If anti-Semitism isn’t the problem on campus, what is?
A McGill University report that failed to substantiate allegations of anti-Semitism made in connection with a recent incident is being met with skepticism in Montreal’s Jewish community, with reason: If anti-Semitism isn’t the problem on this and other Canadian campuses, what is behind the longstanding fixation with expressions of Jewish nationalism?
The report was produced by retired former university ombudsperson who was mandated by McGill’s president to look into a student council meeting in October 2017 at which a board of directors candidate was rejected because, the young man alleged, “I am Jewish and because I have been affiliated with Jewish organizations.”
Following nearly 40 hours of stakeholder interviews, the author found no “evidence that would equate students’ protests about Israel’s policies with anti-Semitism.”
For many if not most Canadian Jews, this writer included, the phenomenon of campus antiSemitism in Canada is a reality and has been particularly problematic for nearly two decades.
As the nine-page document suggests, the author “cannot get inside anyone’s head” in order to determine whether motives were more racist than political. So it is understandable a report on the presence of anti-Semitism that day at McGill could have been deemed inconclusive.
As the report itself notes, “three Jewish students … were named in a text by Democratize SSMU that also included anti-Jewish tropes.” Democratize SSMU is a McGill political group demanding boycotts of Israel – and only Israel – on human rights grounds. Even if that text was published after the vote, not prior to it, it seems to be telling evidence of its authors’ mindset.
The report found chatter in some circles about the perceived Jewishness of another student-politician, but identifying an anti-Semitism problem would be a stretch?
Though the report was narrow in scope, it could have conceivably included more context to help shed some light on what the author correctly describes as an unproductive political climate. The level of anti-Semitism present among campus promoters of the BDS movement (to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel) is impossible to quantify. The problem could generously be described as a troubling fixation with Jewish nationalism, within progressive circles in particular.
In 2002, this Zionism obsession was particularly concerning for Jewish Montrealers. Concordia’s student union, years ahead of the BDS movement, passed anti-Israel resolutions and transformed the student handbook into a radical pro-Intifada manifesto called Uprising. Later that year, an address by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Concordia was cancelled following a riot.
This is part of a political climate on Canadian university campuses that is routinely unsympathetic, sometimes hostile toward one form of nationalism in particular: the struggle to maintain a secure Jewish homeland following centuries of persecution and genocide.
A deficit of information and empathy on Jewish history continues to manifest itself. In 2012, dozens of students protesting planned tuition increases, apparently oblivious to the significance of their gestures, mockingly performed the Nazi salute in the streets of Montreal.