Jews don't count

Memorial University, Sin Jawns Pride, and their socially acceptable racism

There was a review on one of the rate my prof websites for Chemistry 1050, a required course for some science majors offered each semester at Memorial University.

This review was for the semester just ended. It was dated May 2024.

It rated the prof as low as possible, identified him as a hard marker, and added that the prof was “very outright in his stances against human rights.”

Thing is, the prof identified in the rating was on parental leave and hadn’t taught any courses in the Winter semester, 2024. As he explained to his followers on X/Twitter, he also hadn’t taught CHEM 1050 in years before that. Plus he wouldn’t be discussing Middle East politics in a chemistry course anyway.

The prof is Jewish, if you hadn't guessed.

He’s also Israeli.

And like other Jewish professors across Canada the past few months, he’s found himself the target of this kind of racially-motivated harassment that, not coincidentally, has happened as Pro-Hamas protestors set up camp at the local university demanding Memorial boycott, divest, and sanction anything Israeli or any person or company doing business with Israel.

The university administration at Memorial is negotiating with the protesters and has already agreed to some of their demands, including disclosure of the university’s investments. Other demands by the protesters are still under negotiation between the university and the protest leaders with the university already committed to reaching an agreement and releasing a joint statement of some kind on something. The protesters won't be signing anything that isn't what they wanted so the university's commitment puts them in a hard spot.

Boycott-Divest-Sanction is a movement, known commonly by the acronym BDS and it pre-dates the Hamas attack last October that triggered the current war in Gaza. BDS has been a key part of the campaign at Memorial and in St. John’s. It’s not ideologically neutral. BDS is rooted in a complex set of ahistorical claims that starts from the premise that Israel itself has no right to exist as a state, that it is a “settler-colonial” state like white-ruled South Africa, with Jews playing the part of Afrikaners, and that like South Africa, Israel practices apartheid against the Indigenous people of Palestine. It's nonsense but that's what these folks believe.

There have been BDS signs across Memorial’s campuses as well as related slogans like “from the river to the sea,” which alludes to the elimination of Israel and the expulsion of Jewish settlers from the river Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean sea in the west. The prof who was named in the fake course rating has complained to the university administration about all of this, but the administration did nothing about what it told him was just peaceful protest.

BDS was at the heart of a deal between the committee that organizes the annual Pride event in St. John’s and a pro-Hamas group to let the group marshal the Pride parade through St. John’s this year. There’s was no public consultation before the decision, which came with a list of demands from the activists. They’d only take control of the parade if Pride also endorsed the group’s Boycott - Divest - Sanction list of companies and organizations tied to Israel. In other provinces, pro-Hamas groups has disrupted Pride events.

The Pride committee had no trouble doing so, as the statement shown above makes clear. A committee spokesperson told CBC that membership in the groups overlap anyway and they all believe thexsame things too. That’s actually true - the pro-Hamas activists, the provincial NDP, and the Pride organizing committee, and the student encampment have overlapping members and political ideology - but the Prideorganizing committee doesn’t represent the whole community, as the push-back against the decision showed.

That lack of support was clear when Pride activists slammed the decision on social media and one of the companies not on the list withdrew but the pro-Hamas organizers and the Pride committee switched position, claiming that the BDS list was not about Israel and Gaza but about shifting financing for Pride away from corporations. It’s a slippery position but the deceptive media line is as disingenuous as the idea that support for Hamas-controlled Gaza through the alliance with BDS and the pro-Hamas local protesters is consistent with Pride objectives.

“In Gaza,” as the New York Times reported in June, “like in many places in the Arab world, homosexuality remains taboo and gay life happens largely behind closed doors. Government persecution is not uncommon, and in one high-profile case Hamas killed a prominent commander after accusing him of embezzlement and homosexuality.”

As for the City of St. John’s, it hosted the annual flag raising on July 10. There was no mention of the parade controversy and so far city’s elected officials have been silent about the controversy.

What’s interesting about all this is that the Government of Canada names the BDS movement as an example of antisemitism. The university has used training seminars on how to identify antisemitism and antisemitism is included in the university’s diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism policies and materials. That’s why it’s curious that the university has agreed to negotiate with a group that has clearly pushed BDS as a core and non-negotiable demand. It’s impossible to separate BDS from the nakedly antisemitic rationales offered for it: that the state of Israel has no right to exist, that the Jewish people of Israel do not have a right of self-determination, and on and on.

That’s likely because antisemitism is deeply rooted in cultures around the word and often hides in plain sight. Take the well known song Frere Jacques, known in other languages as Brother John in English, or Bruder Jakob or Bruder Martin in German. The song originates in European Roman Catholic societies with the reference to the bell calling people to morning prayers. But the names of the “brothers” refer to non-Roman Catholics like the dissenter Martin Luther or the Jewish Jakob.

Theres more to it though. Comedian and writer David Baddiel wrote in his 2021 book Jews don’t count about the way in which, in an age of inclusion and visibility, Jews are often left out most emphatically by people who would consider themselves progressive. And in this case, no one is more “progressive” these days than a careerist university administrator angling for the next promotion.

Just to illustrate that alignment between modern “progressive” and antisemitism, look at the British Labour Party. At the Party’s 2019 conference, then-shadow secretary of state for women and equalities Dawn Butler listed off specific groups of people who she and her Labour Party colleagues would consider outside the mainstream of society but who would be included by a Labour government.

"If you are in social housing, if you are LGBT+, if you are straight, if you are a traveller, if you struggle to pay rent, if you wear a hijab, turban, a cross, if you are black, white, Asian, if you are disabled, if you don’t have a trust fund, if you didn’t go to Oxbridge, if you are working class, if you are under 18, if you are aspirational, if you work, if you are a carer, if you feel you won’t live beyond 25, if you have ever ticked the other box – you have a future and you are worthy, worthy of equality dignity and respect. And a Labour government will value you, just be your true authentic self."

It is an odd list. Butler includes straight and the cross, for example, which would not normally be considered anything but mainstream. But she left out Jews, Baddiel noted. In that omission, he said, Butler reflected very much the antisemitic views of progressives like prominent Labour leaders, including the party leader himself at the time, Jeremy Corbyn, who is also a patron of the British version of the BDS Movement. Jews don't count enough to get on the list.

Not all of the antisemitism is passive or a sin of omission. Some of the most pointed comments one can get on line is when you note that these days both the extreme political and right share antisemitism as a common belief. Take either the French or American examples, as I have done publicly lately. I’ve joked about both but most recently in national elections, as in the 1920s and 1930s, the French have split almost equally left and right but this time they share a hatred of the Jews.

The most common rebuke you will get for that humour is from those who’d fancy themselves progressive. They won't say it's not funny. They will not take issue with the idea the Left isn’t that keen on Jews but they are eager to point out that the political Right loves Jews. The rejoinder is nutty for anyone passingly familiar with politics over the last century in Europe and North America but these days, the ahistorical mob does not need much beyond the slogans and rhetoric to recite that sort of junk like any cultist whose cherished beliefs are challenged by uncomfortable facts. And they are blind to the point that by fixation on the Right they are implicitly acknowledging the Left is antisemitic. Some of them will even launch into a justification for their one-sided beliefs.

And at the university here, they may not be as far gone as the crowd at the University of Windsor, but it is easy for the people who are already lost in the tangled swamp of racist ideas that dominate the so-called progressive crowd to simply ignore the impact their negotiations are having on Jewish students, Jewish professors, Jewish employees, Jewish people in the province, and those of us who can think more critically than the progressives can. Folks don't feel safe when antisemitic rhetoric goes unchallenged and when the university negotiates to accept some form of what should be totally unacceptable given not only Canadian government policies but the university's policies too. The justifications, the rationalisations, the blind eye all feel chillingly familiar.

The university folks may well have become as blind as Whoopie Goldberg, who was unconcerned about the Holocaust because it was, as she put it a few years ago, two groups of white people killing each other. The Israel/Apartheid/Nazi/holocaust tropes of the pro-Hamas groups these days give off precisely that ahistorical and racist view Goldberg took. All of the BDS Movement is as nakedly antisemitic as it is racist. Anyone in any position of responsibility in the province who does not take a firm stand against it or worse attempts to negotiate a joint statement with antisemitic campaigns despite the university’s own policies does not understand what diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism genuinely means.