Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘link’

Why does this somehow not surprise me?

This year, The Link would like to dedicate the International Women’s Day Issue to the memory of Zahra Kazemi and Rachel Corrie. While various Link members and staff may or may not have disagreed with the politics these two women held dear, we all agree the violent deaths they suffered in their non-violent opposition to human rights abuses was tragic, and a travesty of justice.

This as part of the Concordia paper’s special Women’s issue, which was, as they put it, produced by throwing “all those who identify as men out of the office and allows the women a Women Only Space to complete production of the paper”.

This comes from Mazin Fahmawi, a regular poster on the Link’s board and an SPHR member:

SPHR would love to see the link unbiased towards anybody because that will only show the true faces of what SPHR represents, making the public aware of the Palestinian Human Rights abuses, and what Hillel represent, a blind nationalist zionist ideology.

I could comment, but that pretty much speaks for itself.

I hope everyone had a nice weekend, spending time outside enjoying the beautiful weather.

In case you’re looking for some entertainment, check out the Link’s board for more on the story below, and a very indignant Adam Slater initiating a pissing contest. Reading the interaction I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at the sheer idiocy of politics at Concordia.

Ah yes, and don’t forget to vote tomorrow!

I guess it’s not enough for SPHR that most of the middle east doesn’t have a free press. Now they’re trying to control the student press at Concordia, as Link editor Steve Faguy explains in his journal entry, “SPHR takes over Link . . . again”:

Allow me to vent. Being the editor-in-chief of a student newspaper, it’s my job to see that everyone gets his/her voice.

But today wasn’t about giving people voices, it was about silencing the voices of others.

For the second time, members of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights flooded our Annual General Assembly, the meeting where we approve financial statements and elect people to our board of directors.

[ . . . ]

And Samer Elatrash is voted onto our Board of Directors.

It’s not that I disagree with Samer’s politics (or Laith’s or Adam’s for that matter). And it’s not that I’m guided by racism against Arabs and Muslims (though some might disagree). I opposed Samer’s nomination because the last time he was on our board of directors, he attended only a single meeting, which he had to leave early.

As my colleague Julia Cyboran said during the meeting, the Board has no editorial control over the paper, and as such the positions are not political but administrative. All I ask of administrators is that they administrate. Samer has no interest in doing so (as he explained to me shortly after the meeting).

But now he’s on our board of directors, until he’s removed for lack of attendance. All to prove a point that when the SPHR disagrees with your editorial stance, they’ll try to take you over.

I guess they were pissed about losing the CSU election, and decided to take it out on the Link. It’s becoming increasingly clear how these groups operate. And it’s a real shame – especially for the journalism students who would love to see the Link emerge as a respected campus newspaper like the McGill Daily, instead of the zero-credibility rag that it is becoming.

Well, this is a bald threat if I’ve ever heard one: The SPHR and other activist groups are threatening a protest that will “make the September 9 protest look like nothing” in order to voice their displeasure with the election of Evolution to the CSU:

In an attempt to send a message to the both the administration and to already beleaguered students, activist groups are planning to stage a massive protest, one prominent student politician tells me. At issue is the policy of the new Executive to put activism second and academics first. The act of civil disobedience will apparently “make the September 9 protest look like nothing. They will take over the entire Hall Building.” What’s more, people will be flown in from outside of the country “to do the dirty work.”

My source, who has strong contacts with many student associations (including the SPHR), assures me that this protest will take place sometime in the early fall, and that it will “show that only CSU slates that support activism will be able to maintain order at Concordia.” “People should have voted for Clean Slate,” he says, “because they support activism. The message is that Concordia is about activism.”

This is the way these people operate. They hail democracy as long as it works in their favour. But if students democratically elect people they disagree with, they try to blackmail the students by threatening violence.

Absolutely disgusting. Not too surprising, though.

(Via Wordniness).

Update: Having posted this on the Link’s website, in a response by Adam Slater, he seems to suggest that this may not be true. Well, I can’t confirm or deny it one way or the other. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. But, like I wrote in response to Mr. Slater, there’s only one way to find out: if there’s a riot in September, then I guess it’s true. Although I’m sure the SPHR cronies will maintain that “the Zionists started it”, like they did after September 9th.

Larry Elder writes in this week’s JWR about an overwhelming Leftist bias among professors at American universities:

On college campuses across America, teachers influence students by running down America, demeaning capitalism, exaggerating “oppression” against minorities and women, and denouncing Republicans in general and George W. Bush in particular.

Actually, there is a dangerous trend in the United States whereby secular universities are moving further to the Left, and Christian religious colleges further to the right. This is creating a divided society among the “leaders of tomorrow” because what happens to the secular right? The religious left? Most of all, what happens to the centre?

Education, ideally, isn’t learning facts but is learning how to think critically. However, anyone who pretends that education isn’t a form of brainwashing is kidding themselves. After three to four years studying in a university, faculty, or department with a certain ideological bent, most people are absorbed into it no matter what happens. If the education system is only giving half of the picture, that’s a giant failing.

For example, in this week’s online version of the Link, an article discusses the possibility that Sheila Copps may run for the leadership of the Liberal party. An online user poll then asks students if they would vote for her as prime minister. The options – while predictably lame – don’t give any choice for students who wouldn’t because they find her too far to the left – only not left enough.

Concordia’s campus politics reflect a similar picture. There’s no left, right, and center in most CSU elections. There’s only left, lefter, and leftest. Of course, this is a union election, so that’s to be expected to some extent. But it does create a particular problem where the most left-wing slates automatically have an entire platform essentially custom-written for them. All they have to do is steal the latest ideas from socialism and – voila – a platform built on “human” (read: Palestinian) rights, aid for the poor, disabled and homeless, fighting for gender advocacy, support services, anti-corporate control on campus and in the media, and lower tuition. They don’t even have to think about it, and in an election campaign their issues come across as credible, well-researched, and powerful.

Anyone running in opposition has two choices. They can present a clear alternative to them by putting forth a more right-wing platform, which is immediate political suicide. Even a hint of it is enough to kill a campaign. Take last year’s CSU elections for example. The main group opposing the current extremist CSU was tarnished with allegations of being “right-wing” even though its politics probably fell slightly left of the NDP. The other alternative is to put forth a sort of non-platform, with issues that seem to be much less important. Either way is recipe for disaster.

Students who believe that tuition should be raised in order to improve education quality, those who don’t mind and even welcome advertising in the bathrooms, and those who believe that a person should be hired on merit, not skin colour, to administrate the university find that they are quickly drowned out. For professors, it’s even worse; academia being what it is, hold the wrong views and profs find themselves ostracized, unpublishable, and virtually unemployable.

I’ve said many times that too far Left is just as bad as too far Right. What is happening on university campuses deserves some attention.

In a discussion on the Link’s website, I noticed something I’d seen in a few places before: an anonymous pro-Palestinian poster (alias “ii”), when referring to Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, felt it necessary to include the fact that his birth name was Schneinerman in parenthesis. I asked him why he felt the necessity to do this, and he gave the following reply:

The reason I use it is to discredit the misnomer ‘anti-semitism.’ The name shows Mr. Scheinerman to be of European, rather than Semitic origin.

Why did he choose to change his name? I don’t know. To fabricate a history perhaps?

He then proceeded to give the birth names of Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, David Ben Gurion, and Yitzchak Shamir, seemingly incapable of so much as mentioning any of these prominent figures in Israeli history without a parenthetical reference to the fact that they all Hebraized their names.

Aside from the obviously convoluted reference to the “Semitic” race – a social construct of racists, with no basis whatsoever in reality – “ii” shows both a lack of understanding of the term and basis of antisemitism, and a gross disrespect and disregard for Jewish and Israeli history. Firstly, the term “antisemitism” is defined as hatred directed against Jews. The whole point is that there is no so-called “Semitic” race! That’s why it’s racist. And the fact that all the Israeli politicians to whom “ii” referred were Ashkenazi rather than Sephardi really has no bearing on whether attacking Jews is antisemitism or not. According to “ii”’s logic, it’s not antisemitism to make racist statements against Jews of European origin. Do I really need to go into how twisted that is?

Secondly, if “ii” knew more Israeli history, he would know about the efforts of the olim in the early twentieth century to revive Hebrew as a national language. Prominent people such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (whose name graced the cover of the pocket dictionary that got me through Hebrew school) and others accomplished what was essentially a modern-day miracle: the revival of a language that had not been used in everyday conversation for nearly two thousand years.

Far from an attempt to “fabricate history”, as “ii” slanderously suggests, the revival of modern Hebrew was an attempt to reunite a People who had been scattered in different parts of the world for far too long. While Hebrew continued to be the language of religious study and prayer throughout all that time, by the beginning of the twentieth century, most Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish, Russian, Polish, German, French, or English, and many Sephardic Jews spoke Arabic, Ladino, or a whole host of other languages in everyday conversation. What Ben-Yehuda and his compatriotes recognized was that if Israel was going to reunite the Jewish people from across the world, they would need a common language as an expression of a common heritage and national identity.

When Ben-Gurion, Meir, Shamir, Peres, and Sharon – as well as Ben-Yehuda himself and a host of others – Hebraized their names, it was as much an expression of their common National Jewish identity as anything else. And it is precisely this identity that people like “ii” seek to discredit. A person’s name is an expression of who they are, and who they wish to be, and the habit of anti-Zionists to deny the history and heritage of the Israeli leaders is nothing but a thinly-veiled claim that the history and heritage does not exist.

As poster “bistro” commented in reply to “ii”’s post:

The idea there is that Jews are not “really” a people: Jews from Arab countries are “really” Arab; Jews from European countries are, surprise, Europeans after all; and you’re done — people (des gens), but not a people (un peuple). [. . .] The your-real-name-is manoeuvre is very convenient. It’s shorthand for saying: you don’t really belong in the Middle East, your peoplehood is a lie, even your names are lies, and you are really European. You don’t belong here.

Next time you see this being done, pause a moment and think about it. It may seem like a small thing, but it’s nothing but an attempt to claim that Jews aren’t really a people at all.

Back from my quick trip to Toronto. Thanks to everyone who e-mailed me to update me on the Concordia Hillel situation. For those who may not have heard, at last night’s council meeting, the CSU voted to restore Hillel’s tabling and operations privileges, but they’re still withholding their funding until Hillel agrees to sign an “agreement”. Hillel – justifiably so – is not willing to give in to this blatant blackmail.

I couldn’t be there to give a firsthand account but apparently over 100 people showed up to support Hillel. Kudos to everyone who went! At any rate, the Link has an extensive article covering the issue, along with several photos. Definitely check it out for more details.

I’ll just add that Hillel’s having an open general meeting this Sunday, December 15th, at 8pm. Anyone who has ideas, wants to help out, or is simply pissed off and feels the need to do something, is invited. For details on location, e-mail Noah Sarna, co-president of Concordia Hillel.

More Concordia resources for any of you who may be visiting my site from outside Montreal and wish to learn more about what’s been going on at Gaza U. You can get a good sense at the Link’s website, but most of it will probably make your stomach turn.

To help, I’ve assembled a list of other articles and websites for further reading about the school described as a “hotbed of prejudice”. The signs were there long before things erupted last September 9th. See for yourself:

• Concordia section at Campus Watch
• Focus on Concordia by the Israel Hasbara Committee
• Antisemitism at Concordia – article from the main section of my site written last year.
• Protest at Concordia: The Blame Game – another one by me, this time about the Netanyahu riots.
• Defeating the Concordia Syndrome – feature article by Gerald Steinberg in the Canadian Jewish News
• Pro-intifada handbook sparks outrage at Concordia – article by Irwin Block, the Montreal Gazette.
• Timeline of anti-Jewish hatred at Concordia compiled by David Janes at his blog. A little skimpy on some of the in-between stuff, but not a bad starting point.
• Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights – No, I won’t link to it, as a matter of site policy against linking to racist or hateful material. But if you really want to know what’s going on at the SPHR’s stronghold, you won’t have too much trouble finding their site.

If you know of any other good resources I’ve missed, e-mail me.

The foolishness of the “professional activists” at Concordia has never been more apparent than with the following comment, published in this week’s Link:

“I boycott everything that involves corporations,” said Jennifer Durocher, a first-year anthropology and history student. “I think everything in this world should be boycotted.”

Good. Let’s boycott everything. I’ll go first: I declare a boycott you.