Sun rises over Burnaby

Editorial

Mazal tov to the Vancouver Sun. The daily broke the story last week that the atmosphere on the Simon Fraser University campus is hostile to Jewish students. Three years after the Jewish Western Bulletin began extensive and continuing coverage of the isolation and intimidation taking place on the Burnaby Mountain campus (and at other institutions), the city's newspaper of record noticed something emerging on a local campus.

It is this sort of disconnect between what Jewish Canadians know from personal experience and what we see in mainstream media that gives us a spine-tingling sense of two solitudes. The Jewish community has been mobilizing itself for several years now to combat what any Jewish student and anyone who pays attention can see is a worrying and increasingly desperate atmosphere on campuses across Canada. Led by the Jewish student group Hillel, the Jewish community has come to the aid of students who should rightly be in the library studying instead of rallying for their self-defence.

At the annual Kristallnacht memorial lecture Sunday night, Prof. David Zimmerman, a University of Victoria historian, outlined some of the shameful history of Canadian universities in failing to save the refugee scholars of Europe before the Second World War. Anti-Semitism was rife on Canadian campuses 60 years ago, he said, and urged his audience to consider the parallels for today.

While the current isolation of Jewish students has been dismissed by the larger community as a sad but understandable by-product of Israel's (insert wildly inflammatory adjective here) policies toward the Palestinians, the threat to academic freedom inherent in this situation goes far beyond the Jews.

The anti-Semitism on contemporary Canadian campuses has already infected the sanctity of free expression and academic inquiry. Concordia University has made a great leap foreward by belatedly promising to host former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, but other campuses in Canada have yet to adequately address the threats to free expression, despite concerted pleas from Jewish and other concerned students.

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