Debunk apartheid libel

Editorial

The University of Toronto is to play host, beginning Monday, Jan. 31, to Israel Apartheid Week. Organized by the Arab Students Collective, the event offers five nights of orchestrated brainwashing and the reinforcement of anti-Israel bigotry (and a daytime rally slated to include something called an "anti-corporate action"). Among the lectures on offer are titles like Roots of Apartheid: Al-Nakba and the Right of Return, Solidarity with Workers Under Apartheid and Palestinian Political Prisoners.

The equation of Israel's efforts to protect its civilian population with the despicable ideology of apartheid is a technique being used to dumb down the Middle East "debate" so it is easier to recruit more anti-Zionist activists by requiring no more intellectual commitment than opposition to a system the entire world acknowledges as immoral. The apartheid libel is not only wrong morally and intellectually, it is being propagated in order to justify violence and hatred. Apartheid, if it did exist in Israel, would be justification enough to employ almost any method imaginable to oppose it. But apartheid doesn't exist in Israel – nothing even remotely comparable to apartheid exists in Israel. But if Arab, Muslim and Canadian extremists can convince us that apartheid does exist in Israel, we will be far more likely to overlook their suicide bombings, their use of children as human shields, their packing of ball bearings and screws into bombs so that even if Israeli civilians aren't killed by the detonation, they will live forever eyeless, armless or paralyzed. In the name of fighting something as heinous as apartheid, we might be able to justify some very horrific acts.

But the apartheid libel is a larger issue than the one that should face the University of Toronto and other Canadians of goodwill who permit "conferences" like Israel Apartheid Week to occur. The more immediate question is why the organizers would bother trying to legitimize their attitudes with a mantle of academic respectability. Why organize a conference? Why don't they just burn Israel in effigy? Why pretend this is an effort at intellectual inquiry when it is so obviously nothing more than a week-long chant of anti-Zionist slogans?

The irony should be obvious. The anti-Zionist movement is a primarily emotive one. It uses false imagery like apartheid to avoid the facts that really underlie this conflict: the innateness of violence in Palestinian and some other Arab societies, the incitement to kill Jews that permeates Palestinian schools, mosques and media, the refusal by six decades of Arab leadership to take responsibility for the well-being of Palestinians because Palestinian statelessness is a gift too valuable to lose by Arab leaders, who have used the desperation of Palestinians to deflect attention from their own internal abominations.

Should the University of Toronto be allowed to host Israel Apartheid Week? This goes to the issue of prior restraint. An event as incendiary and imbalanced as this one might turn out to be a hate-fest that provides just the sort of impetus used by those who burned the Montreal Talmud Torah library. Justifying hatred is a step toward incitement, but it is a fine line. Whether the speakers and events that make up Israel Apartheid Week cross the line that Canadian law and judicial precedent have determined to be the parameter of fair comment in an open society remains to be seen. It can probably not be predicted until the speakers have spoken and the events have unfolded. Is it despicable? Yes. Is it illegal? We'll see.

Universities are places where almost any idea should be freely expressed, even lies. It is a role of the academy to address and debunk lies, not to shut them up. But Canadian Jews, other Zionists and the vast majority of silent but good Canadians who have so far allowed the apartheid libel to go almost unchecked must mobilize to ensure that the fabrications of anti-Israel extremists do not become accepted mainstream ideas. For the sake of human fairness and intellectual honesty, decent Canadians have to stand up and reject this tremendously popular lie that is a shorthand for prejudice.

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