Avi Benlolo: Antisemitism in Canadian universities at least as bad as in UNRWA

Article content

Gaza Schools spreading Hamas’ antisemitism grabbed international headlines this week, coupled with breaking news revealing that the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) had staff involved in the Oct. 7 massacre of Jews. There’s nothing groundbreaking here. We’ve been urging the Trudeau government for years to cease Canada’s complicity in terror and antisemitism.

But why focus on Gaza when we have similar issues in our own backyard? Canadian universities and now schools have long disseminated pro-Hamas antisemitism. This week at York University, the pro-Palestinian union released what it dubbed “a Toolkit on Teaching Palestine.”

A more fitting name for the 15-page pamphlet would have been “a toolkit for promoting antisemitism in the classroom.” Mislabelling the fight against the terrorist group Hamas as a “genocide” and referring to Jews indigenous to the land of Israel as “settler-colonial occupation,” the document aims to inject hatred against Jews into the classrooms at York University.

Why look as far as Gaza when it’s been imported into our universities? The pro-Hamas document even targets Hillel, an apolitical Jewish student organization, claiming that York University is complicit in Israel’s occupation due to its “economic and academic relationships with various Zionist cultural institutions (e.g., Hillel).”

While Zionism merely describes the Jewish liberation movement, here it is used pejoratively with contempt and clear antisemitic overtones. In response, the university’s president, Rhonda Lenton, penned a superficial non-letter, not even addressing the obvious false propaganda and antisemitism in the document.

The surge in antisemitism right here in Canada is a direct result of two decades of imported Palestinian propaganda aimed at delegitimizing, defaming, and demonizing the State of Israel. Shortly after the 2001 Durban conference, which borrowed the fake “Zionism is racism” Soviet propaganda for the Palestinian movement, university campuses initiated “Israeli apartheid week.”

For two decades or about four generations of Canadian and American students, lies about Israel and, by extension, the Jewish people have been propagated. UNRWA and the Palestinian education system in Gaza and the West Bank incite students to believe Jews are evil and that they are white (even though at least half are not) “colonizers” and “occupiers” of their own land.

We’ve now graduated millions of students who have been fed these atrocious lies. So why are Canadians surprised by the escalating incidents of antisemitism right here at home? The violence-promoting street demonstrations we’ve witnessed since Oct. 7 involve our university students who have been given permission by our universities and schools to believe these falsehoods.

Recently, it even came to light that in Toronto, the arrest of the so-called “Indigo 11” on hate-motivated mischief charges — turned out to be mostly of academics, many with PhDs and employed by universities, schools and cultural institutions. So while the world has rightly turned attention to the 12 UNRWA staff who participated in the Oct. 7 massacre, lets not turn a blind eye to the staff of our own academic and cultural institutions. We should all be asking ourselves if given the chance, they too would have lent Hamas a hand.

The Nazis perfected modern antisemitic propaganda, telling so many lies about the Jewish people that the majority of Germans and their allies came to believe them. They marginalized and ostracized the Jewish population by producing their own “toolkits” of lies and distortions, first in schools and universities and then in the general community.

The war against hate isn’t just in the Middle East; it’s right here in our backyard — in our universities, schools, unions, and community centers. The distortion about Israel and the Jewish people is so profound and ingrained in the psyche of the average Canadian that chants calling for the death of Jews hardly raise an eyebrow.

Nobody wants to hear the truth. University feminists eagerly march with Palestinians despite the repression of women in Gaza and the rapes against Israeli women. People who identify as part of the LGBTQ community give little thought to how quickly they would be attacked for their sexual orientation under Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. None of these realisms matter because this is Gaza.

I trust Israel’s enemies reading this column are reveling, just as the Nazis must have when Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, and many others fell under their web of lies. History will judge those who have been taken for a ride by the forces of darkness. In the end, however, history has repeatedly shown that those who stand with the Jewish people are on the right side of history. We are the litmus test for what’s coming next. Think about it.

National Post

Avi Abraham Benlolo is the founder and CEO of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative.