As if to confirm the depth of its anti-Israel animus, the Student Union of the University of Toronto at Scarborough (SCSU) passed a poisonous motion during its virtual November 24th meeting, stipulating that the student union “reaffirm its commitment to the BDS movement by … rais[ing] awareness about Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine and war crimes against Palestinian peoples.”

In light of this, the union decided the university must “refrain from engaging with organizations, services, or take part in events that further normalize Israeli apartheid,” and even ban speakers from campus who “support the military occupation of Palestine.”

More insidious was an item from an original motion passed in 2013 that will require that any kosher food brought to campus must be sourced from firms that do not support “Israeli apartheid,” not to mention the creation of a pernicious “BDS List” that will serve to blacklist organizations that support Israel.

This recent vote is the latest in a long campaign of anti-Israel, antisemitic actions at the University of Toronto. At this particular university, specifically, the University of Toronto Graduate Students’ Union (UTGSU) has the dubious distinction of being the only student union in Canada with a committee dedicated solely to promoting the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and in 2019, outrageously rejecting Hillel’s request to recognize the “Kosher Forward” campaign to have kosher food offered on campus. Why? Because the Union decided in their grotesquely antisemitic way, Hillel is pro-Israel and therefore kosher food should not be allowed.

As such efforts ratchet up in intensity and reach, they becomes more destructive, more bigoted, and more fanatically antisemitic. They focus only on one country’s behavior and politics, even though many other countries are actual human rights abusers, and have far more egregious and long-standing records of oppressing minority or fringe groups in their respective societies.

Given the stench of antisemitism that has been emanating from UT’s student government for several years now, Jewish students responded at the November 24th meeting with a motion of their own, “Re-Affirmation of Rights of Jewish Students at UTSC,” written to help insulate them from further anti-Jewish bigotry. Despite the good intentions of the Jewish students submitting the motion, however, Israel’s opponents in the student government outrageously redacted key language in the motion that would have protected pro-Israel Jews from being targeted, maligned, and excluded from campus dialogue.

One key section deleted from the motion, for example, reasonably requested the student union to “re-affirm its commitment to ensuring that Jewish students are unencumbered by discriminatory policies or actions by the union or its officers … by recognizing the right of Jewish students, like all students, to organize & advertise events to express their political, cultural and/or religious views.” For any other minority group of campus, this language, of course, would never be controversial; when the debate is about Israel and Jews, however, normality disappears.

One tactic of campus anti-Israel activists — groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, for example — is to attempt to suppress any pro-Israel views or any efforts at answering back to the calumnies spread about the Jewish state. Free speech and the opportunity to openly debate important issues are, of course, fundamental to the role of universities, but the pro-Palestinian camp has been determined to allow only one narrative — one which portrays Israel as a racist, militaristic, colonial occupier of stolen land. So it was unsurprising that another section of the Jewish students’ motion that was excised was the section that requested that the SCSU, “Defend the principles of academic freedom” so students, faculty, and staff would be able to “attend lectures, workshops, and films about Israel and/or Palestine;” “participate in joint research with Israelis and Israeli institutions;” “enroll in classes in conjunction with Israeli universities;” and “travel and study abroad in Israel or with organizations that support Israel or Zionism.”

No other country in the world is targeted by woke students as being such a global pariah that students are forbidden from visiting, yet this entire benign section was deleted precisely because it allowed students to create and maintain an academic or spiritual affiliation with Israel.

Imagine if a student government yanked accommodations for halal food on campus because Islam can be linked to terrorism. The campus-wide howling about Islamophobia and bigotry would be deafening. And since when are Jewish students — who may not support or even care about Israel — responsible for the political behavior of a foreign country thousands of miles away from campus, and made to suffer for it?

This campaign, of course, is part of a broader effort to marginalize Jewish students, malign Israel and Zionism without debate, contort history and facts to elevate the Palestinian cause and denigrate the Jewish state, and promote hatred and hostility to any supporter of Israel. So, in addition to denying Jews access to kosher food on campus, Israel-haters have made moves to: reject the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, claiming it suppresses Palestinian solidarity; to decide who are “bad” Jews and who are “good” Jews based on their support or opposition to Israel; to proclaim, mistakenly, that anti-Zionism never amounts to antisemitism; to claim they speak for Jews in deciding that Zionism has nothing at all to do with Judaism; and to announce that Zionism itself is antisemitic.

The fact that this same situation exists on campuses throughout Canada and the United States represents a grave moral failure and is a shameful reality for which administrators will someday have to answer.

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of “Dispatches From the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.”

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