ZGram - 1/31/2003 - "The Shoe is on the Other Foot"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

January 31, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Have the Jews of Canada forgotten how they restricted Ernst Zundel's 
freedom of speech with all the censorship guns at their command?  Now 
they get a dose of their own medicine!

How sweet it is to watch what goes around will come  around if you 
wait long enough!

[START]

Daniel Pipes

National Post -

TORONTO - How fares freedom of speech at Canadian universities?

  It looked pretty grim back in September 2002, when a mini-intifada 
prevented Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel, from 
speaking at Concordia.

  Then a few days ago, Ali Hassan and his Middle East Students 
Association did briefly succeed in cancelling a talk on "Barriers to 
Peace" in the Middle East at York University in Toronto. But 
President Lorna Marsden did the right thing and resolved that a 
minority view -- mine -- had the right to be heard and would be heard.

  The result was not your usual academic talk. I spoke in a 
curtained-off section of the university's main basketball court. The 
venue had been locked-down for 24 hours before the event. Admission 
was severely limited. Only students could attend and they had to pick 
up tickets the day before. At the gymnasium they showed 
identification, then went through a gauntlet of metal-detectors and 
friskings. A hundred police officers, some 10 of them on horseback, 
hovered ubiquitously, tensed for trouble. Substantial parts of the 
campus were blocked off.

  As for me, several bodyguards took me through a back entrance to the 
gym and sequestered me in a holding room until I entered the gym. But 
surely the most memorable aspect of this talk was the briefing by 
James Hogan, a detective in the Hate Crime Unit of the Toronto Police 
Service, to make sure I was aware that Canada's Criminal Code makes a 
variety of public statements actionable, including advocating 
genocide (up to five years in prison) and promoting hatred of a 
specific group (up to two years).

  Though the event began very much behind schedule -- all that 
frisking takes time -- and the acoustics on the basketball court 
ranged between awful and atrocious, the lecture itself and the 
subsequent question and answer period went off without a hitch.

  My visit to York confirms, as if one needed more proof, that the 
North American university has become -- in the words of Abigail 
Thernstrom -- "an island of repression in a sea of freedom." This 
problem was inadvertently but succinctly captured by a newspaper 
headline a few days back: "York University to allow talk by 
pro-Israel academic." Imagine that!

  No other institution -- the media, the churches, the Parliament, the 
corporation -- would treat a dissenting view in like fashion. And 
does it really need to be pointed out that the university is supposed 
to be a place for inquiry and debate?

  The attempt to close down my talk also confirmed the specific 
sources of hostility to free speech. In theory, these could come from 
the extreme right, radical Christians, and pro-Israel activists; in 
fact, they invariably and uniquely come from the extreme left, 
Islamists, and anti-Israeli activists.

  This motley threesome contains two distinct wings, the street toughs 
and the academics. The rowdies make no pretense of accepting free 
speech, as they showed at York in their posters that called on crowds 
to "stop" me from speaking on campus -- nothing subtle here. They are 
barbarians plain and simple who must be countered through rigorous 
adherence to principle and strict application of the law.

  Academics work more invidiously, maintaining a veneer of civility 
while restricting free speech in such quiet ways as punishing 
dissenters with poor grades, rejecting them for faculty positions, 
and not inviting them to campus appearances. Even they, however, 
sometimes reveal their true face.

  My visit to York brought out the last two of these patterns. The 
university's Centre for International and Security Studies made the 
mistake of inviting me to meet with students before the talk; when 
its head, David Dewitt, learned more about me and my activities, he 
withdrew his invitation saying that these caused him and his 
colleagues "unease." (I hadn't known security types to be made of 
sugar before this.) The York University Faculty Association, a 
powerful and authoritative voice, issued a formal statement out of 
the blue accusing me of being "committed to a racist agenda and a 
methodology of intimidation and harassment."

  The fact that students had to go through metal detectors to hear me 
speak on Tuesday points to the rot in our institutions of higher 
learning, a rot that will fester so long as society at large ignores 
what is taking place on campus. Improvement requires university 
stakeholders -- alumni, trustees, parents, legislators, and others -- 
to note the intolerance and extremism on campus, then make the 
necessary efforts to combat it.

[END]

=====

  Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and founder of 
www.Campus-Watch.org, a project to monitor, critique, and improve 
Middle East studies.