Ontario Secondary School Teacher's Federation Misses Opportunity To Open Up Debate On Middle East
January 20, 2007 (MMN Editorial): Two Toronto high school teachers, English teacher and Jewish activist Jason Kunin, and computer science teacher Hyssam Hulays, recently put forth two motions to District 12 of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation to hold a debate on whether the teacher's union should support a boycott, divestment and sanction campaigns against Israel as well as endorse a report which exposes ongoing human rights violations against the Palestinian people. The debate was to be held on Thursday January 18. Initially the motion was approved by the Teacher's Federation, but then in steps B'nai Brith and the Jewish Defence League, who opposed holding the debate and adopting the motion altogther. B'nai Brith launched an e-mail campaign against holding the debate, urging list subscribers to speak out against what it calls "inherently, one-sided, biased propaganda," while the Jewish Defence League threatened to picket the meeting in which the debate was to be held.
The main objection of B'nai Brith was that they felt the motions, which they called anti-Israel propaganda, would turn anti-Semitic and that these sentiments would enter school classrooms. Frank Dimant, the executive director of B'nai B'rith, actually likened the motion to "bringing hate into the classroom."
In addition, the group argued that the motion ignores human-rights abuses in other countries and there's no condemnation of Palestinian violence.
Under this intense pressure from these two Jewish groups to muzzle dissent and expose the ungoing and well documented Israeli atrocities against the Palestinian people, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation rejected the motion.
Also, as reported in the January 19th edition of the National Post, Len Rudner, National Director of community relations for the Canadian
Jewish Congress, stated the the proposed motion was unbalanced and would put teachers in a
position where they would be taking sides in the long-running conflict rather than
fostering healthy debate, although he sees no problem, it would appear, with the teachers
taking a pro-Israeli position and silencing the debate altogether.
Rudner further stated that "The union has the right to
involve itself in matters of the larger world, but it has a responsibility to do so in a
constructive and balanced way," to which we respond by asking how can a debate be
balanced if it is silenced from the start?
There are many concerns here regarding the actions of B'nai Brith and the Jewish Defence League.
First of all, the issue did not have anything to do with anti-semitism but was a legitmate issue of debate on a well known and ongoing issue which daily attracks the world's attention. It is important that those who wish to be informed about both sides of the issue and venture to speak out on the daily atrocities facing the Palestinian people be not cowed into silence by the threat of being called anti-Semitic. We are talking about a people who are passing though a living hell on earth. As merely one example of numerous reports available, please refer to report by Jan Egeland and Jan Eliasson in the Thursday 28 September 2006 addition of the newspaper La Figaro entitled "The Human Catastrophe of Gaza Is a Time Bomb," to know what we are talking about: http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/64/22822
Secondly, there is a free speech issue here where concerned individuals are seeking to highlight ongoing human rights abuses which are well documented and are not a matter of dispute. Although B'nai Brith and the Jewish Defence League state that the proposed motions are "inherently, one-sided, biased propaganda," in fact this can be said about the current media coverage of the events taking place the Middle East, with its consistent pro-Israel bias and distortions of the facts on the ground, and those who venture to speak out against Israeli artrocities are silenced or are accused of anti-semitism.
Finally, as for concerns over the politicization of classrooms, our children do not live in a vacuum. Classrooms are not a place to bury one's head in the sand and pretend that the rest of the world, with all of its problems, does not exsist. Our educational institutions should be a place where open debate and inquiry can take place and the facts presented as they are. Muzzling dissent and not allowing open discussion to take place, which is exactly what B'nai Brith and the Jewish Defence League have accopmplished with their campaign of disinformation and distortion, is not in the true spirit of inquiry, and this spirit must be something we encourage in our children as they learn about the world around them.
We would be negligent to mention that the FBI considers the Jewish Defence League to be a "right-wing terrorist group." Please see the 2001 FBI report at: http://www.fbi.gov/publications/terror/terror2000_2001.htm
It is disappointing that the Ontario Secondary School Teacher's Federation missed the opportunity to open up this debate by accepting these motions which would have provide their pupils the opportunity to see another side of a currently presented one-sided story.
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See also: Teacher's Union Defends Right to Freedom of Speech: http://www.osstfd12.com/artman/publish/cat_index_20.shtml
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