August 6, 2024

A Threat to Public Safety

What follows is an abridged version of Chapter Seven of the author's just-published book Analyzing the Israel Effect in Canada (Routledge, May 2024: https://bit.ly/482p6Fa). The chapter recounts a tale of censorship and resistance at the author's former place of employment (Wilfrid Laurier University). It begins with the text of his invited commentary on the Palestinian Question posted on the university website on 10 September 2001 and removed by the administration the following day (9/11), while the preceding pro-Israel commentary by his colleague in the political science department was left up. The part played by the relevant institutional actors - the university president, the vice-president: academic, the webmaster, the Director of Public Affairs and Publications, the faculty union, the student newspaper (The Cord Weekly), a university alumnus accusing the author of anti-Semitism, and two further members of faculty, one at the neighbouring University of Waterloo, who stood up for the author's freedom of speech - is documented via their emails and coverage by the student newspaper.

As an auto-ethnographic accounting of a case of censorship and resistance from over twenty years ago the article obtains its current relevance in light of the institutional, organizational and ideological battles being fought now across Canada and the United States in response to Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people and society of Gaza.

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Veritas Omnia Vincit[1]

Not long before the beginning of the fall term in 2001 I was asked to write a short piece about the Palestinian issue that would provide an alternative account to that recently given by my WLU colleague in Political Science, Dr. Barry Kay, to which there had been some negative feedback, I was told. The forum for this exchange was a relatively new online platform on the university’s website. “Commentaries” would appear on the front page of the website for five days and then be archived. The idea was to provide a space in which selected members of faculty, upon invitation by the platform’s moderator, could provide informed commentary on matters that fell within their scholarly expertise, but in a relatively informal way that would appeal to educated readers both within and without the university. Articles were “provided for the sole purpose of fostering, and/or continuing discussion on the topic presented,” as the blurb at the top of the page declared. They would be informative and interesting and thereby function as a sort of showcase for the university.

I was flattered to have been asked, and somewhat surprised that an arm of the university was responsive to the apparent need to strike a ‘balance’ on this issue. At the same time I relished the idea of having to produce a cogent statement of my views, and one that would stand in desired contrast to that of an inveterate supporter of Israel, my colleague Professor Kay.

According to Maneesh Sehdev’s article in The Cord Weekly, for 19 September 2001, “the posting [of Kay’s article] became the subject of controversy when it evoked critical response from various people on campus who claimed the commentary was anti-Palestinian.”[2] It was in this context that I was invited to write a counter article. Here is that piece, as I wrote it in those fateful last days of summer.

The Palestinian Question

Peter Eglin

Date posted: September 10, 2001

I know of no major public issue about which there is such intellectual dishonesty as the ‘Palestinian Question.’  The scale of distortion, economy with the truth, moral cowardice and outright lying is appalling to contemplate.  It is to be found amongst commentators across the various media, in letters to the editor, public pronouncements, magazine and journal articles and books both popular and scholarly.  It amounts to a vast web of propaganda, perpetrated and relentlessly repeated by politicians, columnists, broadcasters and writers.  University-based intellectuals are among the worst offenders.  Such is the hold of this mythology that it is virtually impossible for rational debate to be conducted on the topic.  When the facts are related, when the truth is told, it is not that they are disputed or even disbelieved.  They are simply not heard.  They are received as a form of lunacy, or hatred.  I speak of the situation in the United States and Canada.  For in the rest of the world, including importantly in Israel itself, the truth is more or less clearly seen, although it is not uncontested.  Yet because the United States rules the world,[3] the lies are enforced and the policies that they are designed to uphold prevail.  Because Canada is a (very) junior partner in the system of rule, the lies and the policies hold sway here too, though they are modulated and there are cracks where the light gets in.[4]

The propaganda is as follows: (1) that Israel and Jewish Israeli citizens are the (innocent) suffering victims of what is disingenuously called ‘Middle East violence’ and Arabs, notably Palestinian ones, are the (evil) offenders; (2) that whatever ‘violence’ Israel has committed has only been in self-defence, whereas Arabs/Palestinians are the aggressors (so that it is up to Mr. Arafat and the PLO to ‘end the violence’);[5] (3) that Israel’s (by definition) defensive military actions are in accord with the doctrine of ‘purity of arms’ and in support of human rights, whereas Palestinian aggression is in the form of terrorism, and they care not for human rights;[6] (4) that Israel has always sought peace and made peace offers, including concessions, which the Arabs/Palestinians have rejected (because they seek to eradicate Israel from the map, or because they are stupid and never lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity, etc, etc); (5) that Palestinians even sacrifice their children by encouraging them to put themselves in the way of Israeli soldiers, forcing the soldiers to shoot them.  This last item is perhaps the most morally depraved position in the whole collection of lies.[7]

The truth is just about the opposite of these fables.  Rather, however, than take my word for it, readers should endeavour to establish this for themselves.  The single, best source is the American Jewish intellectual Noam Chomsky’s book The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Black Rose, updated edition, 1999); for the brutal facts see Palestinians: Life Under Occupation by Nancy Murray (The Middle East Justice Network, 1991); for Jewish Israelis’ capacity for simultaneously knowing and denying Israeli state atrocities against Palestinians see sociologist Stanley Cohen’s States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Polity, 2001, pp. 157-159), and for the travesties of scholarship see Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question edited by Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens (Verso, 1988).  For Canada’s role, see Tareq Ismael, Canada and the Middle East: The Foreign Policy of a Client State (Detselig Enterprises, 1994).[8] 

In setting out a true picture perhaps the most important single datum is the following: ‘In sheer numerical terms, in brute numbers of bodies and property destroyed, there is absolutely nothing to compare between what Zionism has done to Palestinians and what, in retaliation, Palestinians have done to Zionists.’  This is Edward Said, writing in 1980 in his The Question of Palestine (p. x).  I have never seen this brute fact acknowledged anywhere in mainstream reporting or opinion.  Stark though it is this fact conceals the greater crime from which it springs, namely the stealing of Palestine from the Palestinians. Apparently intended by Zionist leaders (though not all of them), and facilitated by the moral and political consequences of the Holocaust,[9] it was carried out through war in 1948 and 1967 and throughout by continual settlement.  In the words of David Ben-Gurion in 1938, “politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves ...  The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside” (cited in Chomsky, p. 91, my emphasis). “In later years, the indigenous Arab population rejected the idea, accepted as natural in the West, that they had a moral obligation to sacrifice their land to compensate for the crimes committed by Europeans against Jews” (Chomsky, p. 92), as well they might.  “Before 1948 there were 475 Arab villages in the land that became Israel.  In the following years, 385 of them were completely demolished so that, in the words of Dr. Israel Shahak, ‘the accepted official myth of an “empty country” can be taught in schools and told to visitors’” (Murray, p. 6).  “By the time the first Arab-Israeli war had ended in 1949 leaving Israel in control of 77% of the territory of Palestine [and Jordan the rest], more than 725,000 Palestinians, or 60% of the population, had fled in terror or were driven from their homes.  Most have never been permitted to return” (Murray, p. 6).  The remainder of Palestine was conquered by Israel in June 1967, leading to another “325,000 Palestinians [being] driven out of the West Bank and Gaza” (Murray, p. 10).  As a colonial, settler state Israel continued to settle the ‘Occupied Territories,’ in defiance of international law, and, despite the limited autonomy granted the Palestine Authority in recent years, has done so till now.[10]

These are the central and abiding historical facts that record an immense injustice, suffered by the Palestinians at the hands of Israel, assisted chiefly by the United States since 1948 (and especially since 1967), and by the United Kingdom in the pre-war period, based on centuries of the West’s anti-Arab racism (see E. Said’s Orientalism (Vintage, 1979)).  Thus, Lord Balfour, in a memorandum two years after the Balfour Declaration of 1917, wrote: “For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country ...  The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land” (cited in Chomsky, p. 90, my emphasis).

The rest of the story is the familiar nauseating tale of the policies and practices of conquest.  To the ethnic cleansing already described one must add a steady diet of Israeli state terrorism, cantonization and ghettoization of the Palestinian territories, exploitation of Palestinian labour, impoverishment, and relentless daily humiliations visited on the Palestinian people.  As overt colonial political control has been gradually withdrawn it has been replaced by economic neo-colonial dependency (the import of the Oslo agreements according to historian Shlomo Ben-Ami). All of this amounts to quite obvious war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, massacre and torture, expulsions and collective punishment (curfews and demolition of houses and uprooting of olive trees), denial of medical care and education, and numerous other breaches of international human rights law, the Geneva Conventions, and United Nations resolutions.  It has all been documented in painful detail by human rights organizations and is, in a certain sense, known.  Yet it is ignored by those who could do something about it or, worse, it is justified and supported.  The awful irony is, of course, inescapable.

Nevertheless, “[f]or 25 years, there has been a near-unanimous international consensus on the terms of political settlement: a full peace treaty with establishment of a Palestinian state after Israeli withdrawal, an outcome that enjoys wide support even within Israel.  It has been blocked by Washington ever since its veto of a Security Council resolution to that effect in 1976” (Chomsky, The Record, August 15, 2001, A19).  Why this is so, and how Canada is implicated in either aiding and abetting or being an accessory after the fact to Israel’s crimes, is worth a further article.

The Reception

As indicated, my piece was posted on the website on 10 September! Around noon on the 11^th, the University President, Dr. Bob Rosehart, ordered it taken down. ‘9/11’ had happened a few hours earlier, and, in the President’s view, the public availability of my piece to anyone who accessed the university website in order to read it posed a risk to the safety of said public. According to Sehdev’s article in the student newspaper reporting this episode,

the explanation given to Eglin by University President Bob Rosehart as to why only his posting was removed was “public safety issues,” although Eglin is unsure as to whose safety was being jeopardized by the commentary.[11]

The student journalist goes on to ask, “And why has Barry Kay’s post remained online? According to Eglin, Rosehart claimed to be unaware of Kay’s posting” (ibid).

The source of my claims about President Rosehart’s position was two email exchanges between us on the 13^th and 14^th of September in which the President appealed to “current safety issues” and “short term public safety issues that need to be taken into account”.[12]

At some point I contacted my union, Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association. There was a prima facie case for grieving my treatment under the academic freedom article of the collective agreement between the University and the faculty association. The usual procedure was to seek an informal resolution before launching, if necessary, a formal grievance.

While that process was unfolding, The Cord Weekly for 19 September 2001 appeared. I am quoted saying, “I’m resisting the conclusion that the removal of my posting was a confirmation of the thesis I am advancing.” What is more interesting is the part played by the “Webmaster” and the “Director of Public Affairs and Publications.” They defended the decision to remove Eglin’s piece by claiming that doing so showed “sensitivity to the tragedy” that occurred in America last week. [The webmaster], concerned with the idea that Eglin’s piece could promote racial intolerance said, “we do not want to contribute to that at all.”

However, the fact that Eglin’s commentary actually presents a point of view that he says is “critical of Israel” seems to be completely at odds with the decision to pull his piece and leave Kay’s piece on the site, felt by many to be critical of Palestinians. The response given by [the webmaster and the Director of Public Affairs and Publications] to this concern was that Eglin’s piece “clearly came out at the wrong time.”

Five days later, 24 September, came the next move. I have a photocopy of an email I evidently wrote to the grievance officer assigned to my case, on 25 September, the day after.

It reads as follows:

Date: Tuesday, 25 September 2001, 08:24

From: Peter Eglin

To: [Grievance Officer]

Subject: Pissing around

[Colleague]:

[The Webmaster] called me yesterday afternoon to say that my piece was going to be put back on the university website (and could I forward him a copy since he’d deleted it from his hard drive; I did so at once). My wife checked last night (and I have again this morning), and it’s been put into the archives! Now I’m really ticked, and wish to pursue the grievance urgently and strongly. I want re-instatement to the front page, and a public apology. What kind of pathetic crap is this!

Peter

I guess I was annoyed!

With 24 September given as the “date upon which the grievor knew of the events giving rise to the grievance,” the grievance was presented in a letter dated 26 September 2001 to the Vice-President: Academic. The grievance read as follows:

Undue institutional censorship contrary to Article 7 by virtue of prematurely deleting the solicited editorial commentary entitled “The Palestinian Question” from the WLU web home page.[13]

The “remedy sought” was as follows:

Reinstate the solicited editorial commentary on WLU web home page for the usual week’s duration after which it shall be moved to the archive page (ibid).

In a letter to me dated 28 September 2001 the V-P:A allowed the grievance, saying

Your commentary entitled “The Palestinian Question” will be posted on Laurier’s home web page for 5 days commencing September 27, 2001.

And so it was, and was duly reported as such in the Cord for 3 October 2001.

“I reluctantly accept that a day or two may be legitimate time not to raise the issue but after two days, I thought there was no longer a justification,” Eglin commented on the removal of his posting …

Elgin [sic] expressed feeling “very encouraged by the number of people giving him unsolicited positive feedback over the last two weeks. Many students and colleagues expressed their disappointment with his article being removed” ...

However, no further explanation for the removal of his posting was given. The original reasons included “safety issues” and concerns that the posting came at the wrong time. Eglin agreed that “safety issues” may have played a part in the decision, but it simply was not enough. He believes the university did not want to deal with this controversial issue and tried to suppress the point of view he was presenting. The commentary spent five days on the front page and has now returned to the archives of the site.[14]

A fly in the ointment

In the course of writing the original chapter from which this abridged version is derived I discovered in the attic of my home an unforgotten but to then unfound file folder containing original documents pertaining to these events. They included one document that I had, in fact, completely forgotten about. See BOX 1.

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BOX 1 Email message from [JG] trashing author’s commentary

Subject: Commentary on the website

Date: Tuesday, 11 September 2001, 02:00

From: [JG]

Organization: @HomeNetwork

To: [Director of Public Affairs and Publications]

How does Wilfrid Laurier, a University with a liberal agenda, have the nerve to put a piece of so called [sic] writing on the front page of its public home page?

The commentary from Peter Elgin [sic] has no basis in reality. It is completely one sided and completely anti-Semitic and inflammatory and is highly offensive to any student of Jewish origin who may visit the site.

Peter Elgin [sic] has obviously never spent any time in Israel, had any real dealings with any Israelis and his piece of writing has absolutely no place on the website.

This is not a piece of writing and is not correct and Wilfrid Laurier should be ashamed.

[JG]

Laurier Alum [sic]

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The fact that I have a copy of this email message that was not addressed to me but to the Director of Public Affairs and Publications, raises the question of how I came into its possession. Presumably the Director gave it to me. But why would they do that? Also, note that it was written at two o’clock in the morning of September 11, six or seven hours before the planes hit the towers, and so had nothing to do with whatever “short-term public safety issues” may have arisen from the conjunction of ‘9/11’ and my article being accessible to the public on Laurier’s website. Of course, [JG]’s message conjures the bogeyman of anti-Semitism and claims the article “is highly offensive to any student of Jewish origin who may visit the site.” Was that enough, do you think, to bring down the hammer?

Coda

To this day I do not know whether, in fact, undisclosed “public safety issues” were the actual reason for the censorship or whether one or more of the usual suspects (see the Conclusion to the book) – [JG]’s email being a foretaste - had been on the phone to the president demanding he do just that, or else!!?? To be sure, the televised footage of the planes flying into the towers and the towers subsequently collapsing was a terrifying sight. One could certainly understand the United States ordering the grounding of all airplanes. But to think that someone would be so moved by reading a 1500-word revision of the standard pro-Israeli account of the ‘Palestinian Question’ as to – do what, exactly? – attack the university or a synagogue in Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada, when a gigantic mass murder had just taken place in New York, the perpetrators of which were identified as Arabs/Muslims, so exposing Arabs/Muslims everywhere to retaliation?

In fact, in the lead story in the Cord of 19 September, dealing with the response at WLU to the attack on the United States, President Rosehart also acknowledged a concern felt by Muslim students on campus who are worried about their safety in light of recent attacks and harassment throughout parts of the U.S. and Canada against people of Middle Eastern descent and against those who merely look as though they might be of that descent.[15]

That acknowledgement is consistent with Rosehart’s insistence in several email exchanges with me now (November 2020) that he took no part in having my article removed from the website. To be more accurate, he says he cannot recall having done so, despite being presented with the emails cited above. Indeed, he assures me he is a supporter of the Palestinian cause. He suggests others must have done it while using his name. Who could those others be? The response reported above of the webmaster and the Director of Public Affairs and Publications clearly sidestepped the issue. Insofar as, following 9/11, it was Arabs/Muslims who feared revenge attacks upon their persons or other such expressions of “racial intolerance,” and not Jewish supporters of Israel, then it made no sense to take down my piece rather than Kay’s. Something else, it seemed to me then and seems to me now, was in play. But getting the relevant parties to confirm or deny it is just the hardest thing in the world to accomplish.

Speaking up for freedom of expression

Two bright lights in this darkness of fear and trembling were letters addressed to the President by my relatively new (at the time) Department of Sociology and Anthropology colleague Dr. Garry Potter and by Dr. Jeff Shallit, a computer science professor at the neighbouring University of Waterloo (a mere few hundred metres away from WLU). Here’s part of Garry’s ‘Open Letter:’

Dear President Rosehart,

As a relatively new member of Laurier’s faculty the recent institutional suppression of the views of a senior colleague in my department has me personally concerned about issues of academic freedom. It is not a question of the legal protection of academic freedom of expression afforded to us by law; it is a question of “atmosphere” – an atmosphere facilitating the uncensored free expression of ideas or one of suspicion and intolerance. To quite some considerable extent this tone is set by the university’s administrative hierarchy. If an electronic commentary by a tenured full professor is removed from Laurier’s website by the authorities because it is critical of Israeli policy, what message does this send to other faculty members? …[16]

Jeff Shallit was and is a fierce defender of civil rights, freedom of speech in particular. What distinguished his action was the fact that, as a half-Jewish[17] defender of Israel, he did not agree with me on the question of Palestine, yet, as a rights advocate, he didn’t hesitate to come to my defence.

Dear President Rosehart:

I am writing to protest the censorship of Peter Eglin’s piece on the Middle East. I am no fan of the Palestinians.  Neither did I get to read Prof. Eglin’s piece, as I am on sabbatical.  But the removal of this piece is completely contrary to the spirit of the university and its obligation to maintain intellectual freedom.

I have heard that the excuse used to censor Prof. Eglin was “public safety.”    I find that excuse preposterous. The proper way to counter bad speech is with good speech, not censorship.

I ask you to reconsider your censorship of this piece and offer an apology to Prof. Eglin.

(Prof.) Jeffrey Shallit (September 20, 2001)

I never did get that apology.

Endnotes

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[1] This is the motto of Wilfrid Laurier University.

[2] Maneesh Sehdev, “Speak no evil? A contentious article on the Laurier website is taken down as World events make issue too hot to handle,” The Cord Weekly, Wednesday, 19 September 2001, 3. The title is referring to my article, not Professor Kay’s.

[3] Added since: see Noam Chomsky. 2017. Who Rules the World? London: Macmillan Picador.

[4] Added since: I think I was mistaken about there being Canadian cracks in 2001. It has become evident over the last twenty years that the grip of pro-Israel ideology at the elite level in this country is even more pronounced than it is in the United States. Or, it may be more accurate to say that that grip has remained remarkably firm even as it has weakened in the United States as Norman Finkelstein documented and explained in his 2012 book, Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End. New York: OR Books; see also Ben White. 2018. Cracks in the Wall: Beyond Apartheid in Palestine/Israel. London: Pluto Press. That said, there is reason to believe the desired cracks are now (in 2021) appearing in The Great White North, as noted in the Introduction. See the Conclusion for further evidence.

[5] Added since: the idea that Israel only ever acts in self-defence, and that ‘Israel has a right to defend itself,’ has come up repeatedly throughout the book, notably in Chapter Three where it is considered as a narrative trope of Israeli propaganda repeated ad nauseam by Israel’s defenders, there with specific reference to The Globe and Mail. It is on florid display now in October 2023 as Israel, assisted by the USA, Canada and the European Union – beacons of Western civilization all - murders Palestinians in unprecedented numbers.

[6] Added since: as I write on 17 May 2021 in the midst of Israel’s latest savage assault on Gaza, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rehearses points (2) and (3): “As we’ve said before, Israel has the right to defend itself.  There is no equivalence between a terrorist group indiscriminately firing rockets at civilians and a country defending its people from those attacks.  So we call on Hamas and other groups in Gaza to end the rocket attacks immediately.” U. S. Department of State. 2021. “Secretary Antony J. Blinken and Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod at a Joint Press Availability.” Remarks, Copenhagen, Denmark, 17 May: https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-and-danish-foreign-minister-jeppe-kofod-at-a-joint-press-availability/. Accessed 17 May 2021. All that’s changed is that now it’s Hamas, whereas then it was the PLO.

[7] Added since: for a broadly similar five-point list see pp. 44-5 in Ismael, Tareq Y. and Jacqueline S. Ismael. 2004. “Canadian mass media and the Middle East.” In George Melnyk (ed.), Canada and the New American Empire. Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press, 33-49.

[8] Added since: I did not know at the time of Norman Finkelstein’s essential text, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, published in 1995. London: Verso, second edition, 2003. And since then Yves Engler’s invaluable Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid (Halifax, NS: Fernwood Books; Vancouver, BC: Red Publishing, 2010) has been published.

[9] Added since: in a subsequent version I added to this clause the phrase “and the UN Partition Plan.”

[10] Added since: that Israel withdrew its settlements in Gaza in 2005 does not mean that it does not continue to occupy it, for it controls all points of entry and exit from the territory. This means that it controls Gazans’ access to virtually all means of life, including the supply of electricity and water. Israeli intellectuals Zertal and Eldar, in “the standard work on the settlement project, called Lords of the Land,” described the disengagement as follows: “the ruined territory was not released for even a single day from Israel’s military grip, or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day. After the disengagement, Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and to kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might” (as quoted in Noam Chomsky. 2015. “An address to the United Nations.” Chapter 12 in N. Chomsky and I. Pappé, On Palestine, ed. Frank Barat. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 193-204. (Based on a speech delivered to the United Nations General Assembly on October 14, 2014.)

[11] Sehdev, “Speak no evil?”

[12] The full version of this chapter contains the text of these emails.

[13] Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association, GRIEVANCE No. 008-2001, Article #27, To: Rowland Smith, Vice President: Academic, 26 September 2001.

[14] Maneesh Sehdev, “Article returns,” The Cord Weekly, Wednesday, 3 October 2001, 4.

[15] Dillon Moore, “Laurier responds to tragedy,” The Cord Weekly, Wednesday, 19 September 2001, front page.

[16] Dr. Garry Potter, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, “An Open Letter: Dear President Rosehart,” The Cord Weekly, Wednesday, 3 October 2001, 6.

[17] In personal correspondence with me, Jeff describes himself this way, his father being Jewish.