The University of Toronto inflicts a demented form of education on students at OISE

The blog Socialist Studies uncovered the new Calendar at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

OISE is a neo-Marxist cesspool that does its utmost do indoctrinate its students to absorb its anti-capitalist, moral relativist propaganda. Worse still, it tries to push that indoctrination to children at the elementary school level and even younger.

This is the school that was, until recently, the home of Professor Ben Levin, the former Deputy Education Minister responsible for trying to introduce a highly sexualized curriculum for young children that was held back by former Premier Dalton McGuinty, In what many view as not entirely coincidental to the curriculum he attempted to forward, Levin was arrested recently on charges of producing and distributing child pornography.

But even worse obscenities are part of daily life at OISE. The new OISE calendar promotes Communist totalitarians and deranged, violent activist groups like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, a group that advocates for class warfare and has instigated riots.

OISE's new Chair of its "Social Justice Education" Department is a polemical Communist promoter of lunatic conspiracy theories by the name of Abigail Bakan. More information about her is available HERE and HERE.

More conspiracy theory lunacy from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education's new "Social Justice" Chair

If you pay attention, you'll notice a pattern to the way that concepts are frequently expressed by Marxist ideologues such as Abigail Bakan, the new "Social Justice" Department Chair at University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

A supposed maxim will be forwarded based not on verifiable facts, but on opinions rooted in antiquated, Marxist axioms. Then, to "prove" it,  few if any actual supporting facts will be offered. Instead you will hear quotations of the unsubstantiated opinions of people who share the same views as her.

For example, to prove that Israel is an "apartheid state" she may offer that Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter consider Israel is an "apartheid" state.

Forget for a moment Jimmy Carter having expressly said there is nothing resembling apartheid in Israel proper, or that Tutu holds weird, somewhat anti-Semitic views and his outlook on Israel is shaped by factors other than that nation's actual policies.

According to Ms Bakan's dysfunctional logical processes, one has to accept that that something means whatever Desmond Tutu says it means. But then, naturally, only on those occasions when Tutu's opinions align with those of Abigail Bakan and whatever the current Marxist zeitgeist allows.

If this resembles a description of the way conspiracy theorists look at everything, there's good reason for it. Abigail Bakan is a conspiracy theorist; one who makes a living promoting a fallacious, ridiculous,and malign version of global events.

In a speech she made at Lakehead University that was loaded with uniformed, paranoid assertions predicated on her own extremist ideological prejudices, she discussed, among other matters, the primary campaign of Jesse Jackson in the 1980's.

As an example of the power of the dreaded American capitalist elite, she offered that Jackson "ran for President in 1984 and 1988 and at that point his presidency (sic) was withdrawn on the grounds that the Democratic Party would likely split if they put forward a black American candidate. That the party itself couldn't tolerate that type of, just visible diversity. So racism interacts with capitalism..."

Anyone who was an adult while Jesse Jackson ran for the Democratic Party nomination will be aware of a very different reality than the one claimed by OISE's Social Justice Chair Bakan.

Jesse Jackson did well in early primaries and caucuses. But he was eventually defeated not by an elite who forced him out because of a racist conspiracy, but the rather straightforward fact that Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis eventually trounced Jackson in open, democratic primary voting and gained enough delegates to win his party's presidential nomination. Among the other candidates Dukakis defeated for the 1988 nomination were Al Gore and Joe Biden.

The fact that the Democrats hadn't named a presidential nominee who never held elected office, such as Jackson, since 1904 when Alton Parker was defeated by Teddy Roosevelt, may have escaped her attention. Or perhaps it's a result of an inability to process information that doesn't coincide with her conspiratorial obsessions.

Whatever the reason, university students, the bulk of whom were not even born when the father of George W. Bush defeated Dukakis for the presidency and whose knowledge of American history is minimal, could easily unquestioningly accept the twisted interpretation put forward by an authority figure like Bakan.

Imagine a generation of students being guided by Abigail Bakan, who is on the editorial board of a website called The Canadian Charger that routinely publishes demented 9-11conspiracy theories.

In Ms Bakan's deranged, conspiracy riddled outlook, the election of Barack Obama was the means by which the ruling capitalist elites planed to replace racism against African Americans with "Islamophobia."  In Ms Bakan's mind, the magazine The Economist exists to provide a discourse by elites "maintaining and sustaining American and global imperialism."

Her lunatic assertions are too long to list, but you get the idea.

The world may be terrifying if one believes the idiocies fostered by Ms Bakan. But what should be even more terrifying is that the University of Toronto has given her a substantial platform to proselytize those idiocies as dogma to impressionable students.

A secretive Queen's University anti-Zionist course disguised as "Jewish History" where "facts" don't matter

Imagine you'd enrolled in an undergraduate course last fall called "Jewish Women in Historical Perspective" at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. If you thought you would be learning about notable Jewish women like Ruth and Esther from the Bible through to authors like Emma Lazarus and Gertrude Stein, and renowned public figures like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Bella Abzug and their influence on the wider world, you could be in for a big surprise.

The course calendar describes it as being about "Jewish history from biblical to modern times using gender as a category of analysis" including "tensions between competing traditions; influences of paganism, Islam, Christianity." But the syllabus and the course content suggest something very different.

You'd certainly receive a healthy dose of tensions between competing traditions. But rather than Jewish History, it has more of the appearance of indoctrination sessions on the evils of Zionism and the Jewish state delivered by a veritable who's who of Canadian anti-Israel ideologues.

Included on that list are Sylvat Aziz, Palestine Liberation Organization Adviser Elia Zureik, Adnan Hussein, Ariel Salzmann, and a Communist professor named Abbie Bakan whose apparent raison d'etre for the last decade has been to attempt to de-legitimize Israel.

Abigail Bakan addressing a
CASMO al Quds Day gathering 

Bakan is a particularly egregious choice for an instructor in a Jewish Studies course. She is on the editorial board of a 9-11 conspiracy theory promoting website called The Canadian Charger, which was founded by Mohamed Elmasry, who notoriously declared that all Israeli Jews over the age of 18 are 'legitimate' targets for murder.

She has also been a featured speaker at al Quds Day gatherings, a 'holiday' invented by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini for the purpose of rousing Muslim support for Jihad against Israel. At one al Quds event, which she attended at the behest of a Khomeinist group called CASMO, which has posted anti-Semitic videos by the neo-Nazi leader David Duke on their website, Bakan fatuously declared that Israel "is exactly like the apartheid state of pre-1994 South Africa."

Such vicious polemical nonsense has the potential to cause quite a stir. But a directive in the course's syllabus is designed to nip that in the bud at the expense of the belief that university education should be above-board and open to scrutiny. A dictate in the Jewish Women in Historical Perspective's syllabus says:

To build an atmosphere of civility, trust, and participation, and afford reasonable privacy it is necessary and you are requested to abide by the following:
-no recording
-no cells, Internet, texting
-no visitors, no auditors

In order to keep the goings-on secretive, the classes can't be recorded and no outsiders are allowed. It's the Queen's anti-Zionist version of what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. But indications are that what happens at Queen's is more insidious than the affairs at Caesar's Palace.

I telephoned Professor James Carson, the Chair of Queen's History Department under whose aegis the course falls, about its curious nature. He described the course as being about "dialogue."  That explanation is indeed supported by another dictum in the course syllabus which states:

"Truths or facts as labels are misleading to understand complex situations. ‘Even handed’ and ‘balanced’ for X may not be acceptable to Y. The important learning event happens in dialogue."

It doesn't require a lot of imagination to picture how that dialogue would be slanted in a course where most of the "authorities" are members of a group called "The Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid."

But what I found perplexing was how something purporting to be a university history course could declare that truth and facts are "misleading" and secondary to a dialogue comprised of feelings and emotion.

It may serve the ideological purposes of the instructors to wave aside facts like five Arab armies tried to eradicate Israel upon its inception as a state, or that the Hamas charter calls for Israel's destruction and endorses the killing of Jews, or that Palestinian state television produces children's programs that glorify suicide bombers and call for war against the Jews. To these Queen's academics, "the important learning event" is the Palestinian feeling of oppression.

But how could that possibly be categorized as history?

Professor Carson attempted to explain it to me using an example from a course he teaches about the First Nations In North America.

He said that the Canadian Indian Act came into being in 1876 and from the government's perspective, it was to "civilize" the First Nations but from the aboriginals's point of view it was an act of "genocide." Carson felt that was an example of how there could be different perspectives on what constitutes a "fact."

I challenged that, observing that there were indeed indisputable facts in his example. The Indian Act was enacted in 1876, the actual wording of The Act is something that can be verified. The intent of these facts could be open to interpretation, but the facts themselves could not.

That agitated Professor Carson, who curtly replied, "I'm not going to engage in a forensic examination of the syllabus with you, thank you for your time." Then he hung up on me.

It's easy to sympathize with Professor Carson's frustration. It would be tremendously difficult to do a forensic examination of anything if you don't believe there's such a thing as a verifiable fact.

It seems the syllabus and curriculum has changed a bit for "Jewish Women in Historical Perspective" in the coming term. For the sake of that course's students and the integrity of Queen's University, it would be a good thing if their History Department's appreciation of historical facts changed along with it.

Israeli Apartheid Week in Gaza: Celebration of the murder of 3 children, aged 11, 3, and a baby, by passing out candy and dancing in the street.

The headline tells the story. It's disgusting and incomprehensibly barbaric.

This week, Judy Rebick, slow-witted Queen's University professor Abbie Bakan and some others did their best to enable making these attacks easier by trying to weaken Israel's ability to defend itself.

The answer is clear. Forget about Gaza for the foreseeable future. It's a hole. Concentrate on peace with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

WARNING: This video contains horrific, graphic photographs taken at the murder scene:



h/t Blazing Cat Fur and Sassy Wire