Taking back the campus

Last week, I wrote about the "new anti-Semitism" disguised as anti-Zionism, and identified the university campus as ground zero for the dissemination of Israel-hatred into the general culture. To-day's column focuses on strategies pro-Israel students are adopting to deal with the problem.

The coming milestone of Israel's 60th anniversary next spring is ratcheting up anti-Zionist organizations' zeal for greater impact during the 2007-08 academic year. Like most such initiatives -- Israeli Apartheid Week is an American import -- their new projects will soon make their way to Canadian campuses.

Look for an "Apartheid Bus Tour," featuring a Palestinian Arab, an Israeli Jew and a South African black, who will travel between campuses, teaching students that Israel is morally and socially equivalent to South Africa's formerly racist regime. There will also be reinvigorated divestment drives, led or supported by faculty, pressuring universities to pull funds from Israel, such as the "Hang Up on Motorola" drive to discourage Motorola from providing services to the Israeli military.

Look too for renewed vigour among far-left professors using their classrooms as anti-Israel indoctrination mills, as well as growing intimidation of Jewish students defending Israel in extra-curricular events, where they are routinely swarmed and physically threatened by mobs of anti-Semitic activists. (There was one such tense incident at anti-Zionist hotbed York University last week when Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus came to speak.)

These hate merchants punch above their weight because they are not themselves, nor do they represent, ordinary students. Rather they are full-time ideological missionaries who colonize student unions to further their toxic cause. Indeed, a timely Compas study released last week, based on a survey of 900 students at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto, confirms that real students on both campuses reject the idea of the Israel boycott now being promoted by some members of Ryerson's active anti-Zionist student union by a definitive margin of 9:1.

Theoretically, that's good news, but in reality no solace to Jewish students constantly subjected to in-your-face hostility at any sign of Israel sympathy. For many years Jewish students naively believed that earnest goodwill in accommodating the "opinions" of others was the civil and appropriate response to the demonizing process. Until recently, pro-Israel Jewish students (and others) have been slow to take the offensive against aggressive, and often illicit, but winked-at forms of campus activism.

That has changed. Campus Zionists are becoming pro-active: A number of groups have emerged over the past few years. Hasbara, for example, an Israel-sponsored leadership training program, has shown canniness and courage at York University in pushing back against intimidation, last week holding their own against a "pack of wolves," as one Israel defender described a mob surrounding his anti-Ahmadinejad display table.

I'm personally following with great interest a pilot program offered to university and cegep students here in Montreal: Student Israel Advocacy Seminars (SIAS), sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research. The endeavour correctly identifies the battle against Israel hate as the front line in combatting the greater malaise of our universities' alarming decline in moral and intellectual integrity.

SIAS demands of its handpicked students a commitment to an in-depth education in global anti-Semitism. The dozen young men and women now embarked on SIAS must plough through a substantial reading list as they participate in a year-long series of seminars led by specialists. SIAS' premise is that students can only defend Israel and counter propaganda if they understand history, Middle Eastern politics, and Holocaust revisionism.

Israel's enemies know that campuses are not "ivory towers," but crucial sites of ideological contestation and ideal incubators for radical anti-Western causes. SIAS and other Israel defence groups aim to take back the campuses: not for Israel's sake alone, but for the sake of all students' right to defend any legitimate idea -- that includes Zionism -- without fear of harassment. Find out more about SIAS at http://www.isranet.org.