Anti-Israel Encampments Have No Place on Canadian University Campuses

By Conrad Black

Always the helpless and reflexive copycat of any remotely faddish trend of protest in the United States, Canadian campuses, weeks late, are scrambling to demonstrate their moral outrage at Israel’s temerity in taking countermeasures to Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of over a thousand of its citizens, many the most vulnerable—women and children and the elderly—in a premeditated and barbarous violation of an agreed-upon ceasefire.

Hamas is an organization that not only doesn’t accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, but is pledged to the expulsion, subjugation, or massacre of its Jewish population. It is not immediately obvious what appeal Hamas might have for Canadian university students and faculty in 2024. It is a totalitarian, internationally recognized terrorist organization that uses the population whose interests it is supposedly advancing as human shields while it hides like moles in a vast underground tunnel complex and takes refuge in hospitals, schools, and houses of worship to ensure that as many civilians are killed in collateral damage as possible. It is despised and detested by the Arab world and its sole line of support is from the medieval, murderous thugee of swaddled theocrats in Iran.

The Hamas attack last October killed approximately half as many people as the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, which was at least confined to military targets and personnel, and of the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Horrible as those attacks were, by their nature there was no ritualistic sadism and almost no children were involved. While those other episodes involved the death of more people, when the fact that the United States has approximately 40 times the population of Israel is considered, the comparative cost in Israeli lives has been almost 20 times as great.

Our terribly inadequate and often negligent Western media have largely bought into the propaganda of the so-called Palestine health ministry, a propaganda arm of Hamas, in citing casualty figures from the Israeli invasion of Gaza. In fact, when the deaths of authenticated terrorists, and the deaths of victims of the so-called friendly fire from Hamas itself, are subtracted from the authenticated totals of people killed in the Israeli action, it is clear that the Israeli Defense Forces are showing as much concern as is possible for civilian casualties, especially in urban guerrilla warfare where the adversary seeks the death of as many civilians as possible to make its propaganda case.

Rarely in the history of human conflict has there been a combatant less deserving of the sympathy of a civilized society than Hamas. The Palestinians and the Jews were effectively promised ultimate statehood by the British through their Foreign Minister Lord Balfour in 1917, when the area was still governed by Turkey. The Palestinians could have had a state any time they wished in the last 25 years if they had been prepared to acknowledge what the United Nations proclaimed in establishing the state of Israel in 1948—that it was a legitimate Jewish state. This was three years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps in which 6 million Jews, half the entire worldwide Jewish population, as well as 6 million non-Jews, perished in the most hideous mass murder in the history of the world.

Thus this belated eruption of misplaced righteousness on a number of our university campuses is espousing mass murder and applauding a ragtag of subterranean terrorists who are over-ambitiously aspiring to replicate the Satanic wickedness of the Nazis. The Nazis were least elected to the headship of the Germans, one of the world’s most distinguished civilizations, which the Nazis would then warp and apply to bring down upon much of Europe a long night of barbarism, made, in Mr. Churchill’s words, “more sinister and more protracted by the lights of perverted science.”

This is the infamy now being favoured by occupiers of sections of some of our universities. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that these agitators are systematically organized by extremist Islamist organizations, as there is increasing evidence supporting this conclusion in the United States where the campus unrest is well advanced—advancing, as always, in the absence of any backbone or moral authority from most of the university administrations. The more venerable among us will remember how the ostensible governing bodies of Harvard and Columbia capitulated to occupiers in 1968, while then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan cleared the main campus square at the University of California at Berkeley with national guardsmen with fixed bayonets, and caused no casualties. The head of San Francisco State University, Samuel Hayakawa, was elected U.S. Senator in recognition for standing his ground against unruly students.

At time of writing, the universities of Toronto and Ottawa have taken preemptive action in stating that they would not tolerate occupations, harassment of normal university activity, or recitations of racist or violent comments. This is particularly gratifying from the University of Toronto, which so conspicuously failed to support its most distinguished faculty member Professor Jordan Peterson, when he was being harassed by students demanding that he address them according to their own multi-gender vocabulary.

At McGill University in Montreal, however, the encampment tripled over the weekend, and the university is confident that at least half of the occupiers have nothing to do with the university. If McGill acts between now and the publication of this column to remove the protesters, I salute the McGill authorities respectfully. If they do not, the numbers of these interlopers will doubtless increase and the level and volume of the their senseless militancy will inevitably be a magnet to the sort of outcast riffraff that flocks to such festivals of obstructive stupidity.

The instigators are almost certainly some combination of extremist Muslim residents who are abusing our hospitality, and gullible students who are the intellectual victims of our atrophied and collectively self-hating professoriate. The member of Parliament for the constituency that includes the McGill campus is the federal immigration minister, Marc Miller, who has spoken purposefully about the McGill activities. But so far, all we have heard from Justin Trudeau is his customary equivocation between freedom of expression, the rights of Palestinians, and Israel’s right to self-defence, implicitly circumscribed though it is, topped out with his goofy incantation: “That’s not who we are.”

Assuredly not, but it is who they are, and it is time for those responsible to disperse and deter them. Our university administrators should emulate the Texan and Georgian universities which have cleared their campuses, and not the spineless and deracinated wimpocracies that seems to be atop most of the Ivy League. If we must imitate the Americans, let’s imitate the right Americans.

First published in the Epoch Times