University of Toronto department partners with terror-supporting, anti-Semitic group

The Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism and Canada's Prime Minister have explicitly stated that those applying double standards to Israel, denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination by attempting to delegitimize and boycott the Jewish State as a "racist endeavor," and slandering it as an "apartheid state" are engaging in antisemitism.

The so-called "Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East" (CJPME) is one such group. Though they vehemently deny their efforts to demonize the Jewish state is antisemitic, with all the atrocities going on in the world, and when Israel is surrounded by the worst human rights abusers on the planet, the one country they expend efforts to boycott is Israel.  Yet the fact remains that while its survival is threatened by neighboring dictatorships against whom it is technically in a state of war, Israel remains the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. It is the only country in the region where Christian and other religious minorities are not persecuted, and are allowed complete religious freedom, and is the only middle eastern country that guarantees rights for its LGBT population.

The CJMPE would probably deny they support terrorism. Yet I attended an event they co-sponsored in 2012 featuring a talk by a vicious anti-Israel activist by the name of Eva Bartlett. At her CJMPE-sponsored talk, she made the point of saying that "violent resistance is legitimate." The "violent resistance" to which Ms Bartlett referred included the terrorist group Hamas'  indiscriminate missile attacks on of Israeli civilian centers, which, by definition, is terrorism.

Though the hypocritical activities of groups like CJMPE make them self-discrediting and unworthy of serious consideration, what is disgraceful is that a publicly funded institution like the University of Toronto would try to lend legitimacy to such an organization by partnering with it.

Disgraceful, but no surprise.

The anti-Semitic jamboree know as "Israeli Apartheid Week" was a creation of the University of Toronto.

Fortunately, its moment has mostly passed and will go largely ignored, with good reason. With ISIS lobbing off heads of unbelievers and raping and murdering Christians, the campaign to vilify Israel for trying to protect its public from terrorism while struggling to negotiate with an intractable, dishonest Palestinian leadership has been relegated to a small, core group of pompous halfwits and moral insects.

Unfortunately, some of those disreputable individuals hold influence at the University of Toronto, and its Department of Near and Middle East Civilizations is partnering with CJMPE to present a talk to coincide with the "Israeli Apartheid" hatefest.

A sample of what goes on at U of Toronto's Department of Near and Middle East Civilizations can be gleaned from a symposium conducted by their Graduate Association at the plush, but superannuated Faculty Club last month. One of the symposium's sessions, on "Community, Identity & Diaspora," was chaired by an internationally notorious, bloodthirsty anti-Israel fanatic named Noa Shaindlinger.

That notoriety was achieved through a number of her social media postings when the supposed "peace activist" proclaimed her pleasure about the deaths of Israelis, and her glee about a Molotov cocktail being hurled at an Israeli soldier. 

The English commentator Pat Condell recently compared such supposed "peace activists" to Nazi collaborators. It's hard not to agree with him, and seeing the University of Toronto turn into an enabler of such moral bankruptcy is a sad indictment of what often passes for 'higher learning' at that institution.



h/t Sassy

OISE Professor accused of pedophilia-related crimes to have preliminary hearing in two weeks

There hasn't been much information in the news about the upcoming trial of Ben Levin, the former Ontario Deputy Minister of Education under Kathleen Wynne who was indicted for numerous child pornography and other offenses involving minors.

But one of the detectives involved with the case confirmed for me today that Levin, who at the time of his arrest was a Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), is scheduled to have a preliminary hearing starting on Wednesday, November 26 at the courthouse at 1000 Finch Avenue West in Toronto.

Levin's preliminary hearing is expected to last three days, at which time the court will hear a great deal of evidence about his alleged involvement in procuring child pornography and allegations about his arranging to commit sexual assault, as was described in his indictment. The judge at the hearing will determine if the evidence presented merits the next step of proceeding to trial.

For those familiar with the environment and culture guiding the institution where Levin was a professor, that someone of such high standing there would be in such a predicament comes as less than a total shock. OISE is the same place that, only a few short weeks after Levin's arrest, co-sponsored a symposium for teachers of young children where the keynote speaker postulated, without genuine scientific evidence, that adult sexual attraction to children is a natural phenomenon.

Considering that culture, the crimes of which Levin stand accused seem to be a natural, logical progression.

Regardless of the outcome of the Levin trial, hopefully the focus will shift to what bizarre, inappropriate dogmas are being taught at OISE. We need to be careful to determine whether that place responsible for the education of our children's educators is actually a place from which our children need protection.

A discussion about genocide at the Munk Centre

On October 14, a panel convened at the Munk School of Global Affairs, under the auspices of the Raoul Wallenberg Legacy of Leadership Project, to discuss genocide in the modern world. I had intended to write about what was discussed there sooner, but my own foray into local politics kept me too busy to get to it until now. As it happens, that delay may have been fortuitous and added to the relevance of this post, since a panelist that night,  Jonathan Kay, has since been thrust into the spotlight for two very different reasons. One of them is the announcement a couple of days ago that he would be taking over as Editor-in-Chief of Walrus Magazine, a staple among Toronto's lefty, middlebrow readers;  a move that was bold, unexpected, and will undoubtedly raise the quality of that publication.

Additionally, some reflected glare from the spotlight thrust on Jian Ghomeshi, in the wake of revelations of his reported proclivity to violently assault women as a form of sexual foreplay, has also been thrust on Jonathan, who was a regular panelist on Ghomeshi's CBC radio show Q. As Editor for Comment and a columnist at the National Post, Jonathan has been commenting, quite rationally, on trying to separate Ghomeshi, the accomplished and charismatic radio personality, from Ghomeshi the (allegedly) vicious, narcissistic sexual deviate. Though many people have been infuriated at what they perceive as any attempt to mitigate outrage against a person who committed terrible acts towards women, Jonathan's is a valid argument. In the way that one can despise the personal beliefs and ideologies of Richard Wagner, yet still admire the music he created, separating the artist from the art requires intellectual examination and the courage to discuss honestly held beliefs in the tumultuous climate of the hysterical media whirlwind of the Ghomeshi scandal.

It's always a pleasure to hear Jonathan speak at an event such as the Munk Centre panel. Unfettered by the word number limitations of a newspaper column or the need to speak in talking points on radio or TV, one gets to hear from him detailed, insightful, intelligent, and often very humorous perspectives on contemporary and historical developments that have and are shaping our world.

The word I most frequently use in my descriptions of Jonathan is "reasonable." While that might be something that should seem a requisite quality for someone in the media or in a position of public influence, the unfortunate reality is that there are far too few media personalities who could be described that way. The fact that I have friends on the left who think Jonathan is a doctrinaire "right-winger," and very conservative friends who are convinced Jonathan has sunk into the quicksand of leftist dogma is actually, as far as I'm concerned, indicative of a balanced intellect who isn't married to any political or ideological position. It suggests he views issues, case-by-case, on their merits. Which isn't to say I always agree with Jonathan's positions, but I always expect they'll be sane and well-considered.

Now back to the Wallenberg Project panel about genocide.

In 1985, Raoul Wallenberg, who vanished under suspicious circumstances in Soviet-controlled Budapest at the end of the Second War and at that point was presumed to be dead, was the first person to be made an honorary citizen of Canada.

Wallenberg received that honor for his courageous accomplishment of saving tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazi death camps, and another honor bestowed on his name is The Raoul Wallenberg Leadership Project. That effort is an initiative of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University.

Aside from Jonathan, the other panelists for the discussion were the eminent Liberal MP for Mount Royal and former Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General Irwin Cotler, and Global Brief Magazine's Editor-in-Chief, Irwin Studin.

It's an obvious tragedy that ongoing discussions about genocide are necessary when the world should have learned the lessons of Holocaust and of the depths to which man can sink, and the unspeakable consequences of what can happen if the world fails to take action to prevent an onslaught of targeted mass murder. Yet genocides have occurred since 1945 in places like Bangladesh, Cambodia, Rwanda, and a genocide is still going on in Darfur.

Despite these atrocities, one of the points that emerged from the discussion is that while the incidences of genocides seems not to have abated, the magnitude of those crimes, compared with earlier times has, thanks to international awareness of them. We live in times where news is not confined to print journalists from relatively few newspapers. Now multiple cable all-news channels, and the Internet, social media, and smart phones can instantly draw attention to crimes such as ISIS' murderous campaign against Yazidis and pressure a relatively quick response. Whereas half a century ago, such monstrosities, competing with other domestic and international events, might have have only been a half column buried deep in the pages of The New York Times.

Which is not to say that genocide is a matter that need not concern us in today's world. One of the issues that ate up most of the panel's Q & A time came from an audience member's (ok, it was me) question about the degree of commitment that western countries have towards combating genocide when it becomes difficult for them. Jonathan during his talk recalled how the murders and mutilation of ten Belgian peacekeepers during the Rwandan genocide led to that country withdrawing all its forces, reducing the UN Peacekeepers' effectiveness and leaving Tutsi victims that much more vulnerable. I reminded the panelists of a similar occurrence the year before that, when following the killing and mutilation of American soldiers in Mogadishu, Bill Clinton withdrew US forces that has been in place to ensure that famine-stricken civilians were not easy prey for Somalia's warlords.

In reality, we have to understand that combating genocides are a combination of factors, including  altruism, a moral duty, and the not unreasonable expectation that global powers are more likely to be motivated to act when there is an element of self-interest.

Considering the night was dedicated to the memory of Raoul Wallenberg, it was quite natural that questions arose about contemporary anti-Semitism and the desire among some to commit another genocide of Jews. A general consensus among the panel was that the existence of the State of Israel has made such an outcome a near impossibility. Despite that country being surrounded by enemies, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and its master Iran and Hamas , who openly advocate for eliminating Jews, the Jewish State's military prowess and determination for survival, plus its existence as an ultimate sanctuary, are all factors that will confound the aspirations of those who want a second Holocaust.

Tragically, it is from within western societies, often on university campuses, that supporters of genocidal maniacs such as Hezbollah, hiding behind the lie of wanting "social justice," are doing their utmost to enable the would-be perpetrators of another Holocaust. Which makes exposing and standing up to such people all the more important today. Our failure to do so would be a betrayal of the lessons of history and of Raoul Wallenberg's courage which ultimately cost him his life.

Showing contempt for Jewish donors, the University of Toronto promotes professor at center of antisemitic controversy

A controversial professor at the University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, who was at the centre of an anti-Semitic classroom incident, was recently promoted by the University to the shock of many in the Jewish community.

Following the wide exposure of an anti-Semitic classroom "Jew count" facilitated by Rupaleem Bhuyan, then an untenured Assistant Professor with the University of Toronto's Faculty of Social Work, the university was deluged by complaints and concerns from its Jewish donors.

A disturbing 2009 incident involving Bhuyan was originally chronicled in the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism by her then-colleague Professor Ernie Lightman, and has since been described by other faculty at the Factor-Inwentash School. According to these reports, which have not been denied by the University, Bhuyan supported the racism of students who wanted to avoid a visit, as part of their course, to the Baycrest Centre, a highly regarded Jewish geriatric care and research facility. Adrienne Chambon, the Director of PhD Programs at the U of T Faculty of Social Work at the time, recounted that Bhuyan told her, "‘racialized’ students come from underprivileged backgrounds and were justified in not wanting to be around old Jews because they are rich and would make them uneasy. "

Bhuyan also facilitated a classroom "Jew count" of faculty after making what Lightman described as an "inflammatory and inaccurate" assertion that half the department's faculty were Jews.

Upon learning about the shocking classroom behavior by one of its professors and the university's inadequate response, outraged Jewish donors who have provided millions to various university departments contacted the office of David Naylor, who was then the University of Toronto's president. Senior university administrators assured the donors that their complaints were being taken seriously and would be addressed.

However, in what was indicative of the real attitude of the university, Bhuyan was retained in her position. In contrast, rather than receiving support from the administration and their department, both Lightman and Chambon were ostracized by fellow faculty for exposing the incident and have since retired.

Demonstrating further contempt for its Jewish donors, the university recently promoted Bhuyan, who told Professor Chambon that racist attitudes towards Jews were "justified," to Associate Professor with tenure.

A fixation on race may be part of Bhuyan's modus operandi, who lists among her interests, "critical race theory." Bhuyan is the only member of the entire Faculty of Social Work's diverse staff to make a point of stating her ethnicity in her faculty biography, writing she "is a second-generation immigrant of Assamese/Indian heritage," seemingly as if it should be considered a qualification.

Among critical race theory's postulations is that people of color can only be the victims of racism, but never the perpetrators, no matter how blatant the racism they express.

Disappointingly, by promoting Rupaleem Bhuyan, the University of Toronto has effectively confirmed that such asinine, illogical bigotry is something it finds completely acceptable.

University of Toronto compulsory student fees used to fund activities the Canadian government defines as antisemitic

Students at the University of Toronto are forced, through the compulsory student activity fees they have to pay each year, to fund the radical so-called "Ontario Public Interest Research Group."

Rather than actual public interest, U of T's OPIRG funds and promotes among other things, Marxist revolutionary organizations and antisemitic boycotts of Israel.

Individual University of Toronto students can ask to have the money that is taken from them to fund this idiocy returned. But I have had U of T students contact me to say that when they do so, they face harassment and intimidation.

Now, the tax levied on unwilling University of Toronto students is being used to fund activities which are clearly defined as antisemitism by the Government of Canada.

OPIRG has a job posting up for a "Palestine Booklet Project Coordinator." The job description states: "This booklet is meant to assist those engaged in Palestine solidarity organizing by sharing strategies for organizing campus based divestment campaigns..."

The divestment campaigns mentioned are part of an antisemitic boycott strategy designed to attempt to delegitimize the Jewish State. That effort is, according to Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper, "nothing short of sickening" and is "the face of the new antisemitism."

An email sent out by OPIRG details how much they intend to spend to finance this sickening antisemitism:

"This is a part-time temporary staff position with 20 hours per week at a rate of$15/hour, for a period of three months. "

That works out to about $3600 of funds, culled from unsuspecting students, to be used at a publicly funded university to pay to promote bigotry and hatred that is explicitly condemned by the Canadian government.

I hope the University of Toronto's donors are paying attention to how their tax dollars and institutions of "higher learning" are hard at work.

Federal Multiculturalism Minister condemns "despicable" anti-semitism of University of Windsor's undergraduate student union

As an aside, I've met Multiculturalism Minister Tim Uppal a couple of times and he's a great guy. It's encouraging to see a politician with the guts to be as forthright about this as Mr. Uppal:



Meanwhile, in other Canadian campus antisemitism and terror support, the intellectually vacuous scum of "Students Against Israeli Apartheid" at the University of Toronto-Mississauga campus  are "honored" to screen messages from Palestinian terrorists.

h/t Marvin W

The spawning-ground of "Israeli Apartheid Week" has bottomed out to a list of pathetic, unknown cretins

University of Toronto's "Israeli Apartheid Week"
 has bottomed out to this

"Israeli Apartheid Week," the annual hate-fest where lunatics, Islamists, fascists and  communist totalitarians assemble to spew out hatred of Jewish self determination under the pretense of anti-Zionism, seems to have fizzled out at its spawning ground.

It began at the University of Toronto and spread like a malignant virus to other university campuses, attracting the vile, the stupid, and the vicious to participate in a cretinous carnival of polemical poison.

The many, obvious, horrendous human rights abuses routinely committed by Israel's neighbors have rendered the frenzied effort of radicals to demonize the only middle eastern country that has a liberal democracy, respects human rights, and allows freedom of religious practice to all its citizens apparent. The so-called "Israel Apartheid Week" is an antisemitic endeavor to destroy the only middle eastern country that doesn't practice actual apartheid.

The Canadian government has made it very clear that it views "Israeli Apartheid Week" as antisemitism and even the usual low-lifes who would be featured at such a gathering have evidently realized that it would be too discrediting to continue the association.

This year, the University of Toronto hasn't even been able to get the usual vapid fanatics, the Naomi Kleins, the Judy Rebicks, whom at least bring some name-recognition to their orgy of bile.

This year, the list of pathetic losers has bottom out so far that their "star" speaker is one of the leaders, pictured above, of the demented "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid."

University of Toronto professor says some classroom activism fostered by The Toronto District School Board and OISE amounts to child abuse

There are teachers in the Toronto District School Board who are subjecting children in Toronto's public schools to child abuse on a daily basis. 

It's a minority of them to be sure, but they are in the system and they operate with the blessing of the School Board and of Ontario's foremost teachers college.

The University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) has posted a number of interviews with active public school teachers promoting teacher activism in the classroom. The interviews will come as a surprise to those who think the purpose of school is to teach children essential knowledge of mathematics, grammar, geography, literature and civics.

Instead of that core foundation,  these activist teachers feel they have a mandate to promote their own politics and biases to the children over whom they have been given authority.

Among OISE's exemplars of activism are Jason Kunin, a teacher at Toronto's Vaughn Road Academy, a public high school, who has used his class to promote his anti-Israel extremism. Another is David Stocker, a teacher at Toronto's Cityview Alternative School who gained considerable notoriety for his intention to raise one of his children to be "genderless," and who asserts his right to condition his students to his own brand of activism.

Manifestations of this teacher activism include the use of science classes to organize student hunger strikes and demonstrations against the Enbridge oil pipeline, and the use of math classes to convince children about the supposed ills of capitalism.

University of Toronto professor of International Relations and Political Science Aurel Braun considers much of the type of indoctrination practiced by activist teachers to be a form of child abuse.

Children in school are a captive audience, Braun notes, and the purpose of education is to provide them with a diversity of views and objective, ascertainable facts so that they have the tools to become thinking, productive citizens capable of reaching their own conclusions.

Instead, Braun, who is currently a visiting professor at Harvard University's Department of Government, suggests the daily reiteration of a particular, political outlook inflicted by activist teachers on their students is similar to the psychological conditioning that is a feature of totalitarian societies.

He compares it with the type of indoctrination for children that was conceived by Vladimir Lenin following the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist leader's subsequent dictatorship in Russia.

Braun's analogy is particularly apt, since David Stocker asserts that the tools an activist teacher should use are the teachings of Paulo Friere, a Brazilian Maoist who extolled Lenin in his seminal work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

In Canada, there is an explicit contract between the government and the consumers of education, those being the children who attend classes and the parents who entrust their children to the care of the state. The most basic aspect of that contract is that the school system will not abuse and inflict harm on their children.

Many take the view that continually subjecting children to politicized biases is harmful to them as it both warps their worldview and detracts from the skills and objectivity they will require to be successful later on in life.

"Of course they're biased, because all classrooms are biased" Stocker asserts by way of an excuse in one of his interviews. "This is mandated by the board. It's about Human Rights Work, and we have an ethical and moral obligation to do it and yes we're going to do it."

But frequently, what is "ethical or moral," and in certain instances what would be considered a "human right," is warped beyond all recognition by activist teachers who may use those terms as a means to deprive others of their rights.

Unequivocal human rights could involve activism against the ethnic slaughter of black Africans in Darfur, or against the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries. But that is not what the TDSB's activist teachers see as "moral and ethical." Instead, they compel their students to engage with groups such as OCAP and No One Is Illegal,  that advocate for class warfare and aspire to cripple Canada's economy, or those like the deceptively-named Canadian Peace Alliance, which acts as apologist for totalitarians who kill Gays and persecute ethnic and religious minorities.

It should come as little shock that OISE would be promoting such totalitarian-leaning classroom proselytizing. That institute recently appointed a professor named Abigail Bakan to head its "Social Justice" Education department. Bakan, a conspiracy theorist,  is one of the founders of the International Socialist organization and has been a speaker at antisemitic al Quds Day celebrations. The Al Quds Day activities are the brainchild of the sadistic leader of Iran's Islamic Revolution, the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Last year, a Queen's Park al Quds rally featuring Canadian Peace Alliance boss Sid Lacombe, whom Jason Kunin called to lecture to his class, was notable for inciting participants to commit a genocide of Jews in Israel.

This is the face of  classroom "Social Justice" activism that your children are forced to endure, day after day. Most teachers are too decent and too smart to subject their students to such abuse. Thankfully, plenty of those students unfortunate enough to have activist instructors realize their teachers are not particularly intelligent propagandists. However, there are many students who will readily absorb the conditioning that activist educators inflict upon them. And for the majority of students who just want to acquire credits so they can graduate and go on to what comes next, they may not emerge from public schools unscathed. Like plants growing next to a poisoned water supply, eventually, some of the toxins in which classroom activist teachers immerse their students may seep into them through the osmosis of constant exposure.

It is critical that parents become aware of what is happening to their children in public schools. Because this form of child abuse will continue to harm new generations of students until the public raises an outcry that forces a response from Ontario's Ministry of Education.



h/t Socialist Studies

The other extreme! Brigham Young U wants students to rat out masturbators

Out of all the colleges in the United States, only the Mormon leadership at Brigham Young University would attempt to turn their students into Masturbation Narcs.

A new video posted by BYU’s Housing and Student Living offices depicts masturbation as a gritty battlefield sequence straight out of Saving Private Ryan, in which only the Lord — and friends reporting their friends to school authorities — can stop masturbation addicts from being lost in the Omaha Beach of sin.

This is where Mormon polygamy could come in handy, if you'll pardon the expression. Once you have eight wives, masturbation really should be a thing of the past.

On the other end of the spectrum of stupidity, we have The University of Toronto, where compulsory student fees are used to pay for masturbation and anal sex workshops.

I'd like to lock the heads of the BYU and U of T student unions in a room for a few hours and see what happens.



h/t Skippy Stalin

University of Toronto compulsory student fees used to pay for anal sex and hand-job workshops

University of Toronto's compulsory student activity fees fund the U of T Sexual Education Centre.

This week, the Centre is conducting workshops on such important topics as a beginner's introduction to anal sex and how to give a hand-job. I'm not sure which is more troublesome, that the university is paying for these, or that some U of T students are evidently so stupid that they need to take a workshop for them.

The worst part is that this is far from the most offensive activity that U of T students are forced to fund. At least this isn't as bad as the anti-Semitic and Communist Revolutionary Groups U of T's students are compelled to subsidize.

h/t Blazing Cat Fur

Stephen Harper`s speech to Israel`s Knesset has Canadian anti-Semites fuming

Distortion and misinformation has been the aftermath of the speech Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made to Israel`s national legislature on Monday.

The Prime Minister clearly said in his speech that not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism. But that hasn`t stopped politically-motivated pundits including Liberal Party backroom boy Warren Kinsella, or sloppy journalism from the likes of Sun News` David Akin, from portraying the exact opposite of what the Prime Minister said, such as Akin`s dishonest assertion that  "in Harper's formulation, you're an anti-Semite if you criticize Israel."

In both the case of Kinsella and Akin the charge against Harper is probably an attention-getting device, since both writers, Akin elsewhere in his same column, and Kinsella in an earlier blog post, acknowledge that Harper said no such thing.

What Harper did describe as anti-Semitism is:

“As once Jewish businesses were boycotted, some civil-society leaders today call for a boycott of Israel. On some campuses, intellectualized arguments against Israeli policies thinly mask the underlying realities, such as the shunning of Israeli academics and the harassment of Jewish students.

Most disgracefully of all, some openly call Israel an apartheid state.

Think about that.

Think about the twisted logic and outright malice behind that: a state, based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law, that was founded so Jews can flourish, as Jews, and seek shelter from the shadow of the worst racist experiment in history, that is condemned, and that condemnation is masked in the language of anti-racism.

It is nothing short of sickening.

But this is the face of the new anti-Semitism.

It targets the Jewish people by targeting Israel and attempts to make  the old bigotry acceptable for a new generation.

Of course, criticism of Israeli government policy is not in and of itself necessarily anti-semitic.

But what else can we call criticism that selectively condemns only the Jewish state and effectively denies its right to defend itself while systematically ignoring – or excusing – the violence and oppression all around it?"

As Federal Cabinet Minister Jason Kenney noted in rebutting Akin, the definition of anti-Semitism used by Harper is nothing new and reflects the definitions in use by the European Union.

However, what is novel is that a Canadian Prime Minister has never been so explicit in stating that outlook before.

This has significant ramifications back in Canada for a number of anti-Israel fanatics who have tried to excuse their anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism.

The fact that a person may be a Jew does not mean that they can't be a Jew-hater. One example is the group of radical cretins calling themselves Independent Jewish Voices that was founded, by the admission of its own leaders, for the primary purpose of putting useful idiot Jews (some of whom who only pretend to be Jewish)  in front of the anti-Israel movement so they could deflect charges of anti-Semitism.

It is now clear that, in the view of the Canadian government, people such as labour leaders Sid Ryan are anti-Semites and that the unions CUPE Ontario and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers are anti-Semitic organizations. A federal court recently agreed with Mr. Kenney in his assertion that Muslim groups like The Canadian Arab Federation are (or at least appear) anti-Semitic, and that description would easily apply to a number of other Canadian Islamic organizations, including the Canadian Association of Shiite Muslims (CASMO) and Zafar Bangash's Islamic Society of York Region.

The label of anti-Semite would therefore extend to Jew-hating Jews like Naomi Klein, her obtuse husband Avi Lewis, and Judy Rebick. The website rabble.ca, which billed itself as "the official media sponsor" of Israeli Apartheid Week would be, by definition, a hate-site. The site is currently published by the spouse of NDP Deputy Leader Libby Davies, who herself has often been accused of being anti-Semitic.  

What will be more controversial is that now, in the very explicit view of Canada's government, Israeli Apartheid Weeks on campuses are in the view of Canada's government, anti-Semitic and by extension, university's permitting them are sanctioning Jew-hate. There are also a number of university supported student groups, including the Ontario Public Interest Research Group,  that are so defined as anti-Semitic. Universities will have to take a very close look to decide if they can continue to sanction these hate groups on their campuses.

As far as university funding goes, it's interesting to note that The University of Toronto's scandal-plagued, Marxist-leaning Ontario Institute of Studies in Education has appointed someone who fits the government's description of an anti-Semite by the name of Abigail Bakan, as the head of its Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education department.

In the case of the City of Toronto, the collection of vapid freaks calling themselves Queers Against Israeli Apartheid now cannot make any sort of claim, at least from the official perspective of Canada's government, that they are not an anti-Semitic group. By Toronto's funding the World Pride Festival in 2014 that includes this group, the city is de facto funding Jew hate, and a re-examination of that funding may be necessary.

The ramifications of Mr. Harper's very impressive and unambiguous speech are far-reaching indeed, and they have some of Canada's most discreditable people very worried.

And anything that has such people upset, whatever else its merits may or may not be, can't be all bad.

Why you MUST READ one of the most awful books ever written

It's one of the most poorly-written books ever published, at least if the most commonly used English translation is anything to go by. The late Brazilian Maoist Paulo Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is filled with trite, jargony, Marxist proselytising, and could be easily dismissed as yet another demented, anti-Capitalist manifesto, but for the fact that it is compulsory reading in teachers colleges throughout North America.

Paulo Freire (1921-1997)

If you were to learn that the textbook which is considered the seminal basis of education philosophy, affecting the teaching of children throughout every year of their public schooling, tries to instill admiration for a vicious mass murderer who invented the political concentration camp, you might find it just a touch odd.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was personally responsible for the abuse and murder of hundreds of thousands of people following the Bolshevik Revolution. He had his political rivals and opponents imprisoned, tortured and often murdered. His brutality set the stage for the horrific brutality of his successor, Josef Stalin, who was responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler. Lenin's political ideology was the basis for that of Mao Zedong, who was the most prolific mass murderer in the history of the world.

While for those of us who aren't sociopaths, such a person might not be considered the best role model to use for teaching youngsters, here's what Freire had to say in the book that your kid's teacher was forced to absorb:

...the revolutionary process is eminently educational in character. Thus the road to revolution involves openness to the people, not imperviousness to them; it involves communion with the people, not mistrust. And, as Lenin "pointed out, the more a revolution requires theory, the more its leaders must be with the people in order to stand against the power of oppression.

So when Freire discuses oppression and "the oppressed," his notion of oppression is capitalism and an education system that produced people like Robert Graves, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Robert Frost, Thomas Sowell, Jonas Salk, and T.E. Lawrence. Freire's means of addressing this "oppression" is to adopt the ideology of a ruthless totalitarian who casually had people executed because their political outlook differed from his.

Friere's oppressive

hero of "the oppressed"

It sounds insane and evil. But Pedagogy of the Oppressed, considered the basis of Critical Pedagogy, is treated like liturgical canon at places like the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, which describes itself as the largest and most influential teachers college in Canada. In fact, OISE was the at the forefront of infusing Friere's theories into educational practice in the 1970's and 80's. That might account for the regular stream of deranged, idiotic, and perverse theses and teaching approaches coming from that institution. That of itself would be troublesome enough, but OISE sees its mission as transforming public education into one of its own image. It teaches the teachers leaving its doors that beyond educators, they should be activists in the classroom.

Their goal is no less than to create a generation of anti-Capitalist revolutionaries by manipulating them in the classroom from the moment they enter school. Or, as Freire himself put it:

Lenin's famous statement: "Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement" means that a revolution is achieved with neither verbalism nor adtivism, but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed. The revolutionary effort to transform these structures radically cannot designate its leaders as its thinkers and the oppressed as mere doers.

The Toronto District School Board encourages students and teachers to read this book, and other bizarre tracts, to better understand issues of race, gender, sexuality and class.

Though it will be a tedious experience, you too should force yourself to read Freire's The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in order to understand the vile ideas behind the dangerous turn that public education is taking.

OISE pushing plagiarist-funded identity politics into public schools

Remember when you were a kid in grade school and Halloween was approaching?  The whole week before was a time of fun and anticipation. Never have I seen a kid, or even heard of one anecdotally, who wasn't happy about having a party at school, dressing up in costume and best of all, loads of free candy!

But that's not quite how they view things at the wretched Marxist cesspool of radical indoctrination for teachers called The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).

According to a new document called "The Professional Learning Series for Culturally Responsive and Relevant Pedagogy" prepared at that Mordor of Education, Halloween is not that time of joy you remember from your childhood, but is "a controversial Western holiday."

You might also have the foolish notion in your head that if someone immigrates to a country, they should take it upon themselves,  and encourage their children, to adapt to their adopted society and culture.

Silly you!. By saying such a thing aloud, you've engaged in hate speech according to the Toronto District School Board. That sort of fundamental logic only applies to Islamic countries, where they will beat a woman senseless should she dare to appear in public in immodest clothing. Or maybe also in a few exceptions like Quebec, where they have felt the need to take the drastic measure of banning religious garb at work for publicly paid employees.

But in the rest of this progressive land, as so deemed by the gatekeepers of educational totalitarianism at OISE, it is Canada that must bend to the will and culture of anyone who arrives on our shores and objects to the traditions we have insensitively practiced for generations.

One of the associate teachers in the project discussed an
issue that surfaced in her school at Halloween. She
observed that many students with cultural or religious
objections to the holiday had no choice but to sit in the
library during the celebrations. She realized that this
structure was inequitable and didn’t reflect the diversity
of the school. This teacher decided to convene a group of
teachers to discuss this issue and to host a fun event for
the students who couldn’t or chose not to participate in
the controversial Western holiday

Now,  is it so bad that children who were compelled by their parents to sit out the most fun day of the school year were provided with a fun alternative?  On the surface it might seem not. But think for a moment.

What this type of policy does, is to encourage people not to adapt to Canadian culture and tradition. The outcomes of that self-defeating approach can be seen in the poisonous culture of victimology that has infected myriad aspects of our society.

That poison is actively promoted at OISE, but that shouldn't be any surprise by now. OISE, which produces the people who create school curricula in Ontario, has played midwife to innumerable imbecilic ideas birthed at that institution. It's not just the students who produce deranged theses such as one that proclaims that western feminists opposed to female genital mutilation are lascivious racists motivated by an obsession with genitalia. Even the institute's administrators are pushing depraved bigotry, like OISE professor Sheryl Nestel, who claims Canadian Jews support Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a community to "maintain its place the racial order."

What's rather curious about the new OISE paper is that it acknowledges that it was funded in part by disgraced former Toronto District School Board Director Chris Spence, who resigned his position after numerous instances of his committing plagiarism, including in his doctoral thesis, came to light.

OISE wants your kids to choose their gender regardless of their sex

The paper is filled with the predictable stupidity one comes to expect from OISE. As an institution where ideology trumps facts and doctrine overrules science, it's hardly surprising that they want to undo the sort of gender distinctions that are a natural outgrowth of the biological differences between males and females.

Possibly less of a challenge to them is to try to shame kids away from using the word "gay" in a negative context. Still, they may have a hard time with that one too. I support gay rights and gay marriage, and do not think gays should face any form of legal discrimination. But even so, it should be rather obvious that as long as 98% of the normal male population continues to find the idea of having a penis shoved in their sphincter repugnant, getting rid of the negative connotation is going to be a hard sell.

If you say "gay" as anything but a compliment or as a positive adjective,
 you're committing an OISE Hate Crime

Curiously, as these so-called Social Justice issues that OISE is pushing in public schools permeate more and and more of the curriculum in Ontario, the Minister of Education and the Toronto District School Board are in a quandary trying to figure out why their students' capabilities in mathematics have taken a corresponding nose dive.

TDSB Director Donna Quan has reportedly asked her principals to come up with ways to improve math scores in their schools and across the Board. What is curious is that they have missed the unmissable solution of focusing more on core subjects and less on the politicized, ideological bullshit coming from OISE. Then again, maybe not so curious.  Because to understand that would require a measure of basic common sense the people who run our education system have yet to demonstrate.

OISE's promotion of anti-Semitism, sympathy for terrorism and other forms of depraved idiocy

It's quite interesting that the only form of national self-determination in the world that comes in for condemnation at the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) is Jewish national self-determination. That discriminatory manifestation of Jew-hate is part of the institutional culture at OISE.

The institution is a Marxist cesspool of radical fanaticism, but making matters worse is that the faculty is one of the primary guiding forces in shaping the public school curriculum in Ontario. Ben Levin, the former Ontario Deputy Education Minister who attempted to introduce curriculum changes that were criticized for its over-sexualization of young children, was on staff at OISE when he was arrested on charges of producing child pornography.

Aside from sympathy for the ideas that produce pedophiles manifested at a recent OISE conference, sympathy for terrorism, particularly when it is directed against Jews, is something else the faculty promotes.

This Friday evening, OISE's Leadership, Higher and Adult Education department is presenting a talk by Birzeit University Academic Linda Tabar about her paper, "Palestine and “The Internationals”: Tracing the Domestication of Solidarity Post-Oslo." 

Linda Tabar

Ms Tabar claims her paper will examine "the rise of the local concept of the internationals, which emerged during the second Palestinian intifada, as a way to critically explore some of the ways in which solidarity with the Palestinian struggle has been domesticated and transformed in the context of both the Oslo “peace process,” its pacification of the Palestinian liberation movement, and the neoliberal and US imperial hegemonies that have reframed transnational solidarity."

Note the concept of the "pacification" of the "Palestinian liberation movement."  Later in the facile, buzz-word filled description of her presentation, she elucidates that such pacification "is producing problematic recolonising relationships, where what happens in the name of solidarity not only reenacts white privilege, but reproduces Zionist settler colonial hierarchies and its racialised colonial order. The paper contrasts this with the militant tradition of solidarity that was created by the third world liberation movements in the 1970s."

If you think that sounds like thinly-veiled nostalgia for the good old days of Palestinian terrorist campaigns of suicide bombings and child murders against Israelis, there's good reason. In the description of a talk Ms Tabar gave on the same paper in Austria, where there is little compunction about public sympathy for Palestinian terrorism, she was more explicit about her sympathy for violent ideologies and wrote:

"I will aim to shed light on the new hegemonies that are competing to fill the political space once fully occupied by the Palestinian national liberation movement and its radical liberatory consciousness. In a period of global neoliberal capitalism, when an assemblage of NGO aid workers, human rights regime, political tourism and liberal cosmopolitanism mediate local-global encounters, I argue that liberal imperial hegemonies have redefined international solidarity in a way that conceals global structures of dominance, and threatens to replace a tradition of radical political solidarity with the Palestinian struggle that is based a shared anti-colonial, anti- racist, and anti-imperialist politics."

Ms Tabar's pro-terror talk is being presented at OISE by its Professor Sharzad Mojab, who previously has produced what could well be the most idiotic paper in the history of Canadian academia. In it, she attributed the erosion of women's rights in Muslim countries, not to the rise of Islamism and its repressive misogyny, but to western governments, which she alleges are "in concert with large charitable foundations and corporations to actively suppress and dismantle social movements, including the women’s movement."  

This sort of detestable nonsense with which OISE indoctrinates its students, who then go on to spread that poison throughout other education faculties in Canada, invites a pressing question.

Why does the leadership of the University of Toronto continue to acquiesce to what goes on at that vile institution?

The University of Toronto's free speech Mengeles: "Students Against Israeli Apartheid"

Only the the toxic milieu found at our institutions of higher learning could spawn a "Protocol For Public Event Facilitation". The little Free Speech Mengeles of U of T's Students Against Israeli Apartheid group came up with the notion that only they can decide whether you are Gay or Trans, Black or White and their decision alone determined whether you were allowed to speak at meetings.

OISE's Bodies at Play symposium proliferated more faddish nonsense to the school system

A floor of aged, fading, wood-panelled rooms in the University of Toronto's austere, century-and-a-half old University College seems like an incongruous choice to house something called The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. If the decision to place it there was intended to scare away any Victorian-era ghosts lingering in the Gothic structure, what has replaced them is even more terrifying. The college is now haunted by purveyors of poorly-conceived "Grievance Studies" subjects, such as "anti-oppression theory," for which post-secondary diplomas are awarded and its graduates are dispatched to public schools to proliferate.

On Saturday morning, The Centre, along with the University's politicized teachers' training faculty, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), presented a symposium on childhood education and sexuality called "Bodies at Play."

The symposium provoked a controversy for its choice of keynote speaker, James Kincaid, a professor from the University of Southern California. Kincaid has written a number of books which postulate the highly contentious idea that adult sexual attraction to children is normal, or as he expressed in his book Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting,"..most adults in our culture feel some measure of erotic attraction to children and the childlike; I do not know how it could be otherwise." 

Professor James R. Kincaid

The TV evangelist and president of Canada Christian College Charles McVety launched a petition and unsuccessful campaign attempting to bar Professor Kincaid's entry to Canada based on the incorrect assertion that Kincaid promoted pedophilia. However, Kincaid has never advocated for sex between adults and children, and has in fact condemned it. 

For more serious critics, the issue was not alleged pedophilia on the part of Kincaid. The rancor his hypothesis stimulated is because it is filled with erroneous, unproven assumptions that may indeed give "aid and comfort" to those who see sex between adults and children as acceptable. Making matters worse was that the conference was to be provided to public school teachers of those young children who could easily fall prey to victimizers encouraged by what they perceived as approbation from Kincaid's theories.

The choice of the speaker and subject matter were even more bizarre and problematic, in that co-presenter OISE had only recently been the subject of unwanted attention when one of its senior academics, Ben Levin, was arrested on charges of producing child pornography, for which he is yet to be tried. 

Tall, elderly, yet spry and impish, James Kincaid is affable, witty, intelligent and articulate. His ability to engage with an audience and the seeming speed with which his 45 minute speech breezed by suggests he is probably a very good professor.

All of what he said was well thought out, and most of it was rather uncontroversial. But much of it was of a nature that many would find disturbing if it was absorbed by your child's Grade 1 teacher and affected their approach to their students.

Aside from minimizing the threat of sexual abuse to children when describing the demonization of eroticizing children, he argues that the danger is exaggerated in part "to anchor the dubious notion of the nuclear family," and is "a conservative effort to maintain national unity."

Kincaid projects on society an "obsession with kids and sex," then poses the question of why do that and yet simultaneously be fixated on preserving their innocence.

He asked, "how can the sexual attraction (of adults to children) be both freakish and ubiquitous?"

The flaw in Kincaid's position became quite clear through the types of examples he provided to establish the supposed ubiquity of that attraction. Some of the examples he listed were more than a trifle creepy in that he was projecting eroticism onto popular images of children that most people would never think of in that way, and then extrapolating that erotic loading onto our entire culture.

A Professor of English Literature, Kincaid based his premise on the idea that the modern concept of the child was only invented during a period of European Romanticism and developed to its current state throughout the Victorian and contemporary periods. Based on the examples he provided as "proof" of his theories, it became obvious, to me anyway, that Kincaid's opinions on "the child" and child abuse are not derived from any evidence based in science, like biology or psychiatry, or on a wider survey of law enforcement statistics, but came almost entirely from a review of literature and popular culture. 

I had a chance to speak to Professor Kincaid over a coffee immediately after his talk and asked him if his ideas were derived primarily from a literature review. Not only did he acknowledge that they were, but he seemed genuinely pleased that someone recognized his sources.

I mentioned to him some of the aspects of biology and zoology that differentiates adults from children in the animal world, as indeed we have them in humans in the development of facial hair in males and enlarged breasts in females. In some species certain spots or markings alter, in an evolutionarily developed signal the young transmit to adults to indicate they were not ready for mating until those changes have occurred.

Professor Kincaid said he was not aware of that.

It was quite odd to hear this. It's as if someone were basing an overview of 1950's culture entirely on reading Catcher in the Rye and watching the TV shows Leave it to Beaver and I Love Lucy.

I liked James Kincaid. He seems like a very nice man. Many of us would find his ideas silly, wrong, and distasteful, but he comes to them from honest beliefs. The shameful aspect, if there is one, to his engagement by the organizers of the Bodies at Play symposium is not Kincaid's but theirs.

His views would be entirely appropriate at a philosophy symposium, or one for psychology or English literature. But OISE, which is notoriously pushing a hyper-sexualized curriculum, was completely irresponsible in presenting theories in a symposium for teachers that could in any way be interpreted as validating adults' sexual attraction to children.

Kincaid noted the over-inflated fear that our culture has about children being molested by strangers. He correctly noted that most sexual abuse of children comes from people they know; from relatives and friends. The one category of frequent abuser he omitted from his list was in the room.

It would take a lot of space to list the many high-profile cases of educators abusing their authority and position to sexually abuse children we have seen in the news lately. As people in the legal and law enforcement professions know well, that abuse by teachers happens far too often.

Overwhelmingly, public school teachers are deeply committed to the well-being of children and are reasonably intelligent, capable people. But the particular type of teacher that would be attracted to the Bodies at Play symposium and the faddish pedagogical nonsense which is characteristic of OISE's ideological biases is not going to be the sharpest crayons in the box, so to speak.

The conversations I heard among the teachers attending the event did nothing to dispel that concern.

No, the Bodies at Play symposium was not a "Yahoo! Let's celebrate pedophilia event" as the Bonham Centre's Director, Brenda Crossman, used as an example to dismiss the alarm of TV evangelist McVety. It was, however, another example of OISE finding a way of disseminating to the public school system more of its unscientific, inane ideologies that in the end diminish children's education and place them in harm's way.  And in some ways, that's almost as bad.

JOE WARMINGTON: Controversial pedophilia author shouldn't be allowed in Canada: Christian leader

First Charles McVety, the president of Canada Christian College, and now Sun News is focusing on the pedophilia-friendly U of T/OISE/York University symposium called Bodies at Play: Sexuality, Childhood and Classroom Life.

The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education seminar featuring a keynote speaker, James Kincaid, whose writings propose the normalization of sexual attraction for children was first exposed on this blog last month. You can read the background HERE and HERE.

Dr. McVety has proposed that Canada should bar Professor Kincaid from entering Canada.

Joe Warmington at the Toronto Sun has written an article about the controversy:

Controversial author James R. Kincaid, who wrote the 1992 book, Child-Loving, The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, should be turned back at airport, says Charles McVety, a child safety advocate and president of Canada Christian College.

“Kincaid’s earlier work in Victorian literature and culture and in literary theory has yielded to publication in cultural studies, most recently in the history and current cultural practices of eroticizing children and instituting elaborate scapegoating rituals to disguise what we are doing,” states a website promoting the event.

His planned Oct. 19 address is entitled “What Is This Thing Called a Child and Why Do We Want to Teach It?” 

But it won’t happen if McVety, who is also president of the Institute for Canadian Values, has his way.

He has fired off a letter of protest to Immigration Minister Chris Alexander and Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney urging them not to allow entry of the California-based professor.

While I am pleased that the Christian leader is drawing attention to the disgraceful agenda that OISE is fostering in the school system, I disagree with the idea that someone who has never broken any laws should be barred from entering Canada for reasons detailed further in an open letter I wrote to Dr. McVety.

Why people seem to hate activists

A female activist at
a Toronto demonstration

A close-up of the female activist's lower calf

An interview with the author of a recent study which found that most people think activists are icky

One of Canada's most prominent activists

U of Toronto's pedophilia-friendly acceptance of the idea of the "erotic child" is evil

For the vast majority of us who are parents, we see our primary duty as the protection of our children's well-being.

That duty manifests in different ways, among them the need to provide education, opportunities and guidance that will allow our kids to mature into successful, happy, well-adjusted, productive members of society. But at its most basic level, protection means exactly what the word implies, to keep them from imminent harm, be that assault, starvation, abuse or worse.

The way the world works, at some point, to some extent almost all of us have to delegate some of that protection to others. Out of necessity we hand our children over to care-givers and educators. With no small measure of parental trepidation, we place faith that those people we trust share our interests in protecting and nurturing our children.

The worst nightmare for a parent, and of course, for any child so victimized, is when that faith is betrayed in despicable ways. It doesn't happen most of the time. But it does happen.

Next month, The University of Toronto and its Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE)  will be holding a symposium for schoolteachers called Bodies at Play: Sexuality, childhood and classroom life in which the keynote speaker will be University of Southern California Professor James R. Kincaid.

The ideas behind that choice suggest are both a betrayal of trust and confirmation that the nightmare we fear for our children is real. Indeed, those fears are being mocked by the very people responsible for shaping our public schools.

OISE's keynote speaker Kincaid says
this is an image
"vacated so we can write our passion there." 

A comment on an earlier article I'd written about the Bodies at Play symposium noted that just as the bank robber answered when asked why he robs banks, "because that's where the money is," to pedophiles, schools are where the children are.

There are people who view children as erotic, sexual objects. That is a view that society, at least mainstream North American society, finds abhorrent and vile.

But the person U of T/OISE has chosen as its keynote speaker takes a different view; that the eroticizing of children is normal. In the introduction to his book Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting,  Kincaid wrote, "..most adults in our culture feel some measure of erotic attraction to children and the childlike; I do not know how it could be otherwise."

U of T and OISE's imprimatur of such values and concepts by promoting their advocate to educators of small children is thoroughly loathsome.

The means by which Kincaid attempts to illustrate his theories are more revealing of his own beliefs than they are about society as a whole. His claim that Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone or the young Shirley Temple "look like cartoon characters: Buster Brown or Betty Boop - images vacated so we can write our passion there" is a bizarre interpretation. In my opinion, anyone who truly believes that should be kept well away from children.

Kincaid suggests that we have created bogeymen of child molesters to the extent that "it raises such fears of touching that any form of intimacy may seem hardly worth the risk." When thinking of normal people, Kincaid is wrong, but it is easy to see how someone who believes that most adults view children as erotic objects might think so.

Children need comfort and assurance and sometimes that can be in the form of a hug or an arm around a shoulder. For a normal, sane person, there is no more of an erotic aspect to that than there is when in patting a dog or cat.

Kincaid is fundamentally wrong in his belief, that "most adults in our culture feel some measure of erotic attraction to children" and even more so in his belief that we are committing some sin by denying it.

For most of us, the acceptable "range of erotic feelings towards children" would be exactly zero. Not so for Professor Kincaid, who wrote we should  "see what might be done by positing a range of erotic feelings with and toward children. Rather than assuming that such feelings exist in only two forms - not at all or out of control - perhaps we could learn something of their differences, manner of expression and effects, allowing them a complex and dynamic relativity."

As a society, we have every interest in deploring and condemning the odious postulations that Kincaid proposes. By normalizing the eroticization of children, it is only a small measure away from normalizing the logical next step of that reprehensible idea. Will the next OISE symposium for educators feature someone who tells us we're overreacting when we condemn actual sex between adults and children?

There are depraved individuals who derive erotic stimulation from children. Evidently, it has eluded the brain trust at OISE that suggesting to educators such feelings are normal is not likely to instill many parents with confidence in them.

While Kincaid's writings may have esoteric philosophical value, the choice of having him as a keynote speaker at a symposium for teachers of young children suggests stupidity at best, and an acceptance of the most repugnant values at worst.  That either is guiding an institution which influences the approach taken to education in Canada is indicative of the appalling state of our public school system.

This isn't good: University of Toronto's pedophile-friendly symposium on "childhood" for teachers

Maybe it's just me.

I know that if I were running an Education Department that got the most attention it ever received for having one of its senior academics arrested on charges of producing child pornography just a couple of months ago, I'd think twice about holding a symposium with a keynote speaker whose work demonstrates an obsession with a supposed "erotic appeal" of children.

But this is the University of Toronto we're talking about and its major education faculty, The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), is a place where just about any preposterous, moronic, self-indulgent diatribe can qualify a person for an advanced degree.

OISE's Centre for Urban Schooling is presenting, along with York University and U of Toronto's Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, a symposium called  "BODIES AT PLAY: Sexuality, childhood and classroom life."

Some of it is comparatively benign, if comically idiotic New Age drivel of the sort an author like John Mortimer or Martin Amis might have invented to parody the self-indulgent vapidity of posturing academics. These people, who want to wear ostensible enlightenment on their sleeves, have a hodgepodge of fatuous buzz-words that routinely surface in everything they say or do. See how many you can spot in the biographical description of one of the presenters:

Louise Azzarello, B.A., B.Ed., M.A. is a media educator working from an interdisciplinary and equity framework. Her M.A. thesis, Spectacle & Discipline: Regulating Female Bodies through Dance explored the notions of body regulation in Western Theatrical Dance from a feminist social and political perspective. She has taught in a number of tdsb schools working with marginalized/racilaized youth and designing curriculum that embeds issues of equity and social justice.

However, the tone takes a more disturbing turn when looking at the works of the keynote speaker, James R. Kincaid.

As summed up by the author Mark Spilka, Kincaid's work, Child Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture, is a mission to "persuade us that erotic child-loving is after all okay, as long as it involves other people's children and is never consummated."

It could be the reactionary prude in me, but that's really not the attitude I would like to see fostered in people entrusted with the care of innocent young children. Were I to attend the symposium, no doubt I'd learn my concerns are silly overreactions since, according to Professor Kincaid, that whole "childhood innocence" thing is just an artificial construct developed by Victorians.

Indeed, in another of his books, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting, Kincaid notes ''the subject of the child's sexuality and erotic appeal, along with our evasion of what we have done by bestowing those gifts, now structures our culture.''

Maybe that's true if your culture is centered at places like OISE, but not necessarily for the rest of us. 

If all this is upsetting to you, undoubtedly Professor Kincaid could explain that this is all a way of stimulating your own sexual tantalization. 

The fear that sex might corrupt them is sexually exciting for us. ''We denounce it all loudly but never have done with it,'' he writes. ''Indignation comes to seem almost like pleasure.''

OISE is a faculty whose graduates were instrumental in formulating the extremely controversial curriculum that was widely condemned for exposing highly sexualized content to young children. An attempt to introduce that curriculum by OISE professor and accused child pornographer Ben Levin, when he was Ontario's Deputy Education Minister, was withdrawn by then-Premier Dalton McGuinty following the outcry from outraged parents across the province.

That setback clearly hasn't dissuaded OISE from pursuing its deplorable agenda. They could be counting on the public having a short attention span. They may have calculated that when it comes to the way children are educated, the public really isn't paying that much attention at all.

Sadly, as we can see from their ongoing travesties that continue with impunity, on that final point, they could be right.


UPDATE: The following brief excerpt is from Professor Kincaid's book, Erotic Innocence:

We might try to manage without stark essentialist ideas of sexuality and sexual behavior, see what might be done by positing a range of erotic feelings with and toward children. Rather than assuming that such feelings exist in only two forms - not at all or out of control - perhaps we could learn something of their differences, manner of expression and effects, allowing them a complex and dynamic relativity.

It's important to be plain about this and not try to counter erotic attraction to children with nothing stronger than nostalgia and talk about how sweet children are. For one thing, nostalgia and sweetness are not antidotes to eroticism but ingredients of it; for another, they are trifles. I believe most adults in our culture feel some measure of erotic attraction to children and the childlike; I do not know how it could be otherwise.

           (from pgs 24-25)


More on this HERE