A political lynching
TOO MANY HAVE FALLEN FOR CLAIMS THAT SELINA ROBINSON SAID SOMETHING ‘RACIST’
Neither her two grovelling apologies for having said nothing wrong in the first place nor her masochistic submission to “anti-islamophobia training” were humiliations sufficient to save Selina Robinson, the British Columbia minister for advanced education ousted by B.C. Premier David Eby last week.
The real reason behind the sadism involved in Robinson’s political lynching will elude you if you rely too casually on the saturation news coverage of the grisly affair. You will be left with the impression that owing to her glibly unscripted but otherwise reasonable remarks during a Zoom conference panel discussion on Jan. 30, Robinson had induced so much “hurt” among British Columbians, as Premier Eby put it, that she had to go.
The main problem with this rendering of the story is that it isn’t true.
To understand Robinson’s political lynching the first thing you need to notice was the noose that first appeared around her neck months earlier. Being a “progressive” Jew of “woke” sensibility and only the mildest Zionist inclination served only to tighten the rope as the howling from antisemitic and “anti-zionist” voices in Canada grew louder and louder following the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7.
The backstory to Robinson’s defenestration goes back years, and just one part of it involves the “activism” of a creepy groupuscule that purports to speak for Canada’s Jews that calls itself Independent Jewish Voices. They’ve been lurking at the uglier margins of Robinson’s own New Democratic Party for more than a decade, and besides, IJV has always had it in for B’nai Brith, the long-standing Jewish human rights organization that hosted the Jan. 30 panel discussion where Robinson committed her heresy.
According to Shimon Koffler Fogel of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs,
anyone who affords IJV any credibility “must be understood as doing so to justify their own anti-israel political agendas.” This would seem to reflect quite poorly on quite a few journalists who have gone out of their way to burnish IJV’S credentials lately, notably by platforming IJV’S denunciations of Robinson.
The IJV was co-founded by the academic Diana Ralph, who maintains that the atrocities carried out by al-qaida on Sept. 11, 2001 were an inside job in an Israeli-american conspiracy to carry off “a secret, strategic plan to position the U.S. as a permanent unilateral super power poised to seize control of Eurasia, and thereby the entire world.”
Not that the IJV was alone in its denunciations of Robinson. Quite a few pseudo-academic organizations made their own lurid and comical contributions to the pile-on, with all the absurd references to anti-colonial resistance and racist settler narratives that you would expect. The chapter of the long and sordid story that opens with Robinson on the gallows came well before that “controversial” Jan. 30 B’nai Brith panel discussion. It goes back to the evening of Oct. 30 last year, when the success of Robinson’s appeals for mandatory Holocaust education in
B.C.’S schools was confirmed by Premier Eby in his announcement at a bipartisan event at Vancouver’s Jewish Community Centre that gathered together several of the city’s Jewish organizations along with Holocaust survivors and their families.
Both Eby and Robinson noted that a study commissioned by the “Liberation 75” advocacy organization in 2022 found that a third of North American students had been somehow persuaded that the Holocaust was either exaggerated or invented. It should tell you something that in the embargoed press release from the premier’s office about the Oct. 30 announcement, reporters were asked not to publicize the timing or the location of the event due to security concerns.
At the Vancouver event, Robinson drew attention to the blood-curdling speeches at a rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery only a couple of days earlier. The rally was one in a series co-organized by a number of groups that openly celebrated the Hamas
massacres of Oct. 7, notably the Palestinian Youth Movement and Samidoun, a Vancouver-headquartered organization listed as a terror group in Israel whose leaders are banned from entering Europe. Samidoun is intimately associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of the most vicious terror groups in the history of the Israeli-palestinian
conflict.
At that Oct. 28 rally, Langara College instructor Natalie Knight praised Hamas for its “amazing and brilliant” slaughter of nearly 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 surprise attack in Southern Israel, the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust.
“I was horrified that any human being would somehow think that there was glory in what we witnessed,” Robinson said, “what Hamas perpetrated against people, against babies, against old people, against people who were dancing in the desert.”
Knight’s own vanity project, which calls itself United
In Struggle, upholds what it calls “the unqualified right to resist and fight back against imperialist aggression, colonialism and genocidal campaigns of the Israeli state.”
Langara College initially suspended Knight, then reinstated her, then summarily ended her contract for reasons the college says were unrelated to her Oct. 28 obscenities. Robinson had expressed her concerns with the college; on Nov. 1 she had met with officials representing 25 post-secondary institutions about the increasingly incendiary hysterics on B.C.’S campuses.
Knight’s many faculty-lounge supporters blame her troubles on Robinson and it hasn’t mattered that the college outright denies that Knight’s dismissal had anything to do with anything Robinson said.
Notable among the organizations celebrating Robinson’s defenestration was the PFLP’S Central Media Office. The PFLP had this to say: “The downfall of a minister biased toward the Zionist entity in Canada is an important precedent.”
That statement is unimpeachably true, at least compared with Eby’s comment that Robinson’s Zoom conference remarks “increased the risk of Islamophobia and anti-arab racism” in British Columbia.
Eby’s capitulation is at the very least an important precedent in Canada, and it came with a death threat that the RCMP is actively investigating, and an elaborate act of vandalism at Robinson’s offices by an “antifa” group that NDP cool kid Avi Lewis publicly encouraged journalists to ignore via X, formerly known as Twitter, because it makes his “anti-zionist” side look bad: “Journos,” Lewis tweeted, “I know you can’t help yourselves, but please don’t fall for this.”
The problem here is that what too many journalists have fallen for is the “anti-zionist” alibi that Robinson said something “racist” during that Jan. 30 B’nai Brith Zoom call. She didn’t.
This is what Robinson said: “We have a whole generation of 18- to 34-year-olds that have no idea about the Holocaust, they don’t even think it happened. They don’t understand that Israel was offered to the Jews who were displaced. So they have no connection to how it started. They don’t understand that it was a crappy piece of land with nothing on it. There were several hundred thousand people, but other than that it didn’t produce an economy; it couldn’t grow things, it didn’t have anything on it.”
Roughly half the land set aside for Jewish refugees in the United Nations’ 1949 partition was the Negev Desert. According to accounts from the British Mandate for Palestine in 1941, it was only British swamp-draining efforts in the other half that made vast tracts of presentday Israel habitable, from “areas where intense endemic malaria had resulted in no population for generations.” Some of the most fertile land had only recently been reclaimed “after centuries of waste.”
There isn’t anything controversial about this history. It is fact. It is not racist, Robinson was not racist for saying so, and the nine rabbis of the Rabbinical Association of Vancouver were quite right to tell Eby that in ditching Robinson he had capitulated to “a small but loud group of people,” that he had “given in to bullies for political expediency,” and that his capitulation would be remembered, the next time Eby came calling for support.
Let’s hope we all do.
IT IS NOT RACIST, ROBINSON WAS NOT RACIST FOR SAYING SO.