Elder Advice never comments on events as they are happening, and rarely in their immediate aftermath. His preference is always to view them in the cold light of another day. When the facts are known and any opinion can be called “considered”. Worth both holding and sharing.
It has been 30 days. Which should be enough. Enough time for everyone to have separated what should be universal condemnation of the terrorist attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 from any position they have on either the political and social issues that have plagued the Middle East for decades and the plight of ordinary Gazans resulting from Hamas’ criminal use of them as human shields. But the indecent and ignorant invective continues. For Elder Advice however, it has been the conduct of educational institutions, and the administrations, faculties and students that inhabit them, that is the most concerning. The most galling. And, on reflection, the most predictable.
Before the bodies of Jews burned alive in their homes were cold, 74 law students at the ridiculously renamed “Toronto Metropolitan University” proved themselves unfit to be lawyers by signing an online letter to the school expressing their “unequivocal support” for Palestinians, requiring that the school “name and confront Israel’s colonial violence”, asserting that “Israel is not a country,” and demanding “an end to the entire system of settler colonialism that has strangled Palestine for the last century.”
As grandmothers not butchered in their beds were being abducted, at Queen’s University, student clubs that purport to support “Palestine solidarity” decided to lament that “violence doesn’t occur in a vacuum” and demanded that Queen’s: “take a stand against Israeli occupation, colonialism, and apartheid.”
While decent people were still coming to grips with the slaughter of Israeli babies, the York University Federation of Students, York University Graduate Students’ Association and Glendon College Student Union issued a similar statement celebrating the Hamas genocide that left over 1,400 dead and 200 kidnapped as “a strong act of resistance” against “so-called Israel” and expressed support for "their ongoing fight against settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide."
Further from home, thirty student organizations at Harvard signed a statement, penned by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee, expressly blaming Israel for the massacre of its citizens on October 7. Ten of the organizations later reversed their position, disingenuously claiming they did not sufficiently review the statement before signing. Elder Advice may be wrong, but it appears we may have reached the point where Ivy League university students are unable to read.
A Harvard-Harris poll reports that 51 percent of Americans aged 18-24 see the Hamas’ murderous rampage as ”justified”. In Canada, Politico’s Pallas Data poll showed 47% of Canadians aged 18 to 34 do not agree that Canada should support Israel against Hamas. Not against Palestinians. Against Hamas.
It cannot be coincidental that people we have permitted to teach the young share those sentiments. On the morning of Oct. 7, while the Hamas rampage of murder, rape and kidnapping was still ongoing, a professor of African history at the University of Toronto, Safia Aidid, tweeted: “solidarity with the Palestinian people, today and everyday.” Uahikea Maile, a professor of Indigenous politics at the same institution, referred to the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians as “anticolonial resistance”. Wilfrid Laurier University social work professor Jessica Hutchison, who describes herself as a “white settler, abolition feminist,” whatever that may be, said Palestinians were “taking their land back” from “settler colonizers.” Zareena Grewal, an associate professor of American studies at Yale, posted: “Israeli [sic] is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #Free Palestine.” Almost 2,000 North American sociologists have signed a letter stating that Israel was committing “genocide”, that anything Hamas does is justified by the “context” and calling on their “colleagues to stand in solidarity with Palestinians and against settler colonialism, imperialism, and genocide.” Elder Advice could go on. And on.
University administrations, meanwhile, have been busily issuing milquetoast statements claiming the student organizations do not reflect the views of the institutions. Views which are carefully left vague or even unexpressed. And, of course, there is no end of chatter about supporting feelings and emotional truths. Concordia University said the following on October 8, when the only violence being perpetrated was the mass murder of Jews by Hamas: “Concordia wishes to express deep concern for all the members of our community who are affected by the violence in the Middle East.” Another of Elder Advice’s favourites is UBC’s: “We encourage anyone who is feeling distressed directly or indirectly by this violence to reach out to available supports. UBC is committed to providing a safe, inclusive environment, with a shared value for peaceful relations”.
These past 30 days, Elder Advice has waited patiently, but in vain, for word that educational institutions might actually require their students to become educated on the issues and make resources available to accomplish that end. At this point, if the exam question was: “How long was the Six-Day War?”, Elder Advice is reasonably certain most of them would get the answer wrong.
Then again, what do we expect? If we send impressionable youth to post secondary institutions that, instead of providing a feast of liberal education, feed them a simplistic diet of identity politics, victimhood, cancel culture, oversensitivity, tone policing, finger wagging, virtue signaling and self loathing, and tell them the world is a binary of oppressors and oppressed, and that power structures are based solely on race and gender, we should not be surprised that they cannot digest anything else.
And if a generation indoctrinated in this way ultimately finds its way into positions of authority and continues to cloak its ignorance and racism with the language of the movement - “colonial”, “settler”, “oppressors”- those who care about liberal democracy need to do more than despair.
Elder Advice has some fairly straightforward notions of education. The basic principle must be to acquire a fund of knowledge and the skills to navigate a complex world. In secondary school, the object must be to provide students with facts (so they can later reasonably claim to be informed) and, in their final year, the rudiments of critical thinking (so they can later avoid being misinformed). All students should be obliged to take a gap year following grade 12 , to broaden their horizons through work, travel or, ideally, both. Universities, for their part, must rediscover their proper role as places for freedom of thought, rather than freedom from it. Places where the word “YES” is always followed by the word “BUT”. Because it is now both obvious and ominous that the “BUT” has all but disappeared, particularly in what used to be liberal arts faculties.
Elder advice for parents? Demand your secondary school teach the basics. Think twice before you encourage your offspring to seek an liberal arts education at Canadian universities. And three times before you agree to contribute financially. It’s not the education you might remember.
Elder Advice for students? Put down the Klonopin and the Adderall. Take that enormous stick out of your ass. And listen up.
You cannot demand social justice if you do not believe that murder, rape and kidnapping deserves some.
You cannot say that silence is unacceptable violence out of one side of your mouth and that murder, rape and kidnapping is acceptable violence out of the other. Unless of course, you are two-faced. Which you are if you do.
You cannot, on the one hand, demand safe spaces from mere words that your delicate sensibilities find distasteful and, on the other hand, ignore the wanton murder of people in what should have been real safe spaces.
Your feelings on a subject about which you are both ill-informed and committed to being incurious, are of no value. And are particularly annoying when you express them publicly. At the top of your lungs.
Anyway, what are you thinking - if you are thinking at all - advocating in favour of a homicidal, homophobic, misogynist, theocratic, fascist state run by millionaire terrorists currently hiding out in Qatar? One thing is certain: you are not interested in a Free Palestine.
As for Elder Advice, if nothing else, the past four weeks have made him more understanding of those members of the animal kingdom who eat their young.
Since I am Jewish, my comments on the subject are usually discounted for bias, so I am particularly grateful Tim that you have stated your views on this subject. Israel is far from perfect and I personally detest Netanyahu. However, the invective towards Israel and, in some cases towards Jews who do not condemn that state as a "settler, colonialist, apartheid" entity, is unacceptable in a liberal democratic society, such as Canada.
Groups such as "Queers for Palestine" who rejoice at what Hamas did on October 7, should understand that they would not survive under Hamas,. Yahyah Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, has made it clear that the mission of Muslims is to kill Jews, as his interpretation of the Quran dictates.
Hamas is a "terrorist" group according to Canadian law, yet the CBC refuses to call it such, for fear of lacking balance. This is also the case with the BBC in the UK where a similar law exists. Words do matter. Law students should know better than to label Israel as an apartheid state when Arab Israelis have sat on the Israeli Supreme Court and generally have much more rights than citizens in most Arab countries, especially in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, etc.
Anti-Jewish sentiment will come out particularly strongly at times like this, so it is important for our friends like you Tim, to speak out as you have done.
Thanks,
Dan
Well said, old friend. I am appalled at everything you have decried here, and especially at the emergence of so much overt antisemitism from places and people I would never have dreamed would take such a position. It’s hard to be hopeful about our future, given what we have apparently collectively become.