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I Am a 96-Year-Old Jew. Can We Talk about this Anti-Israel Vitriol Please?
(National Post-Canada) Frances Belzberg - Universities across Canada and the U.S. have become alarming hotbeds for anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric and actions. Students do not feel safe on campus nor protected by school leadership. In my hometown of Vancouver, a controversy has flared up at the Samuel and Frances Belzberg Library - an institution of research and learning that was endowed by my late husband and me - located in the Morris J. Wosk Center for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. The librarian for history, international studies, liberal studies and political science at SFU posted several hateful tweets that go beyond criticism of Israeli policy. On Oct. 29, the librarian denounced Zionism and Israel as "vile, inhumane, deranged, and monstrous." She also urged people to boycott Indigo books simply because its owners founded a charity that funds former Israeli soldiers' education. I am 96 years old. I make no secret of my Jewishness. I lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust: aunts, uncles, cousins yet to blossom into their full selves. The horrific events of Oct. 7 were a stark reminder that antisemitism has endured and, astonishingly in recent months, deepened in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. Our hopes in endowing the library 34 years ago were rooted in our commitment to create a space where facts and information were centered, a place that would foster mutual understanding, not a cascade of social-media vitriol from one of our own librarians. I am also concerned about the unwillingness of officials at Simon Fraser University to publicly disavow these messages. The extraordinary irony is that the library exists within a Center for Dialogue. I completely acknowledge, and celebrate, that our endowing the library gives me no right at all to hold sway over the learning and the dialogue that takes place within it. The library belongs to everyone now, as it should be. And so, simply as a citizen and as a patron of the library, I think it is within my rights to express the obvious: this is an institution based on free and civil discourse. Such messages on social media from our librarian are no more tolerable in a library than bigoted social media messages from a professor or student leader should be at this university. I am convinced that ugliness and hate in the public sphere is the enemy of peace and reconciliation. Decency, learning, openness and dialogue are our only hope.