Thursday, January 22, 2009
Sid Ryan and CUPE Ontario: new black shirts, by Michael Coren
The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) is wrong to support a boycott of Israeli academics.
It might have been more appropriate for the resolution of CUPE Ontario is written in German.
The resolution of CUPE Ontario proposes to prohibit Israeli scholars to give speeches, teach or do research at Ontario universities, in protest against the bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza on 29 December. In response to the call of the Palestinian Federation of Unions of Teachers and staff of universities, we are willing to say that Israeli academics should not be present on our campuses unless they explicitly condemn bombing the university and the attack against Gaza in general.
Protest peacefully and legally against Israel or another nation is quite acceptable and even useful in a free and democratic society, even when the challenge is misinformed and predictable. But the initiative CUPE is fundamentally different. We are dealing with fanatics and fundamentalists that require ordinary people and apolitical who are to be born in the Jewish state pronounce an oath of loyalty.
It is unlikely that these extremists have considered their actions for more than a few seconds hysterical, but ask some fundamental questions.
Is this "conviction" will also be required of Israeli Arabs, or just Israeli Jews? There are, of course, more than 1.5 million Israeli Arabs, as Israelis enjoy full civil rights and democratic. Thousands of them are studying in Israeli universities, and many of them teach at Israeli universities, unlike most Arab countries where Jews were deported and where they can not study or teach, or even live.
Are we require, for example, that Iranians who teach in universities "condemn" the public hanging of homosexuals by their government, the stoning of women and implementation of university students protesting peacefully? Being asked to many Egyptian universities in the country to "condemn" the persecution of Christians in Egypt, ban various independent newspapers or the construction of the wall on the Egyptian side of the border with Gaza?
Being asked to scholars from Zimbabwe, China or Communist dictatorships of Syria or Libya to "condemn" the despicable policies of their government? Being asked the same scholars from Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, raped, enslaved and forcibly converted to Islam? Or Palestinian scholars: just last week, the government of Hamas has killed 35 members of Fatah and shot in the legs of 75 others, paralyzing. They forced women to wear the hijab and threatened to throw acid in the faces of girls who refuse to do so.
Damn, such a "conviction" was not even applied to university of Rwanda while the country's government was trying to commit genocide!
But we asked the university to Israel, where the armed forces returned fire after eight years of terror, rocket attacks and deadly provocations.
The result of this little bit crass, painfully immature and angry is not the uniqueness of a single identifiable group of people we expose to hatred when they do their work: the Jews. Most of them, incidentally, were born in Israel because their families were forced to leave their old country and live in Israel because of the pogroms, the Holocaust and the expulsion Arabic.
In short, it is targeting Jews. And it goes beyond what is acceptable speech and civilized behavior. That is to operate a complex issue involving two people who deserve justice and to reduce it to abuse, blacklisted and discrimination worthy of the excesses of the 1930s in Europe.
The black shirts who hide under the colors red and green. They should cover their heads in shame and ask forgiveness.
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Labels: Canada, Human mistake, Israel, Palestine, Religion and fanaticism, Secularism
# posted by Francis Chartrand @ 7:32 PM 
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