Pro-Palestinian journalist tells the truth at UBC lecture: Western Anti-Israel activism serves to help terrorists

People will say all sorts of revealing things among friends and fellow travellers that they would never dream of uttering to an audience where they know they would face some scrutiny. That’s why it is important to hear what anti-Israel activists say among themselves at what they refer to as Palestinian solidarity events. Within their own coterie, sometimes the veil slips and they discuss the actual agenda of the movement to vilify Israel with the label, “apartheid state.” The purpose of the movement is not justice for Palestinians within Israel, something that they already have in a country that has universal enfranchisement and equality before the law. The purpose is to buy time for terrorists opposed to Israel’s existence to regroup and launch more violent attacks against the Jewish state, which they hope not to make fairer, but to eliminate altogether.

That agenda was made clear by Palestinian solidarity activist and journalist Jon Elmer at the University of British Columbia, at a speech sponsored by that school`s Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights and Boycott Israeli Apartheid groups on December 2. It was one of many such presentations that Elmer has given on Canadian campuses under the billing of “Ghetto Palestine: a talk with Jon Elmer.”   

In his talk, Elmer made it tacitly clear that apartheid is not something that Israel practices, but is trying to avoid. Israeli leaders are cognisant of the fact that their country cannot remain democratic if Palestinians in the West Bank are absorbed into Israel without having voting rights. That is why Israel had not annexed the territory and is working towards a two state solution with the Palestinians. Elmer  overtly acknowledged that Israel`s withdrawal from Gaza was to avoid having a demographic conflict with the Palestinians.     

Though Elmer`s talk was filled with typical anti-Israel propaganda, such as referring to Israeli “occupation” of Gaza although Israel evacuated all troops and left it to self-government in 2006, much of what he said was startlingly frank and shocking.    

He was explicit in his support for violence as a tactic that the Palestinians should use to achieve their goals, saying, “there is a problem with sanctifying non-violence and privileging it above all other elements of the national liberation struggle.”      

After discussing how Israel had effectively wiped out most of the terrorist or as Elmer terms it, “resistance” leadership, he recognized that the Palestinian terror infrastructure was weakened and unable to launch effective armed struggle against Israel.    

“The political context right now in the Palestinian milieu is not strong enough at this point for there to be an Intifada, “ he reported. Then in a remarkable confirmation of what supporters of Israel have alleged about the real motives of western Palestinian activists, he admitted that the main purpose of their political activism was to support the violent attacks on Israel.     

Said Elmer, “It’s important to understand that the solidarity actions, the solidarity activism that happens during this period of time is in effect buying political time and political space for the indigenous movement to rebuild. So it’s possible, like with South Africa, for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to work effectively hand in hand with the indigenous struggle and at times do some of the heavy lifting in the international arena while the local struggle takes time to redevelop.”      

He also made a facile comparison between the Syrian dictatorship of Assad and Gaddafi’s dictatorship in Libya to the situation between Israel and the Palestinians,  saying that it was hypocritical to support the armed struggle against undemocratic dictatorship to while not supporting Palestinian violence. Elmer`s apparent moral relativism and anti-Israel bias may account for inability to differentiate between brutal, undemocratic dictators bent on preserving their own power at all costs and a democratic country that respects rule-of-law whose government’s main concern is the protection and safety of its citizens. But the honesty of the Palestinian solidarity movement’s promotion of violence, their not-so hidden agenda to eliminate Israel, and the acquiescence of The University of British Columbia and other universities to events that lend support to terrorism is a reality that Canadians need to recognize when understanding the discourse of  the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in our public institutions and media.

OISE's Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education - scholarship subservient to radical ideology

University of British Colombia Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Werner Cohn, has done an analysis of the abstracts of 18 theses produced by the Ontario Studies in Education's Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education.  The results are in an open report submitted to David Naylor, the President of the University of Toronto.

From Werner Cohn's report:

Not only do these eighteen theses propound political agendas rather than detached scholarship, but the politics of all eighteen are of one sort and one sort only: radical leftism. I found no thesis that, for instance, urged a conservative viewpoint, or a Christian one, or, Heaven forbid, Zionism. This political uniformity of the theses contradicts the recent statements by U of T officials to the effect that OISE promotes freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. OISE, or at least SESE, does not seem to be a place where deviation from the left-wing orthodoxy is at all tolerated.

You can read Professor Cohn's entire report here.


This interview provides some interesting perspective:

Professor Werner Cohn: Prolegomena to the Study of Jews who hate Israel - Not to Weep or to Laugh, but to Understand

Professor Cohn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of British Columbia

"Broadly speaking, Jews who hate Israel fall into three categories: a) the famous, of which Noam Chomsky is about the only one; b) the well-known, like Norman Finkelstein and Tony Judt, and c) others who are not known beyond their immediate circles but who do lurk in various crevices of the Internet. Altogether, as I will explain below, it is not likely that there are more than a few thousand of these haters active worldwide, say fewer than 10,000 and probably no more than half that number. Considering that there are more than 13 million Jews in the world at the moment, the proportion of those who actively hate Israel, about 0.04 of one percent, might well be considered to be modest indeed. "

In Canada, we have one or two in the locally "well-known" category, such as non-credible players like Naomi Klein and her husband, what's-his-name, and Judy Rebick.

For more about this very interesting look at a sad phenomenon, read Professor Cohn's entire piece here.