At the heart of a University of Toronto hiring scandal is an academic whose critique of Israeli settlements in Palestine is not what most people would call radical.At York University, a professor is facing death threats and a campaign to stop him from teaching human rights courses — a campaign that accuses him of anti-Semitism after he debated the definition of anti-Semitism.While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been a flashpoint on campuses across Canada, legal experts and advocacy groups are raising concerns that these recent incidents suggest an escalation of silencing even moderate critiques of Israel, and not just in the halls of academia, but in the media, the political sphere and social interactions.
Are the two academics pictured here "moderate critics" of Israel?
The professor on the left, York University Law Professor Faisal Bhabha, said during a June 10 webcast that Zionism is just “Jewish supremacy.” He later said “I am equating Zionism with white supremacy” and then added for good measure that it was possible that Israel is “exaggerating the Holocaust.”
This isn't moderate criticism. This is demonizing Israel and Jewish Zionists as being bigots, and his suggestion that Israel exaggerates the Holocaust is pure antisemitism.
The professor on the right, Dr. Valentina Azarova, is also not merely a "critic" of Israel. She is emphatically against the existence of a Jewish state.
These "one staters" never call for India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to become one state to ensure equal rights. They never propose nations in the Balkans of different ethnicities to merge together. Only the Jewish State is expected to be destroyed in the name of equal rights - with no regard to the human rights of Jews who would, in their world, inevitably become a minority in a majority hostile Palestinian Arab nation.
It is possible to criticize Israel without calling it an apartheid state, or a Nazi state, or calling for its destruction. No one demands Syria's destruction, or China's.
No one is calling actual legitimate criticism antisemitism. But invariably, the people who complain that they are being "silenced" by accusations of antisemitism are proven to have a crazed obsession with insisting that Israel follow rules that they do not demand of any other nation.
That's double standards, and that is antisemitism.