the dead men.

Local people were adamant that the men killed were all civilians: builders who had just laid the foundations for a new house, along with a night watchman (the husband of the woman I had met in hospital).

Of the man who was the target of this operation, Abu Ghadiya, there was no mention.

While secret policemen and government officials hovered nearby, everyone gave the same version of events: Al-Qaeda was never here; there was no gun battle; this was an American war crime.

Flag burning

Five of those killed were from the same family, a man and four adult sons. His widow met me surrounded by 20 or so grandchildren, who were all now fatherless.

An elderly male relative angrily denies that the dead men had anything to do with al-Qaeda.

"The world must see what the Americans have done here," he shouted, close to tears, while men from the village nodded in agreement.

In the nearby town of Albu-Kamel, an anti-American protest was going on. Several thousand people had gathered, waving pictures of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and burning US flags.

This was government organised - but the angry mood we saw there seems to have seized the whole nation.

Syrians are outraged about what they say is the violation of their sovereignty and their territory.

The Americans say they have the right of self-defence - even if that means crossing an international border.

A new US presidential order has reportedly been made to this effect. It means the Americans will be prepared to take such action again in future, in Syria and elsewhere.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7698820.stm

Propaganda doesn't get much more blatant than the BBC piece above. It is strictly motivated by ideological assumptions and Irrationality. It's group-think. For those who think it, it's good group think. What do you do? If you're living in England, if you pay the TV license, you pay for this. How does that feel?

Here's anther take on the same incident.

Marie Colvin and Uzi Mahnaimi, "Questions raised over Syrian complicity in US raid; Syria has denounced a US strike on its territory but sources say Damascus secretly backed the raid." 2 Nov 2008

Video: Syrian minister criticises US raid

The 38-year-old farmer was watering his maize in the scrubby vastness of eastern Syria when four Black Hawk helicopters swooped in low over the palm trees, heading from the border with Iraq formed by the Euphrates River.

It was late afternoon. The light was fading and the chill of the desert winter night was setting in. The helicopters, following their leader in a disciplined arc, hovered just above the one-storey concrete and mud homes of the village of Sukariyeh before the attack began.

Two of them landed next to a ramshackle building site and uniformed men hit the ground firing. Two other helicopters gave aerial cover.

[....]

"To begin with I thought they were Syrian helicopters, but then I saw eight or nine soldiers armed to the teeth. They carried big black M16s," said Mohammad al-Ali, the farmer. His land lies closest to the site where an American commando squad last week staged an unprecedented strike in Syrian territory.

The guns were the clue to their identity – only Americans or their allies carry M16s; the Syrian army has Russian-made AK47s.

Ali said the troops raced to a compound of new homes, where men of the al-Hamad family were working. "Even before they ran from their helicopters they began to shoot at the workers," Ali said. "The whole operation took 10 to 15 minutes and they left behind seven corpses."

According to one eyewitness, the Americans took two men, alive or dead, back with them.

The Americans' target was an Al-Qaeda commander identified as Badran Turki Hashim al-Mazidih, also known as Abu Ghadiya, an Iraqi-born terrorist in his late twenties. It is believed that he died in the firefight and his body was removed.

The Syrian regime immediately denounced the raid for violating its sovereignty, froze high-level diplomatic relations with Washington and protested at the United Nations in a ritualised show of anger.

However, sources in Washington last week revealed to The Sunday Times an intriguingly different background to the events in Sukariyeh.

According to one source, the special forces operation had taken place with the full cooperation of the Syrian intelligence services.

"Immediately after 9/11, Syrian intelligence cooperation was remarkable," said the Washington source. "Then ties were broken off, but they have resumed recently."

Abu Ghadiya was feared by the Syrians as an agent of Islamic fundamentalism who was hostile to the secular regime in Damascus. It would be expedient for Syria if America would eliminate him.

The threat to the Syrian government has made the regime of President Bashar al-Assad jittery. In September a car bomb exploded in Damascus near its intelligence headquarters. Many of the 17 victims were Shi'ite Muslim pilgrims at a nearby shrine.

The Washington source said the Americans regularly communicate with the Syrians through a back channel that runs through Syria's air force intelligence, the Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-Jawiyya.

In the time-honoured tradition of covert US operations in the Middle East, this one seems to have gone spectacularly wrong. The Syrians, who had agreed to turn a blind eye to a supposedly quiet "snatch and grab" raid, could not keep the lid on a firefight in which so many people had died.

The operation should have been fast and bloodless. According to the sources, Syrian intelligence tipped off the Americans about Abu Ghadiya's whereabouts. US electronic intelligence then tracked his exact location, possibly by tracing his satellite telephone, and the helicopters were directed to him. They were supposed to kidnap him and take him to Iraq for questioning.

According to defence sources, when the four US helicopters approached the Syrian border, they were detected by Syrian radar. Air force headquarters in Damascus was asked for permission to intercept.

After an Israeli airstrike against a suspected nuclear reactor in the same region last year, Syrian air defence has been on high alert. The request was turned down by senior officers because the American operation was expected.

It is not clear what went wrong, but it is believed that the helicopters were spotted by the militants on their final approach and a gun battle broke out. That is supported by an account from a local tribal leader, who said a rocket-propelled grenade had been launched from the compound at the helicopter. The firefight blew the cover on a supposedly covert operation.

Ninety minutes after the raid, according to a local tribal leader, agents of the feared Mukhabarat, the Syrian intelligence service, flooded into the village. "They threatened us that if anyone said anything about what happened in this area, their family members would die," he said.

Local residents were happy to identify the seven dead villagers as Daoud al-Hamad, who owned the land, and his four sons, who were helping him to build the new houses, along with the site watchman and his cousin. The area is isolated and poor. Locals speak with Iraqi accents, as their tribe extends across the border, and smuggling is the most lucrative local profession.

The tribal leader revealed that everyone in the village knew that "jihadis" – extremist Islamic fighters – were operating in the area.

"You could often hear shooting from close to the border, which was not clashes but fighters training," he said.

"There are areas along the border where the Mukhabarat doesn't let people go and that's where I think the jihadis are. The areas are some of the best ways into Iraq."

Despite the furore over the raid, there can be little doubt that the Americans will celebrate the death of Abu Ghadiya, whom they described as the "most prominent" smuggler for Al-Qaeda in Iraq. He allegedly ran guns, money and foreign fighters along the "rat lines" that lead across the desert into northern Iraq and sometimes led raids himself.

In February the US Treasury Department identified Abu Ghadiya as a "high value" Al-Qaeda commander in charge of smuggling "money, weapons, terrorists and other resources . . . to Al-Qaeda in Iraq".

It described him as a Sunni Muslim born in the late 1970s in Mosul and said he had been an aide to the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in 2006.

Damascus may have other motives for its cooperation with Washington. Some diplomats in the capital think the regime would like to stage its own cross-border strikes against terror groups in Lebanon, which it sees as a threat.

"Syrian cross-border incursions into northern Lebanon in pursuit of Fatah al–Islam [a group affiliated with Al-Qaeda] are plausible," said one source. They may be relying on the United States to turn a blind eye to do so.

American officials refused to apologise for the botched raid on Syria. They said the administration was determined to operate under a definition of self-defence that provided for strikes on terrorist targets in any sovereign state.

For Al-Qaeda militants, the safe haven of Syria will be looking decidedly cooler as winter sets in.

Additional reporting: Hugh MacLeod in Beirut

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5062848.ece

An American war crime, according to the BBC.

A clue to why the non-American world vastly prefers Obama?

The Irrationality of Anti-Americanism (HT: CSM) by Joe Loconte:

IF WE NEEDED more evidence that the anti-American vitriol from Europe and the Middle East is largely the product of manipulated imaginations, we have it. A new World Public Opinion poll of 17 nations reveals significant support for the claim that the United States staged the 9/11 terrorist attacks--presumably for its own malicious and imperialistic designs.

The poll, conducted between July 15 and August 31 and involving over 16,000 respondents, suggests that America's European and NATO "allies" are in fact infested with legions of anti-American conspiracy theorists. A slight majority of Britons blame al Qaeda for the attacks (57 percent), but another 26 percent say they don't know who the perpetrators were. The numbers were roughly the same for the French and the Italians, many of whom (8 percent and 13 percent, respectively) think the United States authored the act. Among Germans, nearly a fourth of all respondents (23 percent) finger the United States. Yes, one in four.

Likewise, the poll response among Muslim-majority nations signals that the battle for "hearts and minds" in the Islamic world is not going well. In Turkey, where anti-Americanism has spiked in recent years, an astonishing 36 percent of respondents blame the United States for the attacks. In the comparatively moderate state of Indonesia, less than a fourth of all respondents (23 percent) think al Qaeda orchestrated 9/11, while the majority (57 percent) claims they have no idea.

The poll results also demonstrate the insidious link between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. A full 43 percent of Egyptians believe that Israel engineered the attacks.
[...]
True, the deep suspicions about 9/11 and American credibility in the Muslim world can partly be explained by the Bush administration's wrenching mistakes in Iraq, from the failure to find weapons of mass destruction to the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib. But the conspiratorial culture that engulfs much of the Arab and Muslim world is something altogether different. As a growing number of Arab reformers confess, a widespread sense of failure among Muslims--a crisis of confidence--has produced a desperate search for scapegoats. "The distortion of the image of the United States has become a political objective for Arab governments in their struggle for survival," writes Omran Salman of the Middle East Media Research Institute, "and a tool to banish the specter of democracy and change in the Arab region."

What about the Europeans? How is it that so many enlightened minds seem trapped in a byzantine world of political superstitions? How is it that the children of Rousseau and Voltaire embrace theories that draw strength from the forces of irrationalism and despotism? Despite repeated claims of responsibility by Osama bin Laden for the attacks, despite video confessions of his suicidal minions, despite testimony from scores of witnesses confirming al Qaeda involvement, despite the conclusions of intelligence agencies from around the world--despite all this and more, European suspicions about American guilt persist.

Perhaps the Enlightenment spirit of Voltaire is partly to blame. As Pope Benedict XVI has warned, Europeans who sever themselves from Christian doctrines are vulnerable to all kinds of ideologies eager to fill the void. Secular Europeans, slavishly devoted to the soothing powers of diplomacy, have a difficult time taking the problem of evil seriously, especially when it claims a religious sanction. They instinctively seek a political explanation--no matter how improbable. Americans, whose Constitution pays homage to the doctrine of original sin, find it easier to imagine the existence of individuals, and entire social movements, given over to moral and spiritual corruption. "The Bible says somewhere that mankind is desperately wicked," quipped Abraham Lincoln. "I think I would have discovered that fact without the Bible."

There are many reasons for anti-Americanism, of course...

Is moral relativism really all that the Left are about?

I often berate the moral and cognitive relativism that pervades our public culture today. So, in a recent essay, does Victor Davis Hanson. But in saying this I think he (and often I) is missing a point:

Is “ho”—the rapper slang for the slur “whore”—a bad word? Always, sometimes, or just when an obnoxious white male like Don Imus says it? But not when the equally obnoxious Snoop Dogg serially employs it?

Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the “greatest mistake” in our nation’s history?

Because Israel and the United States have a bomb, is it then O.K. for theocratic Iran to have one too?

Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history.

Sometime in the 1960s—perhaps due to frustration over the Vietnam War, perhaps as a manifestation of the cultural transformations of the age—the university jettisoned the classical approach [to education] and adopted the therapeutic.Instead, our youth for a generation have been fed a “Studies” curriculum. Fill in the blanks: Women’s Studies, Gay Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, Chicano Studies, Film Studies, and so on. These courses aim to indoctrinate students about perceived pathologies in contemporary American culture—specifically, race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.

Such courses are by design deductive. The student is expected to arrive at the instructor’s own preconceived conclusions. The courses are also captives of the present—hostages of the contemporary media and popular culture from which they draw their information and earn their relevance.

The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority. Once students understand how gender, race, and class distinctions are used to oppress others, they are then free to ignore absolute “truth,” since it is only a reflection of one’s own privilege.

But clearly, what Hanson is saying is that the Left do believe in one eternal truth: that truth is a reflection of power and authority, and conversely of those whom power victimizes (when, in fact, truth is really something that transcends self-interested calculation because truth is what belongs to an open-ended politics whose collective logic cannot be reduced to privileged interests, or to victimization, but only to shared needs and possibilities for keeping our politics and people alive, free and open - and this is what we need a disinterested academy to explain and explore).

In other words, when it comes to fingering the bad guys, to promoting their party line, the Left is anything but relativistic. Bush is evil and that's really all you need to know, just like Israel is bad. So, the flipside of the kind of shiftless thinking that Hanson describes, the product of an academic humanities culture that is now more devoted to networking than to amassing real knowledge (what now matters in building an academic career is who you know, not what you know), is the production of young people who are increasingly reliant on scapegoats and victims to describe the world in which they live. See www.beyondrobson.com for examples. And they hold to these scapegoats and victimary figures, not only in a spirit of relativism, but increasingly of religious certainty. That is why we apparently now have supposedly educated elites convincing themselves that the kind of antisemitic cartoons discussed in our previous post, are somehow cutting and daring, speaking to truths about power and privilege that no one previously dared emit.

The smarmy, faux-intellectual, endless irony of the academy pretends to be all so worldy wise (see, e.g., Simon Schama's presently-running, on PBS, tv progam on Art). Yet today's academy, despite (or because of) the origins and home of many of its performers, is structurally antisemitic and anti-American; the irony and relativism becomes, when fully played out, just obeisance to so much sacrificial violence.