By David Plotkin

Classes have recently come to an end in Montreal. Instead of burying their heads in final exams and papers, anti-Israel students have been bullying their way into the news.

On March 28^th, the editorial board of The McGill Daily published a piece demanding that McGill cut its strong ties with Hebrew University. The joint partnership involves collaboration in epigenetics, human rights law, international business, and food safety and water management. According to the editorial, “Through this program McGill is effectively supporting the legal apparatus that has allowed the state of Israel to systematically discriminate against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.” Hasbara Fellow and Prince Arthur Herald columnist Zach Paikin quickly responded with an article of his own, titled “Radical Leftism from the McGill Daily Board” in which he lamented how “rather depressing” it is “that the editorial board of the Daily has nothing better to do with its time than to delegitimize and demonize the state of Israel.”

In response to the calls to cut ties, Principal and Vice-Chancellor Heather Munroe-Blum published her own piece in the Daily, titled “A Rejection of Cowardice,” in which she took a strong, principled stand against the demands of the editorial board. “The suggestion that McGill cease to engage with another bona fide university – any bona fide university – because of political controversy in that university’s geo-political environment, goes against everything McGill stands for. It suggests a cowardice that I, as Principal of this great university, categorically reject.” That day, I was proud to call myself a McGill student.

On March 30^th, a few blocks away at the Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Professor Emannuel Navon, an International Relations Lecturer at Tel-Aviv University, was heckled and shouted down by protesters as he attempted to give a lecture on “the geopolitics of energy,” on the invitation of the department of political science. In a blog posting on the Jerusalem Post website, Navon described the events as follows:

“Although I was invited to give a talk on a non-controversial issue, what made my presence controversial is that I am Israeli […]  After I finished my talk, the ‘questions’ from the audience were mostly hysterical (and long) tirades on the ‘crimes of Zionism.’ One student accused me of being a ‘war criminal’ (while others) screamed out ‘Zionists, Murderers!’ with loudspeakers.” [See video HERE]

It is events such as these which remind us how valuable the Heather Munroe-Blum’s and Emmanuel Navon’s are to standing up to campus cowardice. Israel cannot be held to a double standard in the court of leftist public opinion. As concluded by Navon, “These people know that their freedom is at stake. They realize that the intellectual terrorism, irrationality and hypocrisy that characterize the treatment of Israel in the West are ultimately a threat to the West itself.”