Faculty At The University Of Toronto Fight Back Against Antisemitism

Finally, much to the annoyance of Uo T’s anti-Israel faculty, Cotler had the nerve to dismiss the claim that Israel practices apartheid. Again, unlike the anti-Israel crowd, Cotler knows what he’s talking about. He was part of Nelson Mandela’s legal team. Indeed, his talk to the UofT’s faculty of medicine happened to take place on the 41 st anniversary of Cotler’s arrest by the South African government.

Not content with calling Cotler racist, the U of T profs also smeared the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, which was a sponsor of Cotler’s talk.

According to the anti-Israel profs, the FSWC “has actively targeted colleagues of colour.”

They were referring to an incident in which some U of T students had called for Dr. Ritika Goel to be fired from her position as the faculty of medicine’s Justice, Anti-Oppression and Advocacy Theme Lead.

In social media posts, Dr. Gael has championed the movement to boycott Israel, while referring to support of Israel as “#BarbaricCulturalPractices.” And retweeted a post showing former Prime Minister Stephen Harper as a puppet controlled by SodaStream, an Israeli carbonated water company. Jews as puppeteers is a long-standing antisemitic motif.

Though her social media posts were from a number of years ago, they convinced Jewish students that Dr. Gael was not appropriate for an anti-oppression role. The FSWC supported  them. It had nothing to do with her being “a person of colour.”

As Jews are not in fact puppeteers secretly pulling the strings of power, Dr. Gael kept her position as Anti-oppression Lead.

The letter of complaint about Cotler’s talk from 45 anti-Israel faculty, prompted Jewish faculty to write their own letter (see here) to the Dean of the faculty of medicine, led by Dr. Frank Sommers, co-founder of Doctors Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (DARA). Signed by 339 Jewish faculty at the U of T, the letter calls out their colleagues’ “falsehoods, twisted logic and antisemitic rhetoric.”

In their complaint to the Dean, the Jewish faculty concluded: “Taken in its entirety, their letter is an example of the very antisemitism that Mr. Cotler dismantled in his presentation. Naturally the other Faculty members don’t like being exposed. That is why they have attacked Mr. Cotler. Sadly, Jews have had to live with this kind of hostility for centuries.”

The Dean could not ignore 339 Jewish faculty, not entirely. She replied politely pointing out various measures against antisemitism taken by the faculty of medicine, but also saying she couldn’t comment on the letter from the anti-Israel faculty because it wasn’t an “open letter” thus, theoretically private, despite having been seen by thousands.