The Muslim Student Association at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia is presenting an awareness event about Gaza on February 23. Judging by the notice on the Association's website, sfu.ca/~msa, advertising posters on campus and the content and tone of similar events at colleges and universities throughout Canada and the United States it will have nothing to do with reality and will be full of outright lies, distortions, hatred and attacks on Jews and Israel.
Real awareness won't be on offer and anyone who tries to present a contrary viewpoint will either be shouted down or prevented from speaking in the first place. Bias and disinformation will be the order of the day and those who seek an accurate picture of the situation in Gaza and the reasons for it will have to look elsewhere...they certainly won't find it at this event.
Simon Fraser University should be ashamed of itself for allowing such an unbalanced, hateful, inaccurate, patently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel event on its campus. This calls the academic integrity of the university into question, aligns it with Islamists, their apologists and other racist, destructive elements in Canada and the U.S. and greatly diminishes its reputation for honesty, fairness and objectivity.
Unbalanced, hateful, inaccurate, patently anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. That's an exact description of the event alright. If SFU keeps sanctioning events like it (the odious Israeli Apartheid Week for instance) it will soon be known as York University West or University of California at Irvine North, York and UC Irvine being institutions which have been beset by Islamists and their apologists and whose standing has suffered accordingly.
Right-minded Canadians and Americans should speak out vociferously against these events on their campuses and keep the purveyors of hate and lies off them. The event at Simon Fraser is but one example of the rot that is infecting colleges and universities in Canada and the United States, and it would behoove all of us to excise it while we still can.
Our students deserve much better.
Jerry Philipson
Comox, British Columbia, Canada
