Author: David Frum
Publication: National Post
Date: February 27, 2010
URL: http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=2620345&p=1
Next week, York University will once again
open its halls and classrooms to "Israel Apartheid Week," so-called.
This year as every year, militants and activists will use the taxpayer-funded
facilities of York to vilify the Jewish state.
Well, that's free speech, isn't? Everybody
gets to express his or her point of view, no matter how obnoxious, right?
No, not right. Not at York. At York, speech
is free -- better than free, subsidized-- for anti-Israel haters. But for
those who would defend Israel, York sets very different rules.
In advance of York's annual hate-Israel week,
the campus group Christians United for Israel applied to use university space
to host a program of pro-Israel speakers.
The university replied that this program could
only proceed on certain conditions.
It insisted on heavy security, including both
campus and Toronto police -- all of those costs to be paid by the program
organizers. The organizers would also have to provide an advance list of all
program attendees and advance summaries of all the speeches. No advertising
for the program would be permitted -- not on the York campus, not on any of
the other campuses participating by remote video.
These are radically different and much harsher
terms than anything required from the hate-Israel program. The hate-Israel
program is not required to pay for its own security. It is free to advertise.
Its speakers are not pre-screened by the university.
The pro-Israel event, scheduled for this past
Monday, Feb. 22, was cancelled when the organizers declined to comply with
the terms. A university spokesman told the Jewish Tribune that it insisted
on the more stringent requirements on pro-Israel groups "due to the participation
of individuals who they claim invite the animus of anti-Israel campus agitators."
The logic is impressively brazen: Since the
anti-Israel people might use violence, the speech of the pro-Israel people
must be limited. On the other hand, since the pro-Israel people do not use
violence, the speech of the anti-Israel people can proceed without restraint.
Over the past days, however, the university
appears to have realized that this "We brake for bullies" policy
on speech might present some PR problems.
So now it seems they have reverted to a bolder
policy: flat-out denial.
I called York on Thursday for comment on the
incident. York's smooth chief communications officer was out for the day.
So apparently was his deputy. I got instead an audibly nervous substitute.
I asked: Is it York's policy to allow thugs
to decide what may be said on campus, and what can't? He insisted that, no
York had the same rules for all.
"Are you telling me," I asked, "that
York imposes precisely the same requirements on all student groups?"
"All student groups that request university
space, yes."
I said: "I'm going to print that answer
in the newspaper. It's going to be kind of embarrassing if you are quoted
as saying something blatantly untrue. Do you want to modify your statement
in any way?"
The spokesman said he would stick with his
"precisely same requirements" quote.
I offered one more chance to amend the answer.
Pause. And then burst forth a flood of amazing flack-speech reprising Chevy
Chase's legendarily incoherent performance in Spies Like Us.
What he meant, he said, was that it was the
"process" and the "protocols" that were the same, leading
to a "needs-based assessment" of each particular case. Hemina, hemina,
hemina.
The truth is this: York students are treated
"the same" only in the sense that every student is equally exposed
to the utterly arbitrary ad hoc decision-making of a fathomlessly cowardly
university administration.
It was not always this way. One of the speakers
invited to the pro-Israel event, Daniel Pipes, spoke at York in 2003. Violence
was threatened then too. Local militants distributed leaflets urging the disruption
of Pipes' talk. But York's then-president Lorna Marsden refused to allow thugs
to veto academic speech. She provided the police presence to ensure that Pipes'
talk could proceed unmolested, although admittedly in a tense atmosphere that
might have daunted someone less personally courageous than Pipes.
But the current York administration lacks
Marsden's commitment to freedom.
Even when public speech is not an issue, Jewish
students at York experience ethnically and religiously based intimidation
and even violence. On the rare occasions when the university disciplines anyone
for such incidents, it takes care always to penalize both the Jewish targets
of harassment and the anti-Jewish culprits. The motive again is not fairness,
but fear.
Something has gone seriously wrong at Canada's
third-largest university. You can find a list of York's board of governors
at yorku.ca/univsec/board/members.htm.If so minded, maybe you should contact
them and ask them what they will do to correct York's betrayal of the values
of a free society.
- dfrum@aei.org
