Motives behind Gypsy anti-Sun News demonstration

Somewhere between "minuscule" and "small" would describe the size of the demonstration held outside Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission offices in Toronto last Tuesday by the Roma community protesting against the Sun News Network. There were about two dozen people in total, including speakers which included "social activist" Bernie Farber and former Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj.

There is no defending the content of Ezra Levant's tirade against the Gypsy community last year. Sun News issued an apology almost immediately after its broadcast and Levant himself apologized in great length and detail last month. 

Hopefully, that would have put the unfortunate episode in the past, but the issue has become less a cause about offense to the Gypsy community than as a spear opponents of Sun News would use to strike at the fledgling conservative news network.

That motive was so transparent that aspects of the protest took on an element of self-parody. Among the complaints by Roma Community Centre Director Gina Csányi-Robah was that Sun News continues to use the "offensive" term Gypsy to describe the Roma people. Making that claim ridiculous, following her speech, the event's Master of Ceremonies announced a performance by two musicians from the group "The Gypsy Lions."

A definitive monograph on the Gypsies by University of British Colombia Sociology Professor Werner Cohn refutes much of what Ms Csányi-Robah, who was born in Canada, alleges. Cohn is extremely sympathetic to the Gypsies, whose culture he studied in great detail and he dispels dangerous slanders against them such as the allegation of Gypsies "stealing children."

But he also points out that the Gypsies are in fact a number of peoples, most of whom self-identify as Gypsies and of whom the Roma (or Rom or Romani) are just one group.

Bernie Farber's interest in the Roma community is curious. He undoubtedly is sincere in advocating for people he considers oppressed. But it is remarkably convenient for him that in agitating against Sun News, he can attack people with whom he has an apparent ax to grind. As Farber pointed out in an interview on CBC Radio's As It Happens, there is a long history and no love lost between him and Ezra Levant.

That interview is fascinating in a number of ways. The biases and abuses of the state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation have been a frequent Sun TV target that could possibly even be described as an obsession, and Levant's Gypsy faux pas is being seized upon as an opportunity for payback.

In the interview, Farber and As it Happens host Carol Off compete with each other to malign Sun News and Levant, working themselves into a crescendo of bile. Off is famous for her lack of emotional allocution. For those unfamiliar with her vocal style, imagine a lobotomized, female Ben Stein on Ritalin and that will give you an idea of her bland droning.  But on this occasion her disdain for Sun News was so evident that she actually conveyed feeling in her voice.

But that feeling was rife with hypocrisy. As blogger Blogwrath has noted, the CBC has broadcast anti-Gypsy programming that invokes the most hateful stereotypes they face.

At the protest, former Liberal MP Wrzesnewskyj betrayed himself as an intellectual featherweight by comparing Ezra Levant to the unapologetic neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. 

Wrzesnewskyj was one of the most anti-Israel MPs in the House of Commons while he sat there. He co-authored a heavily biased anti-Israel report along with pathologically anti-Israel NDP MP Libby Davies.  On his trip to make that report, he was accompanied by Sea Hitler organizer Ehab Lotayef  and a group of fanatics who routinely support and participate in the "Israeli Apartheid Week" hate-fest that has been condemned by the last two federal Liberal Party leaders, Ignatieff and Rae. Wrzesnewskyj was compelled to resign as Liberal Foreign Affairs Critic in 2006 after he advocated that Canada engage with the terror group Hezbollah.

Ms Csányi-Robah has her own odd history of engaging, on behalf of her community, with nefarious groups. She has aligned the Roma cause with radical fanatics who want an end to Israel as a Jewish state. That association has shamed a number of Canadian Roma who wanted to distance themselves from such hate. That may partially account for why she was unable to garner much support from her own community for her Tuesday protest. 

It might strike some as remarkable that former Canadian Jewish Congress boss Farber would be part of such an event.  But Farber has been remaking himself recently since losing his role as one of  Canada's top "Official Jews." He has been using his twitter account to promote links from anti-Israel hysterics such as blogger Dr. Dawg, and the vehemently anti-Israel website rabble.ca. 

As blogger Sassywire points out, many in the Jewish community have been urging Farber for some time to come to protests against anti-Semites and Islamist hate-mongers seeking Israel's elimination, but he has not notably done so. Ironically the protest he makes a point of attending, he does so alongside people associated with anti-Israel causes to condemn the most pro-Israel media outlet in Canada.

In the end, it doesn't take much examination to get the impression that, like most people opposed to free speech, the protesters against Sun News appear less interested in suppressing hatred than they do in suppressing points of view that differ from theirs. 

Werner Cohn on Titles and Other Ornamental Self-Descriptions

Some sixty years ago I wrote a letter to Albert Einstein. I disagreed with a statement he had made that seemed to me too indulgent of the Stalin regime. Within a week I had a reply, assuring me that he, Einstein, fully shared my own views of Stalin. He signed this note “A. Einstein.” No more, no less. Now here is my question to all the self-styled “doctors” and all the self-styled “Ph.D.’s” of our time: would Einstein have been more impressive to me, or to you, dear reader, had he signed “Dr. Einstein” ?

In the course of my travels, I've met a few people with Ph.D's who insist on being called "Doctor." None of them has the skill to remove a wart or turn on a TARDIS, so their use of the title was a sign of either pomposity or insecurity.

Read the rest of Werner Cohn's very insightful piece HERE.

Guilt by Association: Why the totalitarian left is so offended by it (unless you happen to be asociated with a "right-winger")

All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. I.F.Stone

A "new McCarthyism" is seen in the manner in which guilt by association has been pursued by the likes of Glenn Beck and "mainstream" GOP leadership (if there is such a thing). Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation

In the United States of America, we don’t practice guilt by association. And let’s remember that just as violence and extremism are not unique to any one faith, the responsibility to oppose ignorance and violence rests with us all. Jeremy Ben Ami, President, JStreet

This is the story of a late-twentieth century invention, namely the ostensible moral and intellectual sin of accusations of "guilt by association."

This trope, "guilt by association," or GbA, has a curious history and a curious present. It has the following characteristics:

1) The trope user is almost invariably a self-described person of the "Left," or, in somewhat more modern usage, a "progressive." The target is someone perceived as, or at least designated as someone opposed to the Left, a "right-winger."

2) The trope has a surface resemblance to accusations of established errors of reasoning -- fallacies -- but in fact it is the user of the trope who is illogical and irrational.

3) The accusation underlying the usage of the trope is as much moral as intellectual; the trope user combines a disdain for the ethics and morality of the target (the ostensible bad faith of so-called right-wing McCarthites, for example) with an accusation of intellectual incompetence (failure to understand elementary logic).

4) The trope enables its users, who are often devoted supporters of totalitarian and other hateful movements, to pose as moral and intellectual superiors.

The totalitarian Left decries "Guilt by association."  And yet, if you remember just a few months ago, after the mass murders committed in Norway by the crazed lone gunman Anders Breivik, they were the same people trying to associate his rampage with Christianity, Israel, and any writer who was critical of extremist Islam.  This is far from being the only example of western totalitarian leftist hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, people like Noam Chomsky and George Galloway came out immediately blaming not the fanatical expression of a religion with which they have allied themselves, but the United States and the West for having angered the Islamists.

I would encourage everyone to read all of Professor Werner Cohn's fascinating essay HERE.

Is OISE failing the test of academic standards and free speech?

“There’s hypocrisy at the University of Toronto bureaucracy that says it defends freedom of speech. There is no freedom of speech for dissenters. It’s a political cult without dissenters, and they’ve found a way for the public to finance it.”


More here from the Canadian Jewish News

Is pushing only one point of view academic freedom?

The situation at the Sociology and Equity Studies in Education Department at OISE seems to have only one political agenda, to the exclusion of all others.

Today, Werner Cohn offers the following analysis of the state of affairs there:

..at the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto), we have a fairly modern and fashionable version: social science held captive by ultra-left dogmatists. There are two interesting features of this new dogmatism: 1) it is not freely agreed to by its constituency, as is the case with the Evangelical Christians, nor 2) is it enforced by state power. Instead it has come about and is enforced by stealth: the new dogmatists have been able to seize control of a publicly-financed institution, and they seem to perpetuate their control through their power over recruitment procedures.

.. Faculty attitudes toward Jews and Israel are not shown in the listings of "teaching emphasis." But seven out of the thirty-two are publicly on record as condemning Israel, as shown by their signatures on petitions dated Jan. 12, Feb. 27, and Feb. 28 of 2009. At about the same time other academics signed petitions favoring Israel, but I was not able find SESE names on that kind of statement. Now obviously, a faculty member can have a private life, and in that private life can express political views of any and all sorts. But as we have seen in the current discussion on the Peto and Epstein theses -- the only recent SESE theses dealing with Jews -- all of the SESE scholarship on that topic suggests, not to put too fine a point on it, that the vast majority of Jews are Fascist pigs. Surely more can be said on the subject ? Apparently not, apparently not at SESE.

Read the entire post at Werner Cohn's blog, Fringe Groups

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:

University of Toronto offers weak response to concerns about institutional anti-Israel bias at OISE

The University of Toronto has responded, but not really responded, to concerns about a Master's Thesis submitted in the Sociology and Equity Studies in Education program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) by one Jenny Peto, that alleges "Jewish Racism" is part of "Hegemonic Holocaust Education" and suggests a Jewish/Zionist conspiracy to exploit Holocaust guilt.

According to the Canadian Jewish News:

Responding to a request for an interview, the University of Toronto issued a written statement by vice-president and provost Cheryl Misak: “Due to our privacy obligations to students, I cannot discuss an individual student’s academic work or his or her performance. What I can, say, however, is that freedom of expression issues are ever-present in our society, especially on a university campus. The University of Toronto’s Statement on Freedom of Speech makes it clear that freedom of inquiry lies at the very heart of our institution: ‘all members of the University must have as a prerequisite freedom of speech and expression, which means the right to examine, question, investigate, speculate and comment on any issue without reference to prescribed doctrine, as well as the right to criticize the University and society at large.’ 

“Of the thousands of MA theses written at the University of Toronto in partial fulfilment of degree requirements, it is inevitable that some will have elements that offend various individuals and groups."

It is commendable that the University of Toronto values free speech. But there are issues that remain unaddressed, like the perception that the culture at OISE has become so virulently anti-Israel and anti-Zionist that theses which have the appearance of anti-Semitism have become acceptable there.

And there is the question of whether the anti-Israel attitude at OISE has become so politically rancid that anti-Zionism has become more important there than basic scholarship.


Werner Cohn, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, and one of the first people to draw attention to the thesis, The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education" wrote of the author's scholarship:

"..she is an autodidact who knows how to quote from others, whenever that seems to serve the cause, and thus to give her thesis the sheen of formal scholarship.The only problem is that the footnotes and references to the literature in no way support her contentions, and that she does not muster facts or data of any kind to give her thesis the weight of an academic argument."

"..she makes assertions, but it can’t be called an advancement of knowledge as she doesn’t test it in any way."

Ms Peto's thesis characterized the March of the Living, a prestigious Holocaust education program, as an "abuse of Holocaust memory for Zionist and racist purposes" (pg 108).


An indictment of Ms Peto comes from March of the Living national director Eli Rubenstein. “She hasn’t been on a trip where you see a Holocaust survivor holding the hand of someone who survived the Rwandan genocide or the Sudanese genocide, that it’s comforting and helps them to heal.

“How can you write a master’s thesis and not speak to a single survivor, educator or student in the program, and how can the university accept that?” he asked.

“We have survivors who rebuilt their lives and want to share their stories of survival and make sure that it doesn’t happen to anybody, and here you have someone criticizing us for that… it’s very sad.”

In fact, the only first hand research on the March of the Living Ms Peto is able to cite in her 2010 Thesis comes from her viewing of the March of the Living website in 2006!

This addresses Professor Cohn's principle concern by critics of the thesis and by extension, the culture at OISE in the assertion that "the thesis was devoid of scholarship."

U of T Provost Misak said,  "the university is committed to allowing and encouraging a full range of debate. The best way for controversy to unfold is for members of our community to engage with the perspectives and arguments they dispute. It is intelligent argument, not censorship, that lies at the heart of our democratic society and its institutions.”

These are commendable sentiments. But the question remains, where is the debate at OISE?

At a meeting of the OISE Graduate Student Association to discuss whether they should involve themselves with  the bigoted "Israeli Apartheid Week," the minutes don't indicate any debate. They indicate a universal acceptance of the notion that the Zionist entity must be oppressive. The only expressed concern is about how to imply that they are not anti-Semitic.

And who is the person they had to address that concern?

None other than guest speaker Jenny Peto! Well, with expert advice like that, how could they go wrong?

Ms Peto's thesis advisor is Sheryl Nestel. Ms Nestel has made the conference presentation: "Mapping Jewish Dissent: Jewish Anti-occupation Activism in Toronto." The Department Chair, Rinaldo Walcott, is a signatory to at least two anti-Israel petitions.

Where is the debate at OISE?

For U of T Provost Misak to say that the “university is committed to allowing and encouraging a full range of debate” is most welcome. Perhaps she can let us know when that policy is put into practice at OISE.

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.