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| Toronto District School Board Trustee Alexandra Lulka |
In
a recent scandal, Javier
Dávila, a teacher with the Toronto District
School Board was found to be distributing “resources to educators” that
included links to grossly antisemitic material, promotion of suicide bombings,
and glorification of terrorists.
School
Trustee Alexandra Lulka took to Twitter: “This is reprehensible,” she wrote. “These materials were provided by an employee from
the TDSB equity department, the very department that should be countering
antisemitism and violence, not fanning the flames.”
Lulka
shouldn’t have been surprised; equity, inclusion and diversity officers as a
group have long since been captured by the cult that worships at the altar of
antizionism, which is how antisemitism shows itself on the left.
The
Heritage Foundation recently reviewed the twitter output of 741 equity,
inclusion and diversity staff at American universities on the topic of Israel
and, for comparison, China.
China is a police state with a notoriously horrific
human rights record (see here
and here
for starters). In
contrast, Israel is a liberal democracy that aspires to protect everyone’s
human rights. It’s the only state in the region in which anyone at all enjoys
full civil rights, and Israelis enjoy their rights regardless of whether
they’re Muslim, Christian or Jew. It’s not perfect (what state is?), but Israel
does a fair job of providing a decent place for people to live.
Don’t take
my word for it; ask Palestinians. Recently, Shfa News, a Palestinian news
network, polled Palestinians in Jerusalem, asking if they’d prefer Israel to keep
control of the entire city or transfer control to the Palestinian Authority.
Only 3% wanted to end Israeli sovereignty. Asked if they would trade their
Israeli identity card for a Palestinian Authority ID, only .4% – 5 out of 1,200
– said yes. (See here.)
In contrast,
equity staff have a deranged view of Israel and an obsession with it. They
tweeted about Israel three times as often as about China, and while most of
their China tweets were positive (62%), their Israel tweets were overwhelmingly
negative (96%). And they weren’t criticisms of policy; they were accusations of
“apartheid,” “genocide,” “settler colonialism,” “ethnic cleansing,” … the usual
demonization meant to denounce Israel as illegitimate, as a place that should
not exist. (See here).
Such
accusations, wholly untethered to reality, are directed against only one state
in the world, which happens to be the world’s one Jewish state.
After an
investigation, Javier Dávila was returned to the
classroom, reportedly with no punishment or reprimand for distributing antisemitic
material.
 |
The above is trustee Lulka's statement posted on Twitter
and found by a supposed human rights expert to be
Islamophobic. Lulka also posted a link to a Toronto Sun article
that details some of the material Davila distributed (see here). |
Trustee
Lulka, though, was investigated by the School Board for her tweets objecting to
this material. Relying on “an Independent Investigator expert in Human Rights, Harassment
and Discrimination” (here), the school board’s Integrity
Commissioner recommended that Lulka be formally censured.
The Commissioner decided that the resources distributed by Dávila did include material that was antisemitic and the material did promote terrorism and praise terrorists, but Lulka’s denunciation
unintentionally raised the stereotype of Muslims or Palestinians as terrorists.
Lulka ought to have explicitly praised the non-antisemitic and
non-terrorism-endorsing material distributed by Dávila,
“as important,
positive pro-Palestinian discourse,” and her failure to endorse Dávila’s
material fed
into Islamophobic tropes, so said the expert.
Fortunately, the school board defeated this wonky
recommendation by a vote of 10 to 7.
I suspect that some of those seven who voted to
censure Lulka did so because they’re antizionist; meaning they will support
anything, no matter how vile or preposterous, as long as it’s directed against
Israel. But most of those seven trustees were likely just befuddled. A long,
bureaucratic, hard-to-follow report – a torture to read – gave a supposedly
expert opinion that Lulka’s tweets were somehow Islamophobic.
The problem is with the human rights “experts.”
One of the supposed experts who investigated Lulka was Morgan Sim. During
Hamas’s recent war against Israel, Sim liked a tweet that slandered Israel as
committing genocide against Palestinians – one of those charges with no basis
in reality but meant to paint Israel as an illegitimate state.
And she liked another tweet that praised: “the
Palestinian resistance (Hamas PFLP, Islamic Jihad)” for “primarily taget(ting)
Israeli military sites” with their “homemade rockets,” while slandering Israel
as targeting civilians.
Canada, along with the rest of the democratic
world, has designated Hamas, the PFLP, and Islamic Jihad as terrorist
organizations, precisely because of their long-standing policy of deliberately
targeting civilians. Yet this is the “Palestinian resistance” Sim apparently
likes.
 |
| Colonel Richard Kemp, formerly commander of British forces in Afghanistan, gives his professional opinion of the ethics of Israel's armed forces here. |
The “homemade rockets” fired by these groups, may
carry 150 kg (330 lbs) of explosives (see here), but can’t be aimed at
anything smaller than a town, and during Hamas’s several wars against Israel
have never hit a military target, not even by accident. They do, however,
frequently miss Israel altogether and explode within Gaza, where they often
kill or maim Palestinian civilians rather than the innocent Israelis they’re meant
to murder. (Regarding the 2021 conflict, see here; regarding the 2014
conflict, here.)
This is a strange activity for a human rights
expert to be liking. But maybe Morgan Sim hasn’t noticed what terrorists do. Or
maybe it’s the school she went to.
Sim was schooled in human rights at the University
of Toronto. There a Law School hiring committee recently voted unanimously to
hire Valentina Azarova to direct the school’s human rights department.
Azarova has worked for al-Haq, an organization
with close ties to the PFLP terrorist group. The director of al-Haq is a former
senior PFLP operative who has spent prison time for multiple terrorism offences.
Al-Haq spends much of its time promoting the BDS movement, which seeks to paint
Israel as an illegitimate, apartheid state that should not exist and encourages
people to shut Israelis out of our shared humanity. (See here.)
In
2018, credit card companies ceased processing funds for al-Haq because of its
ties to terrorism (see here) and Israel recently
designated al-Haq as a terrorist organization, meaning that it doesn’t only
have close ties to the PFLP but is directly controlled by it and channels
funding to it (see here).
Besides her work for al-Haq, Azarova’s career has
been devoted to a single-minded effort to attack Israel. This was presumably why the law school hiring committee wanted her,
because really, she has nothing else to offer. {For a detailed assessment of Azarova’s
work see here.}
Fortunately, Azarova wasn’t eligible to work in
Canada and so her application was rejected. There was a huge outcry over this
rejection and supposed outside interference in the hiring process. One of those
protesting most loudly on Azarova’s behalf was Morgan Sim. (More commentary here).
This is the state of affairs in Canada and the
States today: equity officers, law schools, and human rights advocates – the
people we expect to be standing up for the rights of everybody, regardless of
ethnicity, religion, or nationality – tend to have a marked bias against one
ethnicity, one religion, and especially one nationality.
 |
| Beyond falsely accusing Israel of genocide, this tweet, liked by Morgan Sim, plays on the trope of Israelis as the new Nazis. Both the far left and far right have tried to reframe the Holocasust as a Jewish crime; the right by saying the Holocaust was a Jewish hoax; the left by saying Jews are now the Nazis. |
I’ll close with a final example. Back in 2010 I complained
about a novel, The Shepherd’s Granddaughter, which had been recommended
by the Ontario Library Association and that schools throughout Ontario were
encouraging kids in grades 7 and 8 to read.
The novel presents Israelis and Jews as killers
and thieves and especially as child-killers.
For example, on page 180, the Palestinian heroine
of the story says: “Your God says kill us?
Steal our land?” The Jewish boy replies: “They don’t see it as stealing.
They’ll provoke you, kill you.”
On page 61, an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint,
tells an innocent kid: “We shoot Palestinian boys.”
Why? No explanation is given for the brutality permeating
this novel. Apparently, Israelis are just monsters; the Jewish God tells them
to kill.
In the long history of antisemitism, the nastiest
antisemitic trope is the blood libel, the notion that Jews like to kill people,
particularly children. The Shepard’s Granddaughter is a contemporary
example.
School libraries in Toronto still have 251 copies of this book on the shelves. Doubtless, there are many hundreds more at other libraries across the province and across the country. The committee struck to consider this novel – including an Equity Officer and a
consultant from the Urban Alliance on Race Relations – determined it was controversial but fine,
that it didn’t promote “hate or animosity toward others.”
The Shepard’s Granddaughter is one of the teaching
materials recommended by Javier Dávila - and which the Independent Investigator had no objection to – indeed it seems to be a book the Investigator thought Lulka should be praising and that it was racist for Lulka not to praise it. According to the Independent Investigator these
materials “were intended to, and do for the most part: (1) center the voices of
marginalized Palestinians (particularly those of Palestinian children).”
How? By calling Jews child-killers? This seems to
be a trope that equity officers and human rights experts are, not just blind to, but actually embrace.
This is what systemic antisemitism looks like.
Footnote: In a more recent article on antisemitism at the University of Toronto's medical school, Ayelet Kuper – who the school employs as an advisor on antisemitism – notes that it was the Equity Diversity and Inclusion crew who were most likely to bully Jews,. See here.
Brian Henry is a writer, editor, creative writing instructor, and
publisher of the Quick Brown Fox blog. He’s written opinion pieces
for the National Post and The Toronto Star. He was
also a regular contributor to the (now defunct) Jewish Tribune and
the Engage and Harry’s Place websites in the UK. This piece was previously pbublished on TheJ.ca, the Canadian Jewish community's online journal of news and opinion.
