Two weeks ago in The CJN, a group of past and present directors of the Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University aired their thoughts on a recent campus controversy. In the aftermath of the tragic attacks in Paris, an editorial in the Excalibur, York’s student newspaper, ignored the deadly assault on a kosher supermarket, outrageously equated ultra-Orthodox Jews who refuse to sit next to women on airplanes with Islamist radicals who murder innocent civilians, and twisted the attack on Charlie Hebdo to condemn Zionism.
The authors of the CJN piece argued that the university ought to be a place for the free exchange of ideas and that York’s thousands of Jewish students and other community members should be content to simply condemn articles that incite hatred against them.
I agree with the first sentiment, but as a Jewish student at York who wants to feel safe on her own campus, I strongly disagree with the authors’ laissez-faire approach.
The offensive and insulting piece on the Paris terrorist attacks was hardly the newspaper’s first misstep as far as Jews and Israel are concerned. Over the past few years, Excalibur has consistently given front-page coverage to the bigoted campaign to force York to divest from the Israeli economy and boycott interactions with Israeli professors, students and universities. In addition, the paper has repeatedly carried opinion pieces by Hammam Farah, a notorious anti-Israel instigator at York who was even banned from campus for a few months due to his inability to obey York’s very lenient rules for organizing protests.
Excalibur has repeatedly failed to question or fact-check ridiculous assertions in its anti-Israel pieces. And at the same time, it has refused to carry pro-Israel articles written by students, claiming that they are “biased.” Jewish students have been robbed of their ability to reach the student body with their side of the story – in essence, their right to free speech was unfairly suppressed in favour of those harassing our community.
The authors of the Feb. 5 CJN submission also claim that the situation at York is little different from other Canadian universities, but this is simply untrue. It is hard to imagine another Canadian university where Jewish staff and students would be besieged in a Hillel office by a mob of violent Israel-haters, as occurred at York in February 2009.
Excalibur is not a private publication that lives or dies based on the quality of its journalistic output. Rather, as the official campus newspaper, it derives much of its revenue from fees collected from each York student by the university administration along with their annual tuition payments. This fee is mandatory. There is no way for a student to opt out. Hence, Jewish and pro-Israel students at York are being forced to prop up a newspaper that fans the flames of hatred against them.
Student newspapers at other Canadian universities honour students’ role in keeping them afloat by remaining accountable to them. For example, the Varsity, the University of Toronto’s campus publication, hosts twice-yearly meetings for students to air their feelings about the newspaper and cast binding votes on its activities. Excalibur does no such thing and gives every appearance of being a self-replicating echo chamber disconnected from the students who pay its bills and whom it is supposed to serve.
According to York University guidelines, organizations such as Excalibur that benefit from mandatory student contributions must be held accountable to those very same students, but these guidelines are not being strictly observed. Jewish students at York and other members of the community can help us fend off these attacks on our beliefs and our identity not by “censoring” Excalibur, but by personally informing York’s administration that it cannot continue to aid the newspaper in hoarding student fees while it remains deaf to their legitimate concerns.
Danielle Shachar is a student at York University in Toronto.