The militant left has been working to change universities into indoctrination camps by employing a common playbook. When radicals want to speak, campus leftists feign persecution and sanctimoniously cloak themselves in the liberal ideals of free speech and open inquiry. When differing views come to the fore, activists routinely shout them down, claiming that opposing ideas make them feel unsafe. If that tactic fails, threats of violence often follow.
McGill University, which has experienced blockades, vandalism and a lengthy encampment that boasted of its plan to offer a terrorism summer camp for kids in the past year, saw this exact formula play out last month.
On Nov. 4, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, was slated to speak at McGill’s law school as part of a North American tour. After receiving a demand letter on behalf of Jewish groups who wanted Albanese’s event cancelled, and after the law school withdrew its support, McGill decided to allow her to speak at the school’s student union instead.
The Anti-Defamation League has compiled a lengthy catalogue of Albanese’s antisemitic bile over the past decade. Some of her greatest hits include stating in 2014 that the United States government was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby,” celebrating the 2014 removal of Hamas from the European Union’s terror group list (a decision subsequently overturned by the European Court of Justice) and comparing Israel to Nazi Germany on multiple occasions, as well as the Taliban.
One might think that Albanese’s bombast and disdain for the Jewish state isn’t the best antidote for a school that was rated the fourth worst college for Jews in North America in 2016 by The Algemeiner, a New York-based Jewish newspaper. That low ranking has shown to be prophetic multiple times over the past 13 months.
That said, a university is supposed to be a place where even the worst ideas can be aired so they can be washed away by free, open and respectful debate.
Albanese began her speech with the usual self-congratulatory notes about “the hurdles you had to go through in order to secure this event.” Before that, a student union representative whined that “it must be clarified that McGill fought to shamelessly shut down this event,” but “the student movement pushed back, and pushed back hard.”
During the course of Albanese’s speech, she lauded students for speaking “truth to power,” which presumably was intended to encourage further radicalism.
If Albanese set the bar for permissible speech, one could reasonably conclude that McGill was a very open place: basically anything that doesn’t rise to the level of illegality — outright threats, incitement or hate speech under the Criminal Code — ought to have a voice at McGill.
However, another speaker, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder who became an Israeli informant in 1997, was also making his way to McGill last month as part of a larger Canadian tour, and at least some of the people who cheered Albanese’s appearance didn’t think that was right.
Yousef, who converted to Christianity shortly after his defection from Hamas and moved to the U.S. 10 years later, has been a vocal critic of Islam and has bluntly stated that “Islam is not a religion of peace. It’s a religion of war.” On a visit to Israel, he once remarked, “I love Israel because I love democracy…. I am here to protest religion’s absolute control of people’s lives.”
One may disagree with Yousef’s public statements, but his role in preventing dozens of suicide bombers from murdering scores of Israeli civilians is beyond dispute. Moreover, if allegations of antisemitism weren’t disqualifying for Albanese, the same has to apply to allegations of Islamophobia that have been levelled against Yousef.
While Jewish groups attempted to use legal means to shut down Albanese’s speech, the opponents to Yousef’s speech recognized that if they wanted to get their way, they just needed to threaten violence, and both the university and the Montreal police would oblige them.
An email to the university community sent by McGill last week stated that an external group that had previously organized protests in the city had called for Yousef’s event to be “shut down,” which “in turn, incited waves of online anger, including a targeted death threat.”
Despite the university notifying the police, it concluded that “the risk to event participants and the McGill community remains unacceptably high.”
Yousef’s speech was moved online, and McGill simply threw in the towel, refusing to book any other extracurricular events until January.
On today’s campuses, all speech is free, but some speech is more free than others.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has been documenting this phenomenon at American universities for years, with elite institutions such as Harvard, Columbia and New York University being seen as consistently offering their students an “abysmal” climate for free speech.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms provided a similar ranking of Canadian universities until 2020. For several years running, McGill received mixed grades, but its student union consistently received an F.
One must feel sympathy for McGill’s president, Deep Saini, a botanist by training who surely never imagined that quelling protests would be his job. He has tried to maintain order with little support from the police, has been unable to keep a steady deluge of rabble-rousing outsiders off campus and has received no help from the courts or Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante.
After the previous weekend’s orgy of arson and vandalism, Plante refused to call the protests antisemitic, blamed the violence on “professional vandals,” and summed up by noting, “Antisemitism and Islamophobia are completely unacceptable. We need to protect both sides,” — as though the then-franchisee of the Second Cup at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital was gleefully making threats of a “final solution” to anybody but Jews.
At some point, McGill will have to set boundaries and enforce them. For if it continues to allow one side to engage in the most strident monologues while silencing opponents with mischief, violence and death threats, it will cease to be a university and will instead descend into the kind of cult-like echo chamber that people like Yousef know only too well.
National Post
Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer.