Why would an educated, sophisticated and experienced individual such as Ed Morgan walk away with the impression that “it would mostly promote the view that a one-state solution is the only viable option.”

I mean, that was also my impression of this conference. I wasn’t manipulated by the JDL or anybody else. I can read for myself, and so can Ed Morgan. So can others who look at this conference. And then the question becomes: “Why should I lend this conference the credibility that comes with my presence?”

Surely the organizers could have established a more reasonable approach to this issue.

Muffti has never seen anyone sit there and say ‘well, we’d like our student body to have the following character’ ever…and if they do, it’s entirely at the graduate level. Having said that, if a university has developed a reputation in an area they tend to like to keep their strenght in that area so on that level muffti guesses student interests matter. a little.

vis a vis quebec, muffti was saying that there is no tendency to see little separation talk during bad economic times — BOTH referendums were held druing terrible times (1982 and 1995) so he sees no reason to think that weak economy shoudl predict no separation. Muffti truly thinks that quebecers got sick of it, started to see that it was disruptive to their economy and began realizign some of the benefits of the hands off approach canada provides them (not to mention the billions in equalization paymetns canada gives to them as, for all muffti can tell, bribery to stick around and not cause trouble!)

“Meir Weinstein, the JDL’s national director, said that the few people who have agreed to lend a ‘legitimate voice’ to the conference should withdraw so as not to lend credibility to a one-sided event.

Ed Morgan, a University of Toronto law professor and former Canadian Jewish Congress president, said he considered taking part in the conference, but backed out when he learned that it would mostly promote the view that a one-state solution is the only viable option.”

Basically, the capacity of the organizers to make this event balanced has been attacked by the JDL, CJC, etc. If these speakers wanted the conference to include more people with their point of view, backing out wasn’t the more reasonable response!

They are too busy accusing York of conniving and plotting against Israel to attend and make their academic case! Believe me, I am certain if more scholars from Hebrew U. or other Israeli universities could attend this conference, the organizers would have welcomed it.

And as for the absence of actual Likudnik conservatives, well we can see from Bibi’s recent performances, they don’t even support a Palestinian state at all.

So if a school wants to be strong in the physical sciences, then they know they’ll be attracting a bunch of science students + all the characteristics and stereotypes (good, bad, and unfair) that this entails. Same goes for any other discipline: European history, law, Middle East studies, etc. So while York’s president can’t (and shouldn’t) do much about the types of conferences taking place on the campus right now, the campus climate that has led up to this has been heavily influenced by both him and his predecessors, up and down the administrative chain. Speaking of which:

Tom: “Be careful, though– these folks get tenured, so try to anticipate the hot-button issues of two or three decades hence.”

But Tom, this is exactly what faculty/search committees/university administrators are paid to do! As experts in their fields, they’re supposed to hire people with the belief that the new hires will be doing productive research and be contributing positively to departmental/university life decades in the future. This type of fortune telling is one of their job responsibilities. Deans are paid to chair committees that draw up 5/10/20 year plans for the university’s future.

At the risk of a derail (trying to keep this discussion away from Canadian politics, I swear):

Muffti: “Plus, Muffti doesn’t buy the story about Quebec – they held the second referendum during a TERRIBLE economic time for quebec. ”

I definitely agree … I didn’t mean that separation was popular because Quebec was economically strong, I said that the relative *lack* of separation talk more recently is because Quebec is economically weak (or rather, weaker than what they need to make separation more feasible). And at the same time, other provinces became strong enough to take more control over the national agenda. I also agree with your point here: “[a]nd what is more striking is that separation is itself what killed Quebec’s stranglehold over canuck politics – by electing a regional party … ”

In any case, I don’t think these “binational” comparisons between Canada and Israel have any merit, although I stand by my original comment: the Palestinians (like Quebecers from c. 1980 onwards) are weaker than they think they are, in which case buying time and waiting around for a better deal isn’t a good idea.

“he organizers want the conference to be a success, so they’ll prefer to hold it on a campus where the students and faculty will be receptive to the subject matter. A university’s administration shouldn’t meddle in the debates being held on its campus, but they *can* control the makeup of its student body, the professors they hire, and their response to violations of the code of conduct.”

barry, in point of fact, while Dean’s put their stamp of approval on scholars, no one hihger up (if him/her) even looks at file in the typical university. The whole point is to give departments, NOT administrators, the power to hire because they are supposedly the experts, not deans. This leads to all sorts of badness, but, in Muffti’s opinion, less badness than if you let peopel uninvovled in department life, research etc. make these decisions.

Similarly, student bodies arent’ chosen iin general based on political view and it is certainly ILLEGAL to choose them on teh basis of telling signs (where they are from) etc. Furthermore, typically, though not always, conferene organizers just are people from the department at the home university that is having the conference.

Muffti is all for criticism of the sort levelled here but he thinks that it starts with some basic false beliefs about how universities and conferences actually work. It also seems to Muffti to target the wrong people — you and Muffti and everyone else wants the university to stay out of dept life and organization. Things go all wrong when admiinistrators have a say.

However, making a pushback is what you’re seeing here. This is pushback. This is not an attempt to shut down a conference, this is a demand to make the conference – and definitely future conferences – balanced, with a truly broad range of points of view. Heck, they can bring out Ilan Pappe, who is a strong proponent of a single state…as long as they bring out an academic who can provide a respectable response to Pappe. Isn’t this conference asking a large and important question, even if it is an offensive one? Why then provide a foregone conclusion?

In other words, it is we who are asking for more speech and they who are restricting it.

There are far, far smarter means of pushback, at York and elsewhere. How about Jewish students and faculty mounting their own conference– perhaps on the very themes you address in your above comment?

How do you feel about the bill making its way through the Knesset about banning the term ‘nakba’, making denial of Israel’s democracy a criminal offense, etc.? Again, this stuff doesn’t work.

Jews in the West, it’s fair to say, are associated with Enlightenment values, with favoring religious, personal, and political freedoms. Look no further than, say, Justice Brandeis. Fear is often the greatest enemy of such freedoms. Demands of national security, of protection from enemies, real or (in the case of Nazi Germany) imagined…. Appeals to, and misuse of, authority.

Let’s not head down that road, Middle, in North America or elsewhere. The answer to bad speech is not repression, but more speech.

Heaven help Israel/Palestine if it becomes anything like . . . Canada! Or Belgium. Or the United Kingdom.

Have I expressed anything but an interest in this sort of outcome? I’m the guy being called a weakling loser idiot because I think the Old City should be shared as an international city.

Middle, free speech and academic freedom are messy things. The marketplace of ideas includes some feeble wares.

And occasional transparent and less transparent attempts to color scholarship with personal politics.

But what you resolutely ignore (perhaps because it lies beyond even your considerable skill at apologetics)

Thanks for the compliment. Instead of “apologetics,” how about you use “explaining complex situations and issues?” Thanks.

is that the post faults York itself and accuses it of something like Nazism c. 1938.

Yes!

Regarding Nazism c. 1938, did you notice the posts about the incoming York student body president gathering around identifiably Jewish students together with a mob of students? Did you watch the videos, including the key one that has been removed from Youtube but that we posted in February when the incident at York occurred where the mob gathered around a Jewish organization’s office and yelled about “racists” getting off the campus?

Maybe not Germany c. 1938, but how about 1933 or 1932?

Notice how the talk about Jews these days revolves around Jews who are connected to Israel and about Israel itself as the new center of evil. “Gosh, if they would just stop the settlements and the ‘occupation,’ peace would reign over the Middle East, but those war crimes they commit and the unspeakable horrors those Palestinians endure are really the worst of the worst. Those racists, those murderers, those haters, those disgusting people who are supported by other disgusting people over here.”

Add a biased conference with a decidedly anti-Israel-as-a-Jewish-state bent on this very same campus and you begin to see a pattern. Some Jews have recently reported feeling extremely uncomfortable on the campus, especially if they wearing their kippah. Also, did you know that as part of a counter-campaign to prevent the impeachment by the Drop YFS group, posters appeared on campus with the names and information of the key members of Drop YFS, focusing apparently on Jewish ones and including negative information?

This is all permitted under free speech, Tom. All of it. But it sure is nasty and hateful. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of Walt & Mearsheimer lumping me in with the 57% of Jews they identify as involved in some way with the Jewish community, and claiming that we all work against the interests of America.

It makes me feel like I did when some guy who was rejected for a very sensitive intelligence post in the US responded by attacking the “Israel Lobby” and had this picked up by almost every single major news outlet and then some. Or when a former US president went on network tv and asked a reporter whether he felt comfortable reporting about certain things.

It makes me feel the same as when I go anywhere on the Internet and quite often, even when the topic is something entirely different, somebody brings up some negative information about Israel, Zionists or Jews. Like the other day when I played a game of poker online and one of the people in the room was called something like Jewsmellbad. Nobody said anything to him. Nobody. He engaged in conversation with others as if his name was James.

So the atmosphere at York, taken together with this conference, does make me feel quite uncomfortable. And it does send some scary signals to my warning system. I realize Muffti isn’t concerned, but Muffti has also kind of removed himself from affiliation with the rest of us so maybe he feels like he doesn’t count in the same way.

Muffti asks, why not take it up with the organizers? Nah, you say: “What good is it to talk to them when they already have a built it ‘but we’ve invited Israeli and Jewish scholars’ excuse?”

To review: don’t bother talking to those with a different point of view. They’re liars or worse. Just take to the web and slime the folks who own the building, and maybe that will keep conferences like this from happening in the future.

Um, there have been attempts to talk to the organizers and to the university about this conference. The response has been silence and the university’s defense of the conference. The organizers know who they’re inviting and the university pays the salary of the organizers. So what exactly do you propose doing at this point?

I guess we could let it go by silently or perhaps avoid some the stronger language or claims made. But then again, as these things have multiplied across campuses in the US and Canada, with certain campuses being repeated culprits, maybe there’s nothing wrong with calling them on the hate speech and on the unbalanced panels or talks?

Maybe just as they’re permitted to have free speech, so are we? And maybe, just maybe, these strong accusations of ours and others will make universities think a little more deeply about what they’re doing? It hasn’t helped at UC Irvine, but maybe at the next conference at York, they will do the right thing and make it a balanced slate so that EVERYBODY can benefit from free speech and messy ideas. Especially their students.

Let’s hope young pro-Israel activists are reading and taking notes.

You mean when they’re not hiding in their office while a mob outside chants, “Racists off campus?”

I’m sure the young pro-Israel activists at York are wondering what the hell they’re doing at that school and why has this fate befallen them.

And what do you mean by “bias” in this context?

I assume you mean the panel I heard recenty? Let’s put it this way, Xisnotx looks like a centrist compared to some of the things I heard on that panel. He’s also way more knowledgeable or at least presents accurate facts with far less spin than what I heard there.

Schools earn these reputations over time, for instance, a school that doesn’t want a reputation as a hotbed of anti-Zionist activity might not choose to hire a bunch of anti-Zionist activist professors in their Department of Middle Eastern Studies.

Middle, free speech and academic freedom are messy things. The marketplace of ideas includes some feeble wares. But what you resolutely ignore (perhaps because it lies beyond even your considerable skill at apologetics) is that the post faults York itself and accuses it of something like Nazism c. 1938.

Muffti asks, why not take it up with the organizers? Nah, you say: “What good is it to talk to them when they already have a built it ‘but we’ve invited Israeli and Jewish scholars’ excuse?”

To review: don’t bother talking to those with a different point of view. They’re liars or worse. Just take to the web and slime the folks who own the building, and maybe that will keep conferences like this from happening in the future.

Let’s hope young pro-Israel activists are reading and taking notes.

And what do you mean by “bias” in this context?

And what is more striking is that separation is itself what killed Quebec’s stranglehold over canuck politics – by electing a regional party rather than controlling the balance of power via their gigantic population of voters who tended to vote as a block.

Now, of course, the organizers can fail to do a good job of balancing out a discussion. The participants can do a bad job of either challenging speakers or going out and doing research being content to take whatever they hear as fact and move on. Maybe those failures are more frequent than successes. But htat’s how universities work.

The Palestinians could probably learn something from Quebec, i.e. what to do once you’ve well and truly lost the fight, when it becomes time to serve the best interests of your people by accepting something less than a pipe dream.

There seems to be plenty of evidence for handing out suspensions or expulsions from the fallout from “Drop YFS”. I haven’t read York’s student code of conduct, but I’m pretty sure that a protest that results in a group of students being physically threatened and barricaded in an office is potential grounds for the organizers of the demonstration to be summoned in front of the Dean of students for more than a slap on the wrist. And with each successive instance that York chooses not to punish students according to their own codes of conduct, the more likely it is that anti-Zionist nutjobs will say to themselves “hey, maybe we should organize our next conference at York.”

I attended a recent event at a college where the organizer proudly told the audience that his panel of scholars who definitely had a viewpoint slanted to the far left on Mid-East topics was a panel of professional academics who rise above such things as bias. They would bring true scholarship to the audience of students who were there and the university and student body would be better off for it, he said. It was petulant and ridiculous to assume they would be anything but professional. He was angry about hostile questions from the audience. He deemed these questions beneath his scholars and beneath the spirit of the event.

The scholars were full of shit. Well, two thirds of them anyway. I do mean that. They either lied knowingly or didn’t know their stuff. There was an entire body of students and faculty there to learn from these folks and you could see them writing notes, nodding their heads and LEARNING WRONG INFORMATION. And there was nothing I or anybody could do about it because they were people of authority, invited to speak from a position of authority and supposed academic integrity. This was at a college, Tom. I not only remember college, I had this fresh experience at a college.

Since many of those students in the audience vote and will vote in elections, and since one or two may go into politics, it would be nice if they knew the truth instead of some biased bullshit. Point being that in this particular conference, it would be nice if they actually brought in some people who would and could counter the prevailing theme of the event. That way, you could have the two “unobjective” sides having a real dialogue and debate instead of spoonfeeding one viewpoint to the student body of York University.

Maybe I’m wrong and maybe they will rise above this, but this is a stacked deck and I don’t think it bodes well for…objectivity.

I appreciate you have Yonah’s back here, but you’re ignoring Muffti’s point altogether.