Academic Disapprobation : Calling it Like It Is

"It's symbolic. To me it's a mark of great distinction. I was very proud to get the honorary degree. The fact I'm willing to give it back to signify my discomfort with the university indicates how much my discomfort is."

"The participation of many faculty members in the encampment in defiance of university policy coupled with the lack of consequences has been, in my view, shameful. I am profoundly disappointed in my university."

"I no longer wish to have the distinction of holding a University of Toronto honorary degree."

"I do not take this action lightly since I know that since the first honorary degree was granted by the University of Toronto in 1950, an honorary degree granted by it has never been returned."

Dr. Arnold Aberman, former dean of Medicine, University of Toronto

Then-Governor General David Johnston, right, awards the Order of Canada to Arnold Aberman at Rideau Hall on Nov. 4, 2011. Photo by Chris Roussakis /QMI Agency

 

Dr. Arnold Aberman, professor emeritus, former dean, faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto

In protest against the University of Toronto's handling of the anti-Israel protest encampment, the former medical school dean of the U. of T. took the unprecedented path of returning his honorary degree. His "profound disappointment" that the university administration issued no clear statement that "what's going on is unacceptable", led him to take that determined moral decision.

The enforced exclusion of "Zionists" from the encampment set up on the school's central lawn was an obvious term meant to identify "Jews", and he pointed to that in particular. "You saw the signs, anti-Zionist signs, denying entry. There's no right to stop people." 

It was "too late" after the university obtained a legal injunction against the protest several weeks into the occupation when the court-ordered deadline was imminent. "It's never too late to do the right thing. I think they should have done it earlier." Which led to his decision to return  his honorary Doctor of Laws, in his possession since 2015, in recognition of outstanding service to the university.

Serving as dean of the University of Toronto's faculty of medicine, as well as promoting relations with health-care institutions in the administration, he was, as well, a key creator of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University in Sudbury, Ontario. According to his Order of Canada citation, Dr. Aberman "contributed to the advancement of medicine for more than 30 years."

He faulted the university in his letter returning the honour, to University of Toronto President Meric Gertler for its "failure of the school to protect its Jewish and non-Jewish students". The final straw arrived for Professor Aberman when he saw a recently published online list of students and faculty identified at the encampment protest by an activist group. "I consider them antisemites", he stated.

Dr. Arnold Aberman, Convocation, 2015 Honourary U.of T. Degree  U.of T

University of Toronto Antisemitic Encampment & the University's Shocking Complicity

"[The University of Toronto encampment and accompanying anti-Israel movement] was not primarily a grassroots student protest."

"A slew of outside agitators, including faculty, health care workers, climate justice groups, labour activists, trade unionists, gay rights activists, socialists/Marxists and activists with local chapters [of] the Palestine Youth Movement and Samidoun [linked themselves with the 'People's Circle for Palestine']"

The Canary Mission report: University of Toronto Antisemitic Encampment & the University's Shocking Complicity 

"[There were numerous documented instances of overtly antisemitic statements, including:] "kike", "We need another Holocaust", "Jews belong in the sea Palestine will be free" "Death to the Jews", "Hamas for Prime Minister", "You dirty f--cking Jew", "Go back to Europe", and "Itbach El Yahood" ["slaughter the Jews"]."

Ontario Superior Court Judge Markus Koehnen

An anti-Israel tent encampment protesting the war in Gaza continues to stand at the University of Toronto campus on Tuesday May 7, 2024. (Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post)

 

Canary Mission, founded to document antisemitic and anti-Israel actions on the campuses of North American universities, has released a study of University of Toronto, concluding its administrators failed to respond while their campus was taken over by supporters of terrorism, organized by outside agitators. Dozens of U of T faculty were listed as supporters of the pro-Hamas demonstrations that characterized the activities of the encampment. On May 2nd, a group of protesters breached a fence, then occupied the King's College Circle courtyard for two months.

The fence was lined with posters celebrating the atrocities in southern Israel committed by Hamas operatives, calling for more violent uprisings both in Israel and in Canada as well. In their study and subsequent report, Canary Mission pointed out 153 professors, 123 employed by the university included, publicly gave their support to the encampment, while 45 of them took active participation and six delivered addresses to the gathering of antisemites bitterly condemning Israel's counterterrorism action in Gaza.

Concealing identities behind keffiyehs and medical masks, these were sociopathic thugs who acted to confine access to the occupied area where any who wished to enter were first forced to commit to agreeing with a number of statements that excluded 'Zionists' or Israel-sympathizers, much less Jews themselves from gaining access. The report's authors are scathing in their condemnation of the  university's administration which took no action to arrest the protest movement that posed a hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty.

The pathetic excuse given was a wish to avoid violence by confronting and attempting to dismantle the camp, much less enforce the university's own code of conduct. Nor did the university ever appear to address the issue of its own professors supporting the encampment. Some of whom have been identified as members of the university's chapter of Faculty for Palestine, credited in the report with forcing the administration to retreat from its threat of disciplining faculty members refusing to comply with the initial trespass notice.

The Faculty for Palestine complained that the university had ignored its responsibility to its own "supposed commitment to academic freedom, anti-racism and human rights", while they were themselves instrumental in denying those freedoms and respect for human rights while practising racism against the Jewish student body and faculty members. As well, many of the F4P members have involvement in the Hearing Palestine initiative at the university, "an intellectual hub at the University of Toronto that centres the study of Palestine and facilitates advanced interdisciplinary research on Palestine, past, present and future".

This is, of course, a Palestine of their imaginative choosing, linked with Arab Palestinians and de-linked from the primary presence of Palestinian Jews, when during the pre-Christian era of the Roman Occupation of the Middle East, the province known as Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina by the Roman administration. Its occupants were Jews. There never was a 'Palestine' dedicated to Arabs, not in the dim and distant past, not in the recent past, and not at the present time, other than an Arab co-opting of ancestral Judea.

The former encampment at the University of Toronto. Photo by Jesse Kline/National Post

There are Judges to Weigh Judgement But There is Little Justice

An Ontario court has granted an injunction to the University of Toronto to clear a pro-Palestinian encampment on school property.
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday 2 July that protesters must take down tents in an area known as King's College Circle by Wednesday 3 July at 6 pm. The ruling by Justice Markus Koehnen also gives Toronto police the authority to arrest and remove anyone who refuses to comply with the court order.
The injunction allows the protesters to demonstrate throughout the campus, but prevents them from camping, erecting structures, blocking entrances to university property and protesting on campus between 11 pm and 7 am. "As a result, the injunction does not limit the freedom of expression that the law provides," the judge wrote in his decision.

Tyler Cheese for CBC News

Anti-Israel protesters leave the University of Toronto campus after clearing tents and signage on Wednesday. Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post

"There can be no doubt that some of the speech on the exterior of the encampment rises to the level of hate speech."

"[Comments such as] We need another holocaust; Death to the Jews; Hamas for Prime Minister; You dirty fu--cking Jew; Go back to Europe..."

"None of the named respondents and none of the encampment occupants have been associated with any of these statements."

"[The] automatic conclusion that those phrases are antisemitic is not justified. [Including] a photograph of the [Jewish] university president which was described as depicting the president as a devil with the caption 'blood on your hands' in bold letters beneath [the] inverted triangle [used by Hamas to mark its targets, as well as the phrases] intifada, Free Palestine by any means necessary [and] From the river to the sea [call for Jewish genocide]."

Judge Markus Koehnen, Ontario Superior Court of Justice

Organizers from the pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of Toronto’s downtown campus say they will regroup before deciding whether to comply with an injunction ordering them to clear the camp by 6 p.m. on Wednesday. Toronto police have the authority to arrest protestors if they do not disband the camp. CBC still from video

Jews just cannot seem to win, for losing the debate. Jews, throughout their millennias-long history have developed a keen ear and eye for the loathing their presence engenders in portions of any society in which they live as a minority. Their antennae are chronically attuned for the hostility that never fails to waft their way. Sometimes in underhanded ways, sometimes in blatant accusations, sometimes through threats, and when the situation becomes threatening, violence is more often than not, not far behind.

 

This is not idle chatter and mere speculation; 'intifada' has an identifiable meaning; it is anything but innocent of threat. It presages an overt determination to mount a violent campaign for the singular purpose of destroying the lives of Jews wherever they happen to be; residing in their own Jewish state whose purpose is their security, or within other states as minority groups in a historical diaspora that resulted from forced exile from their ancestral geography. 

 

Jews know intimidation, they know fear, they have a very personal acquaintance with the need to flee at a moment's notice.

 

Yet an 'impartial' judge of human interactions leans heavily on freedom of speech, discounting the toxin of hatred leading to threats that will invariably become violent action. The theatre of antisemitism in all its raging distemper and mass pathology is now on stage in full disruptive, threatening display. From sneering charges of colonialist oppressors thrown out at ordinary Jewish Canadians, students attending university, children in primary schools, adults attending synagogue, to under-cover-of-night Nazi messages in cemeteries, on Jewish community centre doors, smashed windows on Jewish-owned small businesses, Jews are constantly reminded of the vast division existing between themselves and all others.

 

Judge Koehnen was ruling on a permanent injunction against campus encampments of pro-Hamas, Jew-hating, Israel-bashing students, directed by outside interests fuelling hate and being remunerated for their participation in a hate-fest that erupted in the wake of the October 7 mass atrocities committed by the terrorists governing Gaza when Hamas operatives flooded across the Gaza border into southern Israel to commit mass rape, mutilation of girls and women, slaughter of Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of people innocent of harm to others. 

At universities across North America, well organized 'Palestinian Student' groups have unnerved public authorities by their protest marches replete with celebration of the October 7 atrocities, citing Hamas as heroic in its rampage against the apartheid colonialist oppression of the victimized Palestinians. The universities appear disinterested largely in dispelling the slanders, much less the encampments. Citing freedom of speech despite hate laws that forbid the ferocity of the hate-inspired threats emanating from diehard antisemites targeting Jewish students with their vitriolic messages of dismissal.

Universities themselves -- and in particular the University of Toronto among the worst -- have coddled the Jew/Israel detractors, giving them space to invite radical Islamist speakers, enabling the promotion of the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, complicit in fostering an atmosphere of bleak antisemitism. An atmosphere that has been decades in the making with faculty appointments of academics whose long-range plans have been a schedule to subvert civility and awaken latent antisemitism. An Islamist conquest.

 

An aerial view of the University of Toronto encampment on July 2. (Mehrdad Nazarahari/CBC)

"There was considerable debate in the record about the use of certain slogans such as 'from the river to the sea', 'glory to the martyrs' and the word 'intifada'."

"A number of intervenors asked me to find those phrases to be antisemitic. I accept that these expressions are perceived as hurtful and threatening to many Jews."

"There appears however, to be considerable variation, nuance and context around the meaning of these terms which, in my mind, would make it improper to automatically assume that they are antisemitic, especially on an interlocutory motion."

Justice Markus Koehnen

Inside From the Outside on U of T Encampment

"First fact is that strict majority of people I talked to are neither students nor affiliated with our university. We have something like 100,000 students and tons of staff, so it's not hard to find them! But yeah, 'student encampment' is just objectively wrong as a description."

"They took down one piece of fencing on the quad where convocation events happen next week, and have a handful of [masked] people controlling entry."

"I walked round the 'sign-in' and no one noticed for ten minutes or so. But it's [not] free entry.

"The 'security' and 'spokesperson' both explicitly said that if you don't support the collective's view on Palestine, you aren't welcome and they will remove you."

"Actually, I was specifically told to leave now or 'it would become more uncomfortable'."

"I don't really get why we'd allow this. All have the right to protest! Free country. But letting a group of masked [non] students control entry to quad, letting them turn it into a campground with tents: you can just take down the tents and entry gate without touching anyone."

Kevin A. Bryan, economist, associate professor, University of Toronto business school

Anti-Israel demonstrators wave flags and hold up smartphones outside the fenced in area of an encampment on the University of Toronto campus on May 2, 2024. Photo by COLE BURSTON /AFP via Getty Images

He was skeptical about the identities and purpose inherent in the anti-Israel protests taking place at the University of Toronto, where students and clearly others had set up an encampment inside King's College Circle. So he decided that he'd go out and have a look around, himself. It wasn't particularly difficult for him to infiltrate the group, illegally assembled with their posters and banners, tents and expressions of hatred for Zionists and Israel. He just began by walking about nonchalantly. And engaging others in brief conversations.

What the professor found damning and disconcerting was that the protesters took it upon their assumed authority to block anyone from accessing the area other than those whom they scrutinized and questioned to ensure that they were singing from the same vitriolic hymnal. The university environs are private property, and none of the groups assembled across Canada and the United States at various universities have secured permission of the various university administrations to stage their volatile confrontations.

 

Pro-Palestinian encampment in an area that was fenced off at the University of Toronto campus in downtown Toronto on Thursday May 2, 2024. Photo by Ernest Doroszuk /Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network

Professor Bryan walked among the protesters for a good half-hour before he was identified as an outsider, asked to leave on the basis of the revelation he failed to share the outlook  and values of the organizing groups. He did eventually leave under some duress and then shared his observations on social media, expressing his opinion that many of the protesters had no link to the university. "A short note on the encampment that's now set up here in Toronto @UofT. I snuck into it today [I told them I was a fellow comrade who'd stepped out to get a cigarette.] I think it's only fair to talk to the folks and see what's going on before judging."

Well, he did see what was going on, he did speak to protesters to discuss with some that the huge "Honour to the Martyrs" poster, logically interpreted as pro-violence since martyrdom as it is meant in the Gaza conflict has a sinister Islamist ring to it that martyrdom is achieved by killing Israelis and Jews. The person to whom he spoke was insistent that he misunderstood; martyr and intifada are not, she said, violent terms.

As for the group demanding that the university divest its funds from any entities, businesses or individuals having anything to do with Israel in any way, shape or form, he remarked to them that U of T has no such investments. "The university response right now is basically 'let it peter out'. They have campus security in case a fight breaks out But they're still complicit in allowing the 'entry gate'." The Professor videoed what he came across at the protest site, but just to ensure he had documentation of what he was commenting on. 

The entrance to a pro-Palestinian encampment in an area fenced off at the University of Toronto campus in downtown Toronto on Thursday, May 2, 2024. Photo by Ernest Doroszuk /Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network

"...I'm not going to post my video. I didn't even take a phone out until a kid made an implicit threat."

"But I do think @UofT needs to understand what's actually happening, and the embarrasing @utfaculty letter implying faculty support, this needs to be retracted."

"And, last last thing: Just want to be really clear that I didn't take a census.All I know directly is, majority I talked to weren't Uof T affiliated."

"We also know that the protest was partly organized by USW [United Steelworkers Union]. Beyond that, you'll have to do some journalism yourself!"

Professor Kevin A. Bryan

Antisemitism at University of Toronto Medical School

"Personal experiences as a faculty member and as a clinician [including antisemitism that I personally witnessed or experienced] led to the writing of this report]."

"There are those who do not only cross over the line to anti-Jewish hatred but who do so proudly and perhaps sometimes as the primary goal, hiding behind the Palestinian cause all the while."

"I personally experienced many instances of antisemitism, including being told that all Jews are liars, that Jews lie to control the university or the faculty or the world, to oppress or hurt others, and/or for other forms of gain; and that antisemitism can't exist because everything Jews say are lies, including any claims to have experienced discrimination."

Dr. Ayelet Kuper, associate professor, department of medicine, University of oronto

 Thee was a time in Canada -- and Toronto -- in the 1930s when signs were erected reading: "No Jews, Blacks of Dogs Allowed". It was a time when entry to universities was difficult for Jews with strictly limited enforced quotas. When universities adopted a rigid system of exclusion, just as private clubs did. Public parks and beaches were also off limits to Jews. Antisemitism ran rampant, so deeply entrenched that when Jews were desperate to escape Germany and certain death few countries saw their way clear to accepting these refugees, certainly not Canada. 

 

Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Incidents of antisemitism have once again crept out of the dank, dark sewers that once quietly hosted them, to again find free expression in places where Jews once felt comfortably that they were finally accepted and the miserable days of active Jew-hate was firmly and permanently relegated to the past. A contrite world post-Holocaust made it socially unacceptable for people to utter racist comments in public. People who harboured rank beliefs in Jewish plots to control the world kept their own counsel.

And then, over a gradual period, with the rebirth of the Jewish state of Israel, conflict between Arabs living in the area that was historically Judean, named as a province of 'Palestine' -- where indigenous Jews traditionally lived -- by the Roman occupation a the time of the Roman empire, was contested by Arabs throughout the Middle East as Arab/Muslim land, not Judean. The first reaction to the establishment of Israel reborn, was military violence which failed to reach its goal.

 

Until the Arab population of 'Palestine' took for themselves the identification of Palestinians as well as the historical presence that was Judaean in character, claiming themselves to be the legitimate authentic indigenous population, Jews mere colonialists. Palestinians draped themselves in victimhood and the world responded with concern. Not concern over Palestinian Arab violence extinguishing the lives of Jews, but the public relations campaign launched to slander the very existence of Israel as illegitimate.

It was a campaign that couldn't fail to resonate with closet antisemites until they become sufficiently emboldened to air their anti-Jewish slurs in the light of day, portraying themselves as sympathetic to the Palestinian 'cause' against invading, oppressive Jews. Hiding behind the noxious vision of a Jewish state bent on wresting control of territory from its original inhabitants as Palestinian Arabs claimed themselves to be, the campaign of disentitlement and delegitimization spread in lock step with visible antisemitism.

Now, on university campuses all over North America, and Canada in particular, Jewish students are harassed and subjected to the racist label of oppressors of victimized Palestinians. A front, in actual fact for the oldest hate in the world. It has become 'legitimate' to criticize Israel and arguing that to do so has nothing to do with antisemitism. In the process victimizing Canadian Jews as accessories to the Jewish state's unwillingness to allow itself to be destroyed. The upshot is that verbal, violent antisemitism has become a dominant creed once again.

Toronto's premier institute of higher education has tarnished itself by becoming an accessory to blatant lies about Israel and harming the lives of Jewish Canadians through the semi-institutionalization of antisemitism. A new academic paper published in the Canadian Medical Education Journal by a credible witness within the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at University of Toronto describes the situation, within a greater aura of disinterest in and unwillingness to do anything about the viral presence of antisemitism.

And while the Faculty of Medicine at the university issued a rote condemnation of antisemitism to the effect of stating that "it takes courage to step forward and shine a light on hate. We hear you. We see you and we are with you", nothing has followed that kindly sentiment.

• Being told that because she was born in Israel and refuses to denounce the Jewish state, she is “inherently racist, and therefore any discrimination I encounter as a Jew in Canada is therefore deserved.” 
• A faculty member [told her] that Jews mustn’t be allowed to speak on their own behalf about antisemitism and shouldn’t even be subject to the protection from discrimination as outlined in the Ontario Human Rights Code, on the grounds that what Jews call antisemitism isn’t real.
• “In the years before the war in Gaza, I overheard faculty colleagues complaining about ‘those Jews who think their Holocaust means they know something about oppression.’” 
• [I] heard about non-Jewish students who thought a Jewish classmate had the power to block their residency matches. 
• Non-Jewish students asked her why educational content about Jews was “being forced on the students by the Jew who bought the faculty.” 

Dr. Ayelet Kuper’s article in the Canadian Medical Education Journal.