University of Calgary Sociology textbook peddles excuses for bin Laden and lies about Israel

A trio of Brock University blowhards, Marxist professor Murray Smith, the late Judith Blackwell, a Women's Studies professor who died in 2005 at the age of 61 from cancer, and John Sorenson, who teaches Critical Animal Studies (yes, you read that right) authored a textbook which is currently in use at The University of Calgary's Sociology Department that offers a morally relativistic approach to Osama bin Laden's terror campaign.

Published by The University of Toronto Press, Culture of Prejudice: Arguments in Critical Social Science is not only anti-Western, but is tinged with anti-Semitism and filled with blatant falsehoods:

One section reads:

One thing leads to another. Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization presented three conditions for ending their “holy war” against the United States both before and after the events of September 11, 2001: first, that Israel retreat from the territories that it occupied in 1967 and that an autonomous Palestinian state be recognized; second, that the trade sanctions imposed upon Iraq that have cost the lives of over one and a half million people, most of them children, over the last decade be lifted; and third, that United States military bases established in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War of 1991 be closed. An overwhelming majority of humankind would likely sympathize with these demands, even as they would condemn bin Laden's methods and reject his program of establishing repressive, fundamentalist theocratic states throughout the “Islamic world.” At the same time, most inhabitants of the Third World-and a great many people elsewhere-would consider the terrorist methods of al Qaeda no more “evil” (to use President George W. Bush's favoured term) than the methods employed by the US and other major powers in maintaining a global order that serves the interests of huge transnational corporations while perpetuating the grinding poverty of billions of people.

Bin Laden's "Letter to America" and his demands are a litany of hysteria but did not include that Israel withdraw to its 1967 lines but implies that it should not exist and the land should belong to "the Muslims."

The textbook also promulgates a number of falsehoods about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict designed to instil its readers with a heavy bias against Israel, stating in another section:

  ...More recently, supernatural sanctions have been invoked by Israelis who violently dispossessed the population of Palestine. As Israel came to be defined as a Jewish state, promised to them long ago by a supernatural being, most of the Palestinian population was expelled; approximately 4.5 million still live there as refugees. Millions of Palestinians remain under military occupation, under constant surveillance and regular attack by Israeli forces, including tanks, fighter planes, and helicopter gunships. Their houses and land have been destroyed or expropriated and given to hundreds of thousands of armed settlers.

Thus the textbook characterizes Israeli-Arab citizens as "refugees" a status that even the ridiculous definition in use by the vociferously anti-Israel UN Relief and Work Agency for Palestine would not encapsulate. Beyond that, the grossly inflated number exceeds the total number of Palestinians in The West Bank and Gaza combined, most of whom are not considered refugees.

More of the ideologically inspired nonsense in Culture of Prejudice: Arguments in Critical Social Science is discussed and refuted at the blog Elder of Ziyon.

The use of this textbook discredits any program and university employing it. Whether the University of Calgary's Sociology Department continues to use it will be an indicator of the credibility of the program and its graduates.  Unfortunately, as is evidenced by a disgraceful 2009 incident at the University of Toronto's Social Work Department, instigated by a professor there, it seems academic Social Sciences have too often become politicized arenas for under-qualified polemicists. 

Politically correct sociologists outraged at study of Gay parents

Homosexuality is a natural facet of animal behavior in some circumstances, and the obvious reason that it occurs in nature is for population reduction.

I support Gay marriage, but it really is no shock that children have worse outcomes being raised by same-sex partners than by two biological parents.

But don't ever dare say that in public, or a storm of outraged, politically-correct, substandard academics will bay like wolves.




h/t American Power

University of Toronto trying to rehabilitate "Professor Jew Count"

You might remember U of Toronto professor Rupaleem Bhuyan, who was described by colleague Professor Ernie Lightman as having facilitated an anti-Semitic "Jew Count" in her Social Work post graduate class, and according to the director of PhD programs at the Factor-Inwentash school of Social Work at U of T, said " ‘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. " and added that "the donor plaques at the university were all from rich Jews", which she felt proved her point.

The U of T demonstrated either extraordinary cowardice by retaining her, or perhaps shares that point of view, but doesn't want to admit that too loudly for fear of forfeiting the Jew money they take in every year from benefactors like Peter Munk, Jeff Skoll, Charles Bronfman, the Reichman family, etc, etc. Or perhaps because Ms Bhuyan is a visible minority, she gets a free pass on the racism issue, since as we know from the University's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) faculty, only whites can be racist.

Whatever the reason, with the imprimatur of the University of Toronto, Bhuyan is popping up as a speaker at conferences, perhaps in the hope that by the time of her next review, the controversy will all be forgotten.

If the University of Toronto keeps hiring people like that or sweeping their public classroom bigotry under the carpet, perhaps Canadian Jews might consider an alternative destination for their largess.

You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to connect these dots..

"The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education," is Jenny Peto's infamous thesis in which she claims to "show how Jewish victimhood is instrumentalized in ways that obscure Jewish privilege, deny Jewish racism and promote the interests of the Israeli nation-state."

What's really behind it?

On the very first page, she wrote, "In the first grade, after having been told that I could not play the lead in our school play because I was a girl, I decided that god was either sexist or nonexistent. Either way, I wanted to have nothing to do with him."

If only little Grade 1 Jenny had known people in show business, they could have told her that rejection is part of the trade. You have to learn how to deal with it, get over it, and move on the the next audition. One of the reasons so many actors turn to Scientology is that it teaches confidence and how to overcome rejection.

Imagine how much happier a person she would be if Jenny's influences had been Scientologists such as John Travolta and not a Maoist fanatic like Norman Finkelstein.  Say what you will about Scientology, they haven't been responsible for a single suicide bomber, let alone the 10 million murders of the Cultural Revolution.

Would having been cast as a male in a school play been enough to have turned Jenny from the path she chose? It doesn't look like it.

Because being a girl didn't keep Jenny from playing male roles for long. As this picture shows, by Grade 5  Jenny is taking what appears to be a male role in a play. It was in 1992 and was put on by Associated Hebrew Schools, one of "the sexist, gender-normative and heterosexist educational institutions [she] was forced to attend."

Guess who the cute little thespian, 2nd from the left, is

But sadly, during those four years since Grade 1, it seems irreparable damage had been done.

Or maybe not!

Jenny wrote: "Despite all of my rebellion against the oppressive beliefs of my parents, teachers and religious leaders, the one aspect of my upbringing and education that I never questioned was Zionism – loyalty to the Israeli nation-state. In fact, Zionism fit within my childhood understanding of anti-oppression politics.."

Coily oppressing Q*bert with its racist,
hegemonic purple snake privilege

What a coincidence! Zionism fit within my childhood understanding of anti-oppression politics too! Wait. No it didn't. My mistake. I have to confess that as a child, I didn't spend much time considering anti-oppression politics. But I did manage to get the high score on a Q*bert machine once, if that counts. (Q*bert was frequently oppressed by Coily, a springy snake.) On the other side, I didn't give a lot of thought to Zionism either, unless watching The Ten Commandments on TV is an act of imperialist, colonialist, repressive Zionism.

But the hegemonic influence of Zionism was able to stay within Jenny Peto's psyche until a watershed event occurred, which she describes as follows:




Ancient oppressor with early Zionist propaganda



"I was having dinner with a friend who I thought was Lebanese – I later learned that his family were Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. His brother, who had just arrived in Toronto from the United Arab Emirates joined us. He was wearing a necklace with Handala on it. I recognized it as Naj Al-Ali’s famous cartoon of a Palestinian child holding a rock behind his back and immediately demanded to know why he had a terrorist on his necklace. We then got into an argument about Israel and Palestine that lasted several hours. I pride myself on being able to win most arguments, but in this case I could not beat him – he had facts and history, but all I had was rhetoric and sound-bites."

All she had "was rhetoric and sound bites."  

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Intriguing, and leaving aside the narcissism of "I pride myself on being able to win most arguments," the most interesting and revealing part of the journey into Jenny Peto's rebirth as a Jew who wants to see the end of modern Israel comes from two of her statements:

"It is also significant that I had long seen the organized Jewish community as extremely oppressive. As someone who had experienced violence and oppression within my own Jewish community, it was not very difficult for me to accept that Jews could be oppressors and by extension, that the so-called ‘Jewish state’ could itself be oppressive and violent."

and

"I was already an outcast in the Jewish community, and estranged from my family for being atheist, queer, gender-queer, feminist and generally outspoken in a highly normative, Orthodox setting. I had less to lose in terms of family and community than many anti-Zionist Jews."

If what Jenny Peto says about her childhood experiences are true,  then it is sad and she deserves pity.
 
But it was hardly the fault of the "mainstream" or "organized Jewish community" nor is it the fault of Israel for trying to survive as a democratic state among totalitarian countries bent on its destruction.
 
Peto's "thesis" reads like a cry of anguish and revenge against personal circumstances that caused her to suffer in her youth. She comes across as someone trying to strike back at the values and beliefs of those who caused her pain.
 
That's a tragedy. The greater tragedy is that the Sociology and Equity Studies in Education Department at OISE appears to consider an unsubstantiated cry of anguish to be something that should be awarded a post-graduate degree.


UPDATE: The National Post published the following letter from Jenny Peto's brother, David, which sheds even more light on the unfortunate situation:

It is not my desire to get involved with the details of my sister Jenny Peto's thesis, which has recently generated tremendous controversy. There are people far more qualified than I to debate the merits of the thesis, or lack thereof. There is, however, one point that I would like to contest. My sister dedicated her thesis to our late grandmother, Jolan Peto. She asserted that if our grandmother "were alive today, she would be right there with me protesting against Israeli apartheid."   

Our grandmother was the youngest teacher at the Jewish orphanage in Budapest during the Second World War. She, along with my grandfather, saved countless children from death at the hands of the Nazis. After the war, she saw firsthand the brutality and baseness of the communist regime that came into power. She, along with our grandfather and father escaped to Canada, and celebrated the day of their arrival each and every year. Freedom was not an abstract idea to her; it was alive and tangible for her.   

Our grandmother was a soft-spoken woman, but she had an iron will. She taught us to abhor hatred, and to strive for excellence in everything we did. She was a woman of endless patience and generosity, and boundless love. She was uncompromising in her dedication to truth and honesty, and was also an ardent supporter of the state of Israel. My sister is simply wrong; our grandmother would have been entirely opposed to her anti-Israel protests.   

Our grandmother had a tremendous impact on my life, and her memory continues to be a source of strength and inspiration to my family. My daughter is named after her, and we pray that she will emulate her namesake. I cannot in good conscience allow my sister to misappropriate publicly our grandmother's memory to suit her political ideology.


David Peto, Houston.

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

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.