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Teitelbaum's Take
Exactly What Happened in Montreal?
When Bibi ventured abroad last week for a brief jaunt in Canada, it wasn't Israel that burned, but the small patch of boulevard fronting Concordia University, where the former Israel PM had been slated to give a talk.
Bibi showed up in La Belle Province to address the subject of terrorism courtesy of Montreal Gazette and National Post owner Izzy Asper's CanWest conglomerate and at the direct behest of the university's Hillel Jewish Student Union. But it became clear even before he signed in at the posh Ritz Carleton Hotel that Bibi's two-or-three-block motorcade descent from the slopes of Mount Royal would prove as slippery as any I endured on foot as a Concordia student 25 years ago, even after an ice-storm and a couple of drafts of now sadly defunct Brador beer.
Jewish Student Union President Yoni Petel told VJ the day after the debacle that Internet discussion groups before Netanyahu's arrival had been rife with calls by a group called the Montreal Coalition for Peace and Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) to quash his appearance by all and any means. Anticipating a mugging of the kind recently fashionable at the University of San Francisco and the University of California at Berkeley, Petel says he beseeched both the university's administration and the Montreal Police to beef up security for the event.
"We told them over and over that this group is dangerous, that their protests are almost always violent, and that this one will be violent."
Despite a lurid history of campus violence dating back to the '60s, and since the latest Intifada an atmosphere of anti-Semitic and campus-wide anti-Israel intimidation that have earned the school the dubious monicker of "Gaza U," Petel's pleas went unheeded. Consequently, many of the students, faculty and community members attending the event found themselves forced to run a gauntlet of gibbering protestors who had pushed past police and university security guards into the lobby, where they set up a self-proclaimed "Palestinian checkpoint."
The protesters, says Petel, behaved "in a way not even befitting of animals. They broke windows, they threw chairs, they kicked a Holocaust survivor right square in the (testicles) on the way in (the Montreal Gazette said he was kicked in the ankles merely to spare him embarrassment).
"Rabbis and their wives were spat on and punched. Students were hit on the head with a flagpole. There were chants of "Kill the Zionists" in English, Arabic and French. And in the street some people heard "Itbach il Yehud" (Kill the Jews!). The police, presumably because of a dearth of English or Arabic-speakers, simply stood there doing nothing."
I asked Dr. Stephen Scheinberg, who heads the history department that granted my own BA, for his own take on what went down at Concordia. Although Scheinberg does not share Petel's Betarist political outlook, their accounts are similar.
"I felt I was staring fascism right in the face," Scheinberg recounted in an e-mail message. "I was in a crowd trying to go in and along with Prof. Norma Joseph and her husband, the rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese (Synagogue) and we were pushed and shoved. I did see Tom Hecht kicked in his vital parts. The demonstrators were allowed to block our access to the hall while the riot police stood by.
"The police failure," he adds, "was that they did not keep the demonstrators away from the building. They were supposed to demonstrate (two blocks away) but the barriers allowed them right around the building. I don't know why but I do know why they did not act. The university and police certainly didn't want tear-gassed students. Only when windows were broken were the police allowed in and used pepper spray to disperse the demonstrators.
"The demonstrators kept prating about Palestinian human rights, which I believe is a good topic for discussion, but they had no interest in rights of free assembly, free speech, or the meaning of a university. I suppose some of them come from Middle Eastern countries with no such traditions, and others are Arab Canadians who know but obviously hold such freedoms in contempt."
Informed that the university and the RCMP had cancelled his talk (the university later claimed that Bibi's security entourage had called it off), Netanyahu retreated to his hotel where, not without a measure of satisfaction , he denounced the protesters as "mad zealots" and "a microcosm of what exists in the Middle East.
" Rector Fred Lowy, who is Jewish, responded by declaring the events of the day yet another stain upon the long-suffering university. Promising to oust and prosecute the most violent offenders, Lowey declared a moratorium on further political assemblages of the kind that might spark yet another such fracas. This despite the fact that any number of Holocaust deniers, Israel-bashers and Palestinian figureheads had been granted quick and easy access to the university over the years, none of them ever similarly abused by Jewish students and community members.
Dr. Scheinberg subsequently joined Lowy in a meeting with community leaders, where he echoed Netanyahu's sentiments, arguing that the Jewish community "had scored a victory because the broad Canadian public would now understand what the demonstrators stood for and what we stood for." Nevertheless, Scheinberg took umbrage with Lowy's ban on further Mideast-oriented activity, agreeing with B'nai Brith Canada's position that Lowy had inadvertently penalized the victims for the acts of the perpetrators. "It is to my mind a terrible precedent for Canadian universities,"Scheinberg said.
The next day, on Tuesday, Netanyahu paid a courtesy call on Canadian Premier Jean Chretien at his Ottawa digs. Netanyahu subsequently told a luncheon crowd in the Canadian capital that Chretien, himself just fresh from a visit with US President George Bush at the Detroit/Windsor border, had castigated the university for "continual irresponsibility there." Never loathe to add his own two agoroth, Netanyahu opined that my venerable alma mater, home to Mordecai Richler and the rest of us Jewish street urchins unable to gain entry to McGill, had been "misaptly named."
As one of the many who remain partial to the university's distinctive, if no less goyische, name before 1974 (when Sir George Williams University merged with Loyola University further west on Montreal Island) I am forced to admit, if perhaps for the first time, that our cigar smoke and brim fire belching ex-PM-at-large is almost certainly right in this regard. Why, however, is a matter he left unresolved. Lacking the kind of endowments that typically swell the flush coffers of nearby McGill, Concordia has funded its latest expansion in part by actively recruiting foreign students, many of them from the Islamic world.
Canadian immigration policy remains sufficiently indiscriminate that students from Third World countries may enter the country and remain even if registered for a single Mickey Mouse course. Additionally, the school has attracted a number of students whose parents enjoy diplomatic immunity, and who are not reticent to use it as a shield for the kind of political activism that sometimes skates past the red line into the realm of criminality.
Those Canadian universities that must contend with ever-declining government support, meanwhile, demur from the task of imbuing foreign students with respect for democratic values and academic freedom and integrity. To do so would earn the wrath and denunciation of those Canadian progressives inclined to view such minimal gate-keeping as racist, colonialist or unabashedly imperialist, progressives who, universities being what they are, often occupy faculty positions. Whether generated in-house or out, these are not appellations that any university seeking to maintain its good, that is to say, solvent, name abroad would wish to endure.
And finally, we are left to contend with an aging Jewish community that, after decades awash in the often-caustic exigencies of eking out a minority niche in French Quebec, may have grown too depleted - dare we even say meek and tooth-worn - to retake the high ground. This is certainly mirrored at Concordia, where of a student body of some 25,000 and a Moslem and Arab contingent numbering between 1,500 and 2,000, fewer than a thousand Jewish students remain. Once a refuge and a bastion for Jewish Montrealers, today good old Sir George is a school most now avoid with the aplomb of people about to have their thumbnails snatched out. With respect to Dr. Scheinberg, who most commendably hopes the university will "lay down the law in clear terms, along with arrests, expulsions and suspensions," being kicked in the yarblockos and then sent to my room for a time-out is not my idea of a moral victory. It is, however, decidedly Canadian.