Israel Apartheid Week: A Tale of Two Brothers

The SC of Canada just held that:

    – a prohibition on language that is “likely to expose” those groups to hatred is legal. For the most part, the Court upheld the province’s hate-speech legislation, maintaining that it “appropriately balances the fundamental values underlying freedom of expression with competing Charter rights and other values essential to a free and democratic society, in this case a commitment to equality and respect for group identity and the inherent dignity owed to all human beings.”

Does this mean that Jews will be accorded “equality and respect for group identity and the inherent dignity owed to all human beings”. If so Israel Apartheid Week should be shut down and held to be illegal. Don’t hold your breath. Ted Belman

By David Solway, FPM

Driving past the University of Toronto recently, I noticed a lone protestor on the perimeter of the campus carrying a sign objecting to Israel Apartheid Week. I was reminded that the University of Toronto was the first academic institution to host and promote the scandal of this event. Beginning in 2004 under the interim presidency of Frank Iacobucci, who does not seem to have realized the ignominy he had countenanced, the contagion spread to many other academic cesspools across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. The University of Toronto, however, is the revered patriarch of the movement. Iacobucci was succeeded in November 2005 by the current president, David Naylor, under whose administration this academic canard has persisted into the present moment—the festival of anti-Semitic hatred and anti-Zionist calumny will unfurl the Palestinian flag and welcome a contingent of bigoted speakers on March 4.

When questioned by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for HolocaustStudies about his university’s compliance with so evidently corrupt and defamatory a spectacle, Naylor declared that “We do, in fact, recognize that the term Israeli Apartheid is upsetting to many people, [but] we also recognize that, in every society, universities have a unique role to provide a safe venue for highly charged discourse.” Naylor’s recognition that the term is “upsetting” is entirely frivolous, unbefitting a university president. The fact is that the term is totally false—a given that appears to have escaped Naylor’s attention rather conveniently, thus sparing him the moral duty to confront so spurious a conviction. Further, universities are not always—or even primarily—known for furnishing such “safe venues,” especially when the speakers are unpopular conservative figures.

A few typical episodes will suffice to corroborate the point. A riot incited by pro-Palestinian activists erupted when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to speak at Concordia University in Montreal, causing extensive damage and injury and forcing cancelation of the event. Jewish students at York University in Toronto required police protection when threatened by a swarm of Muslim students. Ann Coulter’s talk at the University of Ottawa was shut down by a horde of howling students and a craven administration. Author Warren Farrell’s address on behalf of a men’s rights organization, the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE), held at Naylor’s own university, proceeded amidst obscene verbal abuse and palpable menace while police stood idly around. Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, was disrupted and shouted down by unruly Muslim and left-wing students at the University of California at Irvine. David Horowitz, founder of the Freedom Center, is accompanied by a bodyguard when he lectures at American universities.  The beat—and the beating—goes on.

The disingenuousness of Naylor’s claim regarding “every society” is revealed if we glance at the Arab world, where no “safe venue” is remotely in evidence. Consider inviting a politically controversial or Jewish speaker to Al-Azhar University in Cairo, or Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca, or the Islamic University of Lebanon where the Academy’s  “unique role to provide a safe venue for highly charged discourse” is about as viable as, well, a Canadian or American university president showing a sliver of moral courage or cerebral acuity.

One does not like to cast disparaging phrases and sentiments around indiscriminately, but I cannot refrain from viewing David Naylor (no differently from his likeminded peers, as it should go without saying) as a disgrace to his calling. Nor can I help speculating that the refusal to intervene, or what amounts to the de facto advocacy we remark in the U of T president, runs in the family. His brother, R.T. Naylor, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, is the former director of the piquantly named American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the author of many tendentious books on political and economic subjects. The Naylors’ partiality to Islamic causes may be fractionally explained by a Middle Eastern genealogy, as M.J. Stone implies in a favorable review of the Montreal Naylor’s work in the pro-Nazi Vanguard News Network Forum, in which he does not fail to mention the Naylor “family roots in Lebanon.”

R. T. Naylor intrigues me not least because we shared a publisher for a time, McGill-Queen’s University Press, for which I no longer write. Naylor, I must confess, is one of the most turgid and clottingly indigestible writers I have ever suffered reading, but one book in particular merits investigating for the kind of anti-American, anti-Israeli, pro-Muslim bafflegab littering the Left/Islamic scene today, an illustration of what David Horowitz has aptly called “the unholy alliance” busy at its insidious work. I refer to Naylor’s Satanic Purses, a screed filled with reams of presumably hard economic data arguing that the war on terror is largely deceptive and feeds off a hoodwinked public in order to advance various entrenched interests. The atrocious titular pun on Salman Rushdie’s major novel, The Satanic Verses, is enough to extradite the author’s intellectual repute. Not only does the title betoken an adolescent attempt to seem clever and with-it, but ironically also recalls the fatwa on Rushdie issuing from the very Islamic world that Naylor extols and justifies.

Once inured to the battery of putative “information,” it requires only a few pages for the reader to recognize that the writing is vitiated by a sophomoric snideness, operating in the vein of pseudo-mockery and alluding tongue-in-cheek, to take just a couple of examples, to the presumed “regime of brooding Islamic fanatics” in Sudan or the “gang of misanthropic miscreants” in Taliban Afghanistan. These groups are meant to be understood as the inventions of unscrupulous neoconservative agents like George W. Bush and his Republican backers or of the “machinations of the pro-Israel lobby.” It is the latter, we are given to understand, who comprise the brooding fanatics and misanthropic miscreants.

But when Naylor goes on to define al-Qaeda as “largely a law-enforcement fable akin to the Mafia myth,” we know we are witnessing a slick polemical shell game, for the Mafia is no myth and its global reach has been amply documented. For Naylor, the United States is the real Evil Empire, Israel and its American-Jewish supporters are the devil’s deputies, Hamas is a world-class charity, the Oslo Accords were sabotaged by the Israelis, radical Islam is basically innocent and is only reacting to “Western meddling in the Islamic world,” jihad does not mean Holy War (shades of John Brennan), the American government seeks “to demonize Muslims worldwide,” (utter nonsense under Obama, but also under Bush), the international banking infrastructure is “a global espionage apparatus,” and so on ad vomitatum.

When, in an interview with Counterpunch, Naylor speaks of Jewish fundamentalist “charities” sponsoring terrorist groups and of Christian fundamentalist proselytizing which “may well provoke further acts of terrorism,” asserts that Israel is engaged in a “policy of mass murder,” torture and theft, and contends that the main resource of Middle Eastern countries “is not oil [but] their émigré population, well-educated and for the most part anxious to go home,” there can be little doubt that we are observing a polemical farce of histrionic proportions, turning reality upside-down, accusing a straw man of the crimes and transgressions committed by one’s own fraternal constituency, and whitewashing a frankly violent, parasitic and Caliphate-aspiring Islamic world.

As Stone put it in the above-cited puff job, “A culmination of thirty years’ work as a historian, criminologist and expert in international political economy, Naylor described Satanic Purses as counterpoint to post 9/11 propaganda. ‘It brings together my expertise in finance, politics, and both Middle Eastern and North American history as it relates to the deeply embedded prejudices against Muslims and Arabs that have existed in the West since the time of the crusades.’” Shades of the increasingly discredited Edward Said. Naylor then goes to bat for Hamas and Hezbollah, describing both terrorist organizations, according to Stone, as “having important social and humanitarian mandates” and being compelled to react “to Israeli atrocities.”

Candidly speaking, it isn’t far from one Naylor’s approval of Hamas and Hezbollah and condemnation of (fictive) Israeli iniquities to another Naylor’s seemingly serene acquiescence in eight years’ worth, now, of Israel Apartheid Week hate fests on the campus he oversees. There is nothing unique about the brothers’ species of advocacy, whether passive like the Toronto Naylor’s or aggressive like the Montreal Naylor’s. Together they offer a paradigm for the migration and sedimenting of radical ideas, via a composite passive-aggressive mentality indicated by a sibling dynamic of permission and attack. There is a symbiotic relation in play here, as one approach lends institutional respectability to the hypothetical scholarship of the other—and vice versa.

The brothers are therefore influential in different but kindred fashions, one through the latent concession of misconstrued authority and the other through the manifest thrust of false argumentation. Moreover, it clearly signals how academic elitism and ostensible intellectual sophistication have succeeded in skewing the genuine terms of debate and have reconditioned violent aggressors as plaintive belligerents. There is not much to choose between wrong thinking and abject pusillanimity.

The placard borne by the lone protestor on the University of Toronto campus read: Israeli Jihad Apartheid Week. No balls to flog. The second statement may be a trifle bizarre and ambiguous, but it is more easily understandable than the pliant and accommodationist positions adopted by the representative Naylors.

March 3, 2013 | 23 Comments »

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23 Comments / 23 Comments

  1. Interesting-comments are unresponsive to Solway’s article.

    Solway has gone long and deep in his erudite analysis as to what makes University of Toronto President David Naylor tick when it comes to his disingenuous and besides the point defence for U of T to host IAW.

    In so doing, Solway devotes considerable attention to David Naylor’s brother, R.T. Naylor, a Montreal academic, a prolific demonizer of Israel and apologist for Jihadism, Islamism and for all that is wrong with Islam by either saying Islam is not wrong to do what it does and if what it does is injurious to the West, it is the West’s fault because the Muslim world has had to defend itself against the West ever since the Crusades.

    Solway throws in for good measure the Lebanese ethnic background of the Naylor boys.

    The essential premise to Solway’s piece damning David Naylor by referencing his brother and David Naylor’s own disingenuity when it comes to IAW, is that the apple does not fall far from the tree.

  2. INCOMPREHENSIBLE, BAFFLING Israeli govt – Just as supporters of Israel try to fight back against the perception of the country as an apartheid state, the world media have screaming headlines about the latest ‘apartheid’ policy in Israel: Palestinians-only buses. ~~~ What were your authorities thinking? Or smoking? Or is this simply a confirmation of suspicions that the elite actually finds the worsening of Israel’s image abroad useful for their own plan to partition the country? Other clues:
    – They allow weekly riots to take place at the fence because they give the international media photo-ops of riot police confronting teens armed with slingshots (they could ban those demonstrations altogether).
    – They allow anti-Israel foreign NGOs to do as they please (they could deport them).
    – They chose confrontation on the Marmara even after having been advised there were terrorists on board (instead of availing themselves of technology to remotely disable the ship).
    Preventing potentially negative PR is a very basic notion for all governments. I don’t believe for a moment that your authorities are clueless as to the consequences of their policies or inaction.

  3. @ Canadian Otter:

    You are in Vancoover, I have relaties in Seattle,I love the city ,but prefere a dry climate. You have to be tough to live in a desert. Do you have Bigfoots. My favorite program, “Finding Bigfoot”. We don’t have Bigfeet here just ,”foots in the mouth”.

  4. A Big Thank You to Phoenix, John Train, Eugene Valberg and Honey Bee, for your very kind words. And thanks also for all the Thumbs Up.
    Regarding Israel’s trouble asserting its rights – During last Independence Day celebration a group of people stood at the Akko train station with a banner saying “Proud to be Israelis”. They were ordered to take it down because it might offend Arabs, although no Arab had complained about it. That anecdote sums up a general attitude among authorities and the elite they represent. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/155255
    Although Israel is supposed to be an independent and sovereign country, authorities act as if the country was: 1) always on probation; 2) subservient to other countries; 3) not truly belonging to Jews, but sort of taken away from Arabs, who therefore deserve special deference no matter what; 4) in need of cleansing of its Jewish nature so as to fit better in an anti-Semitic world (hence Jewish holy sites neglect and limited access and the surrender of Temple Mount). ~~~ Peaceful words of patriotism that are very normal everywhere else are considered dangerous and even offensive in Israel. ~~~ Attachment to Jewish land and heritage is equated with extremism. The frequent use of the word “extremism” in that context is very disturbing because it implies there’s something not only objectionable but downright illegal about it. ~~~ That’s the psychological part of it. Much of Israeli dismal PR, dysfunctional politics, dhimmi policies, and loss of land follow from there.

  5. @ Laura:

    Oh no they are not mental, they are dangerous,devious and cunning. And we make a huge mistake by thinking them crazy.

  6. The otter does indeed hit the nail on its head. Rare to see truth spoken so clearly. Who would the otter like to see PM of israel? How about Carolyn Glick? Is that so unfeasible? She would have to undergo some very good speech training in order to become something closer to an orator, both in terms of electability and changing things in israel. But her ability and willingness willingness to speak truth to power are already there.

  7. @ Canadian Otter .You have said it extremely well.

    I recommend that Ted Post your comment on his general site for all to view.

    Thank you.

  8. OVERALL IMPRESSIONS – They say that reality is all about perception, so here is one aspect of Israel’s brand as perceived abroad: There is NO FORWARD MOVEMENT. Experts will cite the good economy, amazing technological advances, social tolerance… But supporters abroad perceive Israel as always losing, retreating, explaining and apologizing, on the defensive, always helplessly victimized. ~~~ If Israel was a sports team, it would have no fans, no matter how fair it played. It would be perceived as always losing without trying hard enough to win. ~~~ Supporters find it difficult to support your right to Judea/Samaria when there is no credible and effective organized popular movement in Israel to keep that land. And citizens vote for pro-partition political parties anyway. ~~~ When the PM and officials make public statements, they endorse Two States, which implies an admission of occupation. ~~~ In Israel – the most diplomatically and ideologically besieged country in the world – the only well-organized activism is that of your enemies, who have taken giant strides while the govt explains and apologizes, appeases terrorists, and files pointless grievances at the UN. ~~~ Denouncing injustice is not enough. There must be a strong, independent and pro-active movement in Israel to turn the tables on your enemies. Your enemies reek of genocide, corruption and perversion – all of them, Muslim, Christian, seculars, the West and the “emerging democracies”, the whole lot. Use that ammunition and your legal rights under international law. Take the initiative away from your attackers.