Juno News - May 04, 2024


Anti-Israel encampments take over Canadian universities

Topics
anti-Israel encampments at McGill
Mentioned
McGill Barbara Kay Andrew Lawton Show
Trudeau blames EVERYBDOY except himself for housing crisis Liberals keep pushing for drug decriminalization, despite failure in B.C.

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

160.23

Word count

1,859

Sentence count

131

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Pro-Israel protesters have taken over the campus of McGill University in Montreal and are demanding that the university divest its endowment funds from anything connected to Israel, and that it severs ties as a school with Israeli enterprise. And we ve also heard reports of anti-Semitic rhetoric and statements, and harassment of students for no other reason than their Jewish identity.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I want to shift gears to an entirely different topic.
00:00:12.360 You may have seen in Montreal that the very worst of American academia has been imported to Canada 0.97
00:00:19.220 in the sense that there is now an encampment at McGill University in Montreal
00:00:24.040 that is inhabited and occupied by these anti-Israel protesters that are making all sorts of demands,
00:00:31.580 among others, that the university divests its endowment funds from anything connected to Israel,
00:00:36.800 that it severs ties as a school with Israeli enterprise.
00:00:40.400 And we've also heard reports of very anti-Semitic rhetoric and statements,
00:00:44.740 students being harassed for no other reason than their Jewish identity
00:00:49.060 and in the values that a lot of Jews, most Jews have, of supporting the state of Israel's right to exist.
00:00:57.220 And what was fascinating about this is that McGill has kind of just said,
00:01:00.620 oh, well, oh, I don't know, aw shucks.
00:01:02.520 They've given very little in the way of any sort of pushback,
00:01:06.780 as we have an encampment that is now entrenching itself and will soon, I suspect, balloon to other campuses.
00:01:13.240 Barbara Kay is a columnist with the National Post and the Epoch Times.
00:01:16.420 I actually got to see her over the weekend briefly at the Civitas Conference.
00:01:20.860 Barbara, always lovely to see you.
00:01:22.380 Thanks so much for coming on today.
00:01:24.080 A pleasure.
00:01:24.700 A pleasure, Andrew.
00:01:26.040 Oh, you're muted there.
00:01:28.120 Oh, perfect.
00:01:28.640 I got your audio now.
00:01:30.020 Let me ask you, Barbara, first off about whether you're surprised by this.
00:01:33.380 I mean, you've lived in Montreal for, I don't know about all your life,
00:01:36.620 but certainly for many years, and you've seen what's happened since October 7th.
00:01:40.460 Was this unexpected at McGill?
00:01:42.820 No, not at all, because this is kind of like a meme right now.
00:01:48.480 In fact, I can't believe there would be a university campus anywhere in North America
00:01:53.640 that would consider itself respectable if it didn't have something like this going on
00:01:58.860 in an encampment, because that's what is done to show what a great social activist you are.
00:02:04.640 And especially, it would be especially anticipated at universities where there's a large Jewish presence
00:02:12.500 as there is at McGill.
00:02:13.600 So, no, it doesn't surprise me at all.
00:02:16.260 How about McGill's response to this?
00:02:18.840 Because they've basically, in a lot of ways, it looks like they've washed their hands of it.
00:02:23.340 And we had students that were sent out through the Student Association,
00:02:27.260 which is supposed to be, I don't know, advocating on things like tuition fees.
00:02:30.860 Instead, send out students the death toll in Gaza, which, based on very, very sketchy numbers
00:02:37.720 from the Gazan Health Authority, there we go, just basically pinning the deaths of 31,000 people on Israel.
00:02:44.400 And this is the type of rhetoric that students at McGill are being bombarded with.
00:02:50.200 Well, you're right.
00:02:52.300 They're not specific about who's dying or how many.
00:02:56.380 It might be that 30,000 have been killed.
00:02:59.100 But what they don't specify is that, according to Israel, 13,000 of them have been terrorists.
00:03:05.640 And Hamas has not denied that. 1.00
00:03:07.180 So, the ratio of those killed to civilians killed to militants is actually, in urban warfare of this kind, quite low.
00:03:16.980 But, you know, they'll tell you all kinds of things because they get their information from sources that are not reliable.
00:03:24.480 They are determined to make their case for support against Israel. 0.71
00:03:30.080 That's their main concern is to call Israel out as an evil nation. 0.91
00:03:34.240 And that's the message.
00:03:36.040 And they're delighted to be active like this on campus.
00:03:40.700 This is what students do.
00:03:42.340 You may remember in 1968, there were similar demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
00:03:47.080 And they were also taking over the campuses.
00:03:50.280 In fact, that was our first experience of students actually taking over campuses
00:03:54.700 and the administration losing control of what was happening on their own campuses.
00:04:01.360 Of course, in those days, the message was peace and love.
00:04:04.920 And now it's intifada and hate.
00:04:07.700 So, that's changed.
00:04:09.280 But I did expect it.
00:04:11.440 And I agree with you that the administration is acting in a very namby-pamby way because they're not quite sure what to do.
00:04:17.720 And they're afraid to take muscular action as is required.
00:04:21.600 Well, and one of the things that, again, you always end up when you're talking about any display of this nature with this whataboutism.
00:04:28.600 And, you know, a lot of people that had no issue with the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa are saying they want police to come in and crack skulls here.
00:04:35.380 And the flip side, people that wanted police to crack skulls in Ottawa with the Freedom Convoy are saying,
00:04:39.860 Oh, no, no, no, no, this is the right to protest.
00:04:41.560 So, I think there's hypocrisy all around.
00:04:43.780 But the one point I'll stress here is that universities have a demonstrable track record of treating different demonstrations differently.
00:04:50.140 Like, I bet if the McGill University Pro-Life Society were to stage a sin, they would be gone in no time.
00:04:57.720 And here we have an encampment of this nature.
00:05:00.780 It's very anti-Israel, bordering on, depending on the rhetoric of the individual person, anti-Semitic.
00:05:05.980 And McGill is saying, well, we'd like to come up with a resolution.
00:05:08.520 We'll try to talk.
00:05:09.300 We'll try to engage.
00:05:10.460 And that's not a group that they afford to other, or a right they afford to other groups.
00:05:14.120 No, they're afraid of this group.
00:05:15.720 They're not afraid to act, as you say, with politically incorrect groups, such as pro-lifers.
00:05:22.340 And they certainly wouldn't tolerate for one second, you know, people that are saying that we're anti-immigration or in any way, in any way, asserting themselves as white Canadians or anything like that.
00:05:37.900 There's a set menu for who is considered racialized and who's considered the victim, and the Palestinians are one of them. 1.00
00:05:45.920 And it does not occur to them that these expressions of hatred for Jews, because Jews are not on the victim list, to say, you know, for this one time, we have to agree the numbers of anti-Semitic incidents and hate incidents are so high.
00:06:06.440 I think we're going to just have to include this group of Jews on our campus as amongst the racialized, and we can't let this continue to happen. 1.00
00:06:16.160 In the United States, we have seen states, Florida and Texas, where the governors have said, no, this just isn't happening.
00:06:25.220 You private universities have codes of conduct.
00:06:28.800 You're not applying them.
00:06:30.000 And by the way, of course, McGill has a code of conduct, just like all the other universities.
00:06:34.400 They are not applying their code of conduct.
00:06:37.460 Their code of conduct does not allow for harassment on the basis of nationality or affiliation of any kind with, I mean, they may not like Zionism. 0.66
00:06:48.860 That's too bad for Jews, for most Jews.
00:06:52.380 I think you froze there for a moment, or at least it did on, oh, I got you back now.
00:06:55.960 Sorry, I might be on my end here.
00:06:57.540 This is the glory of doing things live.
00:06:59.200 But I'll ask you about the, well, okay, let me take a step back here.
00:07:04.820 If we talk about what's led us to this point, there have been people sounding the alarm about the increasing rhetoric, the ratcheting up of language.
00:07:13.760 You know, at first it was, not at first, but early on we saw people protesting businesses, especially in Toronto, that happened to have a peripheral connection to Israel or no connection at all.
00:07:23.400 It was just connected to someone who was Jewish.
00:07:25.760 And then you go to this protest against McGill.
00:07:27.820 Of all the people complicit in what Israel is doing, if you want to believe that Israel is in the wrong here, I put McGill University very low on that list.
00:07:36.520 So the idea of targeting your ire at McGill when you have an issue with Israel and the IDF and the Mossad and all of that is absurd.
00:07:45.320 And even if they got what they want or what they say they want, and McGill were to divest its funds from Israel, which is not even handled by the university.
00:07:52.360 They have an external fund there and sever ties with Israeli academics.
00:07:56.820 You're changing nothing.
00:07:58.560 So that's the issue is that it's not even like it's an effective protest because their issue, they claim, is with Israel.
00:08:04.460 And I think when you look at it through that lens, it becomes apparent their issue isn't with Israel.
00:08:09.380 Their issue is much broader than that.
00:08:11.560 I think it is broader, of course.
00:08:13.040 It's very anti-Western as well as anti-Israel.
00:08:17.180 And they know that they're probably not going to change the boycott.
00:08:21.680 All their efforts at boycotts of Israel have failed because it's not in their gift to tell the university where to place their funds.
00:08:30.460 And they know that.
00:08:31.580 But they are going after hearts and minds.
00:08:34.200 They have been very successful in that endeavor.
00:08:37.060 And the more noise they make on the campuses and it's a central place, it lends itself to, you know, big open spaces to encamp.
00:08:46.840 The universities could end this very quickly by taking the ringleaders and expelling them.
00:08:53.420 That's what they have done in Florida and in Texas.
00:08:56.880 And it's been very effective.
00:08:58.220 That's the end of the protest.
00:08:59.420 They could expel 100 students or suspend 100 students.
00:09:04.960 They could end this very easily.
00:09:07.140 So these students are activating either knowingly or unknowingly for a revolution.
00:09:13.980 And to do that, they have to change what's acceptable to what is unacceptable. 0.82
00:09:20.820 They have to make, turn Jews into pariahs. 1.00
00:09:24.320 We saw that at Columbia, that Jews were advised to go home.
00:09:27.460 They weren't safe.
00:09:28.520 They caused the university to have to go on to online classes.
00:09:32.540 This is a big victory for them because they are showing a lot of muscle.
00:09:38.100 And, you know, people get the message.
00:09:42.200 We had better start appeasing these people or things could get violent and out of control.
00:09:49.100 I think, to me, it's very obvious what is happening.
00:09:54.080 And the only way to combat it is very swiftly and to enforce your own codes of conduct.
00:10:00.300 And at a certain stage, it's easy to do.
00:10:03.000 And later on, it isn't so easy to do.
00:10:05.600 Why they have chosen the path of appeasement.
00:10:08.320 Perhaps it's because the message from the top from our prime minister is non-messaging and he doesn't seem to care about the rampant anti-Semitism that finds its ground zero at the universities but spreads with the demonstrations all through society.
00:10:26.300 It creates a mood.
00:10:27.760 It creates a mood.
00:10:28.660 It creates a feeling that, well, maybe, you know, if they're that angry, maybe they're right.
00:10:33.560 And it does change hearts and minds.
00:10:36.140 So they are winning the propaganda war with these tactics.
00:10:40.460 And so I'm sorry to see it.
00:10:42.320 And I'm sorry that so many intelligent people in the administration are failing to do their duty.
00:10:47.680 Sad.
00:10:48.260 One of my, very sad indeed, one of my favorite Canadian columnists, Barbara Kaye.
00:10:52.320 Always a pleasure, Barbara.
00:10:53.540 Thank you, Andrew.
00:10:54.640 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:10:57.100 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.
00:11:06.140 Thank you.