Dr. Richard Cravatts

An Open Letter to Administrators at McGill, York, and U Toronto: Take Back Control of Your Universities

As you are certainly aware, in recent weeks a series of troubling incidents has occurred on your respective campuses. While the events in question were distinct, they all shared a common impulse by groups on your campuses who believe that they, and they alone, are able to set standards for free speech—in these particular cases, involving the debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and how Jewish students and other Israel supporters are treated as part of the university community.

How Universities Enable the Hijacking of Campus Free Speech When Jews are Involved

In a country where multiculturalism has a reverent following and criticism of protected minorities has essentially been criminalized as “hate speech,” it is more than ironic that on some Canadian campuses radical students have taken it upon themselves to target one group, Jewish students, with a hatred that is nominally forbidden for any others. And with a recent incident that took place on November 20th, York University, in particular, has now revealed a troubling pattern of tolerating physical and emotional assaults by pro-Palestinian radicals against Jewish students and others who dare to demonstrate any support for Israel or question the tactics of Islamists in their efforts to destroy the Jewish state.

The 'Altruistic Evil' of Social Justice for the Palestinians

As yet another indication that the university campus has become "an island of repression in a sea of freedom," last March a pro-Israel group, Hasbara Fellowships Canada, was barred from participating in a "Social Justice Week" event organized by the Student Association of Durham College and University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT).

Blaming the victim for Palestinian anti-Semitism

No sooner had a three-day conference on contemporary anti-Semitism at Yale University ended but voices of disapproval arose over a perceived bias and even latent racism of the event. Sponsored by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), and bringing together some 110 scholars to present papers relevant to the theme of "Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity," the conference had as its seemingly benign, and productive, objective to further the initiative's primary role of identifying and seeking to explain current manifestations of the world's oldest hatred.

'Lights of Perverted Science:' Positioning Israel as the Nazi of Nations

Jews have been accused of harming and murdering of non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, perjuriously proclaimed that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover season.

Free Speech on Campus, Depending on Who’s Speaking

In what is yet more evidence that universities have become, at least where campus free speech is concerned, as Harvard’s wise Abigail Thernstrom has described them, “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” the University Of California, San Diego has been undergoing collective apoplexy over some incendiary racial slurs made by students involved in an off-campus fraternity party and in a subsequent broadcast from the school’s radio station. The discovery of a noose and a roughly-fashioned Ku Klux Klan hood on campus only helped stoke tensions and inflame rage at the perceived racism.

Noam Chomsky’s Visceral Hatreds

Noam Chomsky, who spoke at Boston University’s Jacob Sleeper Auditorium on March 2nd as part of the noxious Israeli Apartheid Week and a guest of Students for Justice in Palestine, clearly lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies, conspiracies, and intellectually-imbecilic distortions of history and fact. As a result, MIT’s professor emeritus of linguistics has become a widely-known, eagerly-followed superstar of the Israel-hating, America-hating Left.

Is Assaulting Jewish Students on Canadian Campuses Now Legitimate Criticism of Israel?

In a country where multiculturalism has a reverent following and criticism of protected minorities has essentially been criminalized as “hate speech,” it is more than ironic that on some Canadian campuses radical students have taken it upon themselves to target one group, Jewish students, with a hatred that is nominally forbidden for any others.

Is Gaza’s Islamic University an Educational Institution CUPE Ought to be Defending?

- Richard L. Cravatts, PhD Taking a cue from a similar effort by its morally-imbecilic union brethren in Britain, the Ontario chapter of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) made the smarmy announcement that, “as a protest against the December 29 bombing of the Islamic University in Gaza,” it would introduce a resolution seeking to ban Israeli academics from speaking, teaching, or conducting research at Ontario university campuses. Acceding to an appeal from the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees, Sid Ryan, president of CUPE Ontario, announced that the union had decided, no doubt after thoughtful and troubling deliberation, that it was “ready to say Israeli academics should not be on our campuses unless they explicitly condemn the university bombing and the assault on Gaza in general.”