Jesse Kline: The anti-Israel profs who aided the illegal U of T encampment

A new report provides insight into who was behind the takeover of the University of Toronto campus

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Published Sep 05, 2024  •  Last updated 1 minute ago  •  5 minute read

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

As the new school year gets underway, a report released Thursday by Canary Mission, an organization that documents antisemitic and anti-Israel activity on North American campuses, paints a grim picture of how University of Toronto administrators sat back as their campus was overrun by terrorist supporters and outside agitators. In particular, the report lists dozens of U of T faculty, the very people responsible for educating future generations, who aided and abetted last spring’s illegal anti-Israel encampment.

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Following in the footsteps of similar encampments at American universities, on May 2, a group breached a fence surrounding the newly revitalized King’s College Circle and occupied the courtyard for a period of two months. When I visited the site the following week, the fence was littered with posters excusing Hamas’s atrocities and calling for violent uprisings in Israel and here at home.

Canary Mission found that 153 professors, including 123 employed by U of T, publicly supported the encampment, 45 actively participated in it and six addressed the demonstrators.

Thugs hiding their identities behind keffiyehs and surplus medical masks strictly controlled access to the area, forcing those who wished to enter to agree with a series of statements designed to ensure that no Zionists — or anyone advocating for peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, for that matter — would be allowed to infect the encampment with their blasphemous ideas.

At the time, it wasn’t entirely clear who was behind the protest, or how many of those who had pitched tents on university property actually attended classes there. The Canary Mission report — titled, “University of Toronto’s Antisemitic Encampment & the University’s Shocking Complicity” — provides some unique insight in this regard.

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According to its authors, this “was not primarily a grassroots student protest.” Instead, the so-called People’s Circle for Palestine was home to “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.”

In other words: the usual array of left-wing, anti-western agitators and the “useful idiots” of Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It’s little wonder that the protest quickly devolved into Jew-hate. As Ontario Superior Court judge Markus Koehnen noted in his ruling granting an injunction against the encampment, there were numerous documented instances of overtly antisemitic statements, including: “kike,” “We need another holocost” (sic), “Jews belong in the sea Palestine will be free,” “Death To the Jews, Hamas for Prime Minister,” “You dirty f–ing Jew. Go back to Europe” and “Itbach El Yahod” (“slaughter the Jews”).

The authors of the report are critical of U of T’s administration for failing to take action against a protest movement that was creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and staff. Part of this was undoubtedly due to fears that trying to dismantle the camp or enforce the university’s code of conduct could lead to violence. But it’s also the case that the encampment maintained the support of a striking number of faculty members.

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Some of these profs are members of the university’s chapter of Faculty for Palestine (F4P), which the report credits with forcing the administration to back down from its threat to discipline faculty members who refused to comply with the school’s initial trespass notice.

In a May 30 statement, F4P chastised the university for failing to live up to its “supposed commitment to academic freedom, anti-racism and human rights.” Which is ironic given that the encampment was littered with racist messages and one of its key demands was for the U of T to sever ties with Israeli academics and universities. Academic freedom for one group, but not for the other.

F4P also released an open letter, signed by over 100 faculty members, pledging an “academic boycott of Israel.”

Many F4P members are also involved in the university’s Hearing Palestine initiative, which is described as “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.”

In practice, this means publishing academic papers undermining Israel’s legitimacy and advancing ideas intended to stifle debate on the Middle East conflict. This includes the concept of “anti-Palestinian racism,” which is an attempt to paint legitimate criticism of Palestinian “resistance” as inherently racist.

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For example, as Canary Mission notes, in 2002, Abigail Bakan, a professor in U of T’s department of social justice education, along with a colleague from the University of Alberta, published an article in The Political Quarterly claiming Palestinians are victims of “racial gaslighting” through the positioning of Israel as “ ‘democratic,’ ‘Jewish’ and unfairly treated” (all true) and Palestine as “ ‘terrorist,’ ‘antisemitic’ and ‘undemocratic’ ” (also, unfortunately, true in far too many cases).

Since October 7, many of those involved with Hearing Palestine have expressed support for Hamas’s brutal massacre and rape of 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking of over 250 hostages. A number of prominent U of T faculty members, for example, signed a statement released in October 2023 that attempted to compare the plight of Ukrainians who had been invaded by Russia with the Palestinians who invaded Israel.

Canary Mission also documented professors who retweeted images and videos glorifying Hamas’s attack, wrote about the “jubilation” they felt on October 7 and claimed that Israel is a white supremacist state.

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What we are witnessing is nothing short of a perversion of our higher education system. Rather than teaching the facts and encouraging students to engage in robust debate, too many educators are pushing a false narrative that paints Jews as colonizers and terrorists as freedom fighters. Hiding under the cover of “academic freedom,” they look to take those very freedoms away from Israeli academics and tar anyone who dares challenge their worldview as racist.

The authors of the Canary Mission report are highly critical of U of T administrators for not doing more to dismantle the protest camp and protect Jewish students, but the fact that so many of their staff members — the very people who should be modelling civilized behaviour and encouraging diversity of thought — were actively involved in the takeover of university property put the administration between a rock and a hard place.

Moving forward, administrators will have to decide if they’re willing to continue to employ faculty who support terrorist tactics and groups that pose a threat not just to Israel, but to Canada and the broader western world. And Canadian taxpayers will have to decide whether it is really in their interests to continue to fund a higher education system that spurns Canadian values and emphasizes ideology over truth.

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