Confronting hate on campus

DR. STEFAN BRAUN

Across Canadian campuses, Jewish students are under siege. Israel is singularly demonized, the historic Jewish identity delegitimized and the Jewish voice marginalized.

A painting of Palestine shrouding the entire Jewish state greets first-year students at Carleton. Rocks are thrown twice in two years through the window of Hillel House at the University of British Columbia. Swastikas are scrawled five times in two years on the Jewish Students Association's door at McMaster University. "Jews must die" emblazons a campus wall at York University.

The most powerful arsenal in this barrage of intolerance is an idea – the "Israel apartheid" card – a devastatingly effective smokescreen, legitimating intolerance in the name of equality. Jewish students openly identifying with their historic homeland are turned into racist pariahs, publicly scorned, brazenly harassed and openly taunted.

The Jewish answer to campus intolerance has been four-fold: deploy hate censorship laws and speech codes to silence the worst offenders; maintain a low public profile and work behind the scenes with responsible officials for redress; reach out to moderates and isolate the extremists; and confront the haters on their own belligerent terrain.

This veritable hodge-podge of strategies makes for a troublesome mix. It lacks clear direction. Worse, it harbors serious self-contradictions and self-conflicts. The cloistered and hierarchical campus environment doesn't help. It is difficult to freely censor and freely speak at the same time. It is impossible to maintain a low profile and directly confront the anti-Semites. It can be self-debilitating to reach out to moderates where extremists, and fear, are in charge. It may be better to openly challenge, rather than quietly work with responsible officials paralyzed by faculty intimidation and fear of campus unrest. Confronting haters on their own belligerent terrain may feel good but, more often than not, does bad. Yet, Jewish students are at a loss for better "answers," doing all things at all times and this is ultimately self-defeating.

Current strategies are failing. At best, Jews get the crumbs of inclusivity where all others get the actual acceptance. The strategies of hate have changed. The strategies to answer them must also. Jewish students can no longer afford self-contradictory approaches. What is needed is political clarity, strategic coherence and tactical consistency. Recycling or retooling old approaches will not do. They need be overhauled altogether. This requires redirection and reinvention. It requires finding new approaches. And it requires burying failing old ones. Difficult choices need to be made. This is not a job for those set in their ways.

First, a clear, coherent and consistent Jewish strategy must be a "democracy-friendly" strategy. This means a "speech-friendly" strategy. Hate censorship and speech codes should be buried. As weapons against campus anti-Semitism, they are already as good as dead. Enforced silence is a double-edged sword. It is the friend of enemies of dialogue and discourse. Today, campus speech codes serve the belligerent enemies of Israel better than its friends. Censorship is ill-suited to answer the far more sophisticated "academic" language of today's anti-Semites. Jews who censor delegitimize their own voice to freely and fully speak and, instead, arm that of their intolerant opponents.

Second, the "speech-friendly" strategy is a nuanced concept that must be understood in its subtlest – creative, sophisticated and flexible – sense. Jewish music events are a speech-friendly weapon against campus intolerance. So, too, are Jewish food fairs, Jewish humanitarian causes, Jewish exhibits, Jewish memorials, Jewish recognition and everything else that spotlights the richness of Jewish culture, the contributions of the community, the civility of its people, the pluralism of its citizenry, the nobleness of its charity, the pain of its history and the tolerance of its democracy. Emotions can move ideas in subtle and seductive ways that even the best counter-arguments against hate and distortion often cannot.

Third, Jewish students should not shrink from refuting falsehoods and getting their due. But bold refutation is not the same as bald confrontation. Unregulated free-for-alls, which trample on democratic rules of discourse and debate, play into the hands of the intolerant and the belligerent. They diminish Jews to the level of their tormentors. Jewish students need to be more sophisticated and discriminating as to when, where and how to respond to provocation. They need to fight on their own terrain – not their opponents' "speech-belligerent" terrain. Patterns of staged conflicts – conflicts of organized hate, conflicts of orchestrated harassment, conflicts of targeted faculty intimidation, conflicts that routinely trample on democratic rules of student engagement – should be answered not in the fields of force but in the democratic media, in campus offices of equity and, especially, before provincial human rights tribunals and the nation's courts of civil justice. Jews need to first discredit the methods of the intolerant before they can effectively discredit the intolerance of their message.

Fourth, there is strength in numbers and power in connections. Jewish students cannot do this alone. Extending olive branches to moderates is not enough and can be self-deceptive. Getting the moral support, active and vocal, of Jewish elders, along with financial and other resources from the community, is not enough. Inter-Jewish networking is not enough. Unless Jewish students connect with the non-committed campus masses – that huge population of faculty and students who, through indifference, ignorance or just indolence, wish a pox on both the combatants' houses equally – they risk ultimately losing the war, even while winning individual battles. Alliances should be made wherever partnerships can be found. Coalitions and associations of every sort should be fashioned: religious, cultural, commercial, professional, social, intellectual and recreational.

Jewish students today cannot afford to be choosy in finding their help. Fascists, fiends and fear-mongers who trample on democracy and bludgeon opponents into submission to make their point need not apply; all others should be embraced with open arms. There is less guilt in associating with "Christians for Israel" than there is in losing the cause for misguided "high principle." Equally, what "others think" is less important than what Jews need to do. Holocaust-era American Jewry stifled their voice and abandoned their brethren, for fear of reprisal and disloyalty to their hosts. Black civil rights activists didn't. Feminists and homosexuals don't. Jewish opponents won't.

A more coherent, speech-friendly, Jewish approach to campus intolerance – true to the democratic processes and oneself – should not be feared but embraced. Jews need to redirect and answer the Middle East "Israel apartheid" card with the campus "Jewish inclusivity and democracy" card.

Dr. Stefan Braun, LLB, LLM, MA, PhD, is a barrister and solicitor living in Ontario. He has authored numerous scholarly articles on hate censorship. His book, Democracy Off Balance: Freedom of Expression and Hate Propaganda Law in Canada was a 2005/'06 Harold Adams Innis Prize finalist for the best English language book in the social sciences in Canada.

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