Canadian schools.

Submitted by Mike (Canada), Jul 14, 2011 at 11:49

I am a conservative student of philosophy in Canada. In a class on international 20th century diplomacy between the great powers, I learned that there was "no unified Arab response" to the creation of the State of Israel, in a lecture that avoided entirely any mention of the war of independence. In this same, 4th year class, students have asked, when the Middle East was under discussion, questions like "doesn't Israel just steal people's land so it can get everything for free?" I am not kidding. We had to read Chapter 4 of "Shattered Dreams", an account of the negotiations between Arafat and Barak at Camp David.

I urge anyone to read that chapter (available on Google Books) and to see whether their own critical evaluation accords with the unanimous position in class that "Israel was not willing to make any concessions." When I pointed out that Barak had been willing to allow the Palestinian Arab flag to fly over the Temple Mount (!), an Arab in class remarked "you can't really trust whether Israeli concessions are serious, just look what they're doing in the occupied territories today", and so on.

In other words, it is no different on the West Coast of Canada, not even in a school that is highly regarded, than it is on your West Coast when it comes to the question of anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, anti-Jew, pro-Arab propaganda. I am an award-winning student here. In my eyes, there is no hope for the great majority of my classmates, one of whom, just the other day, told me that she is tired of reading books, like Plato's Republic, written by "dead white guys." Will somebody like that ever spend an extra ten or twenty minutes, nevermind ten or twenty hours, sorting through anything of worth that was written by someone who is now no longer? Perhaps, but only if he's black, or maybe if he's an Arab.

In my eyes, conservative groups and Jewish groups on campus need to ratchet up their pro-conservative and pro-Israeli propaganda campaigns in a very big way if they want to stand a chance in the war of ideas. Their classmates will soon go on to be journalists, voters, politicians, lawyers and so on, and if those classmates have never had the orthodox propaganda line challenged, they will be hard for the conservatives to befriend or to make use of.

So as not to pick on my history class, in which the above-mentioned remarks were made, let me end with a comment an "Ethics and World History" professor recently made: Christianity and Islam are both pacific religions, so how is a state, which is not pacific, to manage itself if it is a Christian or Islamic state? This position, that Islam is a pacific religion, is, as you know, a common and pernicious lie. I am merely reporting the circumstances under which it continues to circulate here in the Canadian university system,

Mike.

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