A struggle for balance

Editorial

Nowhere in Canada has the debate over Middle East affairs been as bitter and painful as on university campuses. Concordia University has been the site of an ugly, ongoing effort to, apparently, espouse one aspect of the debate to the exclusion of balance. The defining moment in this phenomenon occurred when protestors succeeded in preventing former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu from speaking on campus last year. A similar tempest failed to keep pro-Israel Mideast commentator Daniel Pipes from speaking on a Toronto campus recently.

While discussion on British Columbia campuses has not quite reached this tenor, it is not healthy debate. The Simon Fraser University newspaper has been a welcome forum for extremely biased anti-Israeli propaganda, as reported in the Bulletin over the past two years. Two recent incidents have remained violence-free, but should raise questions about whether this unbalanced approach is what we want in British Columbia.

As readers learned last week, a film screening at Langara College, in Vancouver, depicted a thoroughly anti-Israel, possibly even anti-Semitic, depiction of Middle East concerns. Then, last Saturday, a conference was held at Simon Fraser University downtown, titled Dispelling Misconceptions: Media, Conflict and Imperialism in the Middle East. The panel included several outspoken local and international critics of Israel.

This unbalanced approach to the issue of Israel in academia is cause for concern, not least because British Columbians should desperately want to avoid the degree of conflict and violence witnessed in eastern Canada. But also out of the basic respect for truth and balance.

Presentations like these two recent events on local campuses raise difficult issues. Campuses are incubators of unpopular and challenging ideas and must remain so. A chilling of debate undermines the role of academia. Yet public universities play a strange dual role, seeking as they do to provide both critical analysis of important issues and a value on the right to express divergent opinions.

The solution is not, as some might conclude, a stifling of debate on campus. There should be very few limits, if any, on what is said in the context of a peaceful discussion. The propaganda-fest that was the Langara evening was organized by the Canada-Palestine Support Network. As a community organization with a very clear bias in favor of the Palestinian condition, the contents of the meeting were neither surprising nor out of place in the marketplace of ideas that a campus should be. The appropriate response (if one chooses not to ignore it entirely) would be activism on the other side. Friends of Israel have an obligation to counter the mistruths or different interpretations of events. In other words, we can have our own meeting - and, to our credit, we have held community meetings and vigils.

The SFU event is a little different. It was sponsored by three campus groups: the Political Science Student Union, the History Student Union and the Communications Student Union. These are organizations that purport to represent their respective students who, in turn, presumably, represent a broad spectrum of opinion on these issues.

Campuses should be places where people are unafraid to express unpopular ideas. Indeed, many of the world's most popular ideas (the world is not flat; mental illness is not caused by demonic possession; and humankind evolved from the oceans, for example) began as unpopular notions in the academy.

Still, if a campus is to be the incubator of ideas it was intended as, there must be an atmosphere that welcomes debate. When campuses become hotbeds of anti-Israeli activism, they can become inhospitable to Jewish students, as Concordia seems to be, as well as failing at the larger imperative of seeking informed judgment.

Some responsibility falls to us. As activists or as friends of Israel - even, simply, as Jews – we have an obligation to express our views, on campus and elsewhere.

But academia has a responsibility too. When it is clear that "accepted wisdom" reflects a biased, incomplete and therefore incorrect perspective of a major world concern, it should ring bells for the very people who claim to stand for free expression.

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