A two-day conference on anti-Semitism begins today at the University
of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Launched by former
prime minister Brian Mulroney with an invitation-only speech last night,
the conference has been prompted, at least partly, by two recent
events.
The first occurred last September at Montreal’s Concordia University,
when rioters cowed university authorities into cancelling a speech by
former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then last month,
Toronto’s York University came close to cancelling a speech by the
Philadelphia-based scholar, Daniel Pipes. Under pressure from
pro-Palestinian students and faculty, York’s student government withdrew
permission for use of the campus pub where Dr. Pipes was scheduled to
speak. The intimidators’ argument was “no free speech for racists” -- a
familiar slogan, used to silence anyone protesters like York
University’s Ali Hassan and his Middle East Students Association don’t
want people to hear.
Dr. Pipes is a historian with a PhD from Harvard who argues that
Middle East peace depends on Arab acceptance of Israel. If this makes
him a racist, I’m one, too, for I’ve been arguing the same thing for
years. Dr. Pipes also runs Campus Watch, a controversial Web page that
monitors and critiques Middle East scholars for bias in their academic
work. Whatever one thinks of such an Internet site, monitoring and
critiquing only extend free debate. Intimidating and rioting deny it.
Since York University president Lorna Marsden is made of sterner stuff
than her counterpart at Concordia, Dr. Pipes’ speech was re-scheduled in
a gymnasium on university property. Still, it dismayed many people to
see left-wing rowdies and partisans of political correctness turning a
university, a traditional seat of inquiry and debate, into something
resembling Kafka’s Castle.
I’ve fewer illusions about universities. It seems to me they’ve always
been fertile grounds for intolerance. The twin evils of the 20th
century, Nazism and communism, incubated at universities. Young people
are tailor-made for proto-Fascism: They’re energetic, self-righteous,
idealistic, naive and impressionable. They’re afflicted by that “little
learning” which, as the poet Alexander Pope pointed out, “is a dangerous
thing.” Many are also educated beyond their intellectual means, which is
even more dangerous. Society’s relentless promotion of academic degrees
has created a glut of simpletons pursuing PhDs -- hardly good news for
the liberal arts or for liberal democracy.
If many students are receptive to extremism, some faculty are even
more so. Ambition, pedantry, hauteur -- common intellectual vices, along
with resentment of, and contempt for, contrary views -- all serve to
turn institutions of inquiry into fortresses of repression. Embittered
academics with no power but unbounded arrogance often become gurus for
academic hooligans or apologists for Nazi-type systems. Martin
Heidegger, rector of the university of Freiburg, is an oft-cited
example, but there have been countless others, from Nazi professors and
student organizations in Germany’s Weimar republic to Marxist professors
and student activists throughout America and Europe during the turbulent
1960s and ‘70s. In fact, the foul breath of political correctness that
permeates academic institutions today is a miasma arising from this
totalitarian swamp.
Universities have often acknowledged their role in nurturing evil --
sometimes a little belatedly, as when Rector Alfred Ebenbauer said in
1997: “As a human being, and as a representative of the University of
Vienna, I am ashamed by the university’s culpable involvement in the
horrors of Nazism.” His apology referred to Vienna U’s famous medical
atlas, “Topographical Anatomy of the Human Being,” compiled by Eduard
Pernkopf, rector between 1943-45, who may have used the bodies of
Holocaust victims to illustrate his anatomical text.
I don’t mean to create the impression that universities are only
hotbeds of iniquity. Far from it. Many professors and students bring to
their disciplines impeccable honesty and intellectual rigor. Some adhere
to the highest principles of free inquiry and debate. It’s actually
remarkable how the best and the worst coexist at universities; how
peerless examples of learning, tolerance and character can be found just
down hall from the shabbiest manifestations of fanaticism, coercion and
stupidity.
It’s especially noteworthy when such total opposites are present not
just in the same institution, but in the same individual’s mind. The
philosopher Heidegger is an obvious example, but many contemporaries,
from the linguist Noam Chomsky to the historian David Irving, have
exhibited similar intellectual and moral dichotomies.
Despite all efforts by the Middle East Students Association and some
faculty members to import the tone of the Middle East into this country,
Canadians who wished to hear the American scholar speak could do so last
month, though only in a curtained-off corner of a basketball court and
not before going through metal detectors. Later, Dr. Pipes described the
scene:
“Several bodyguards took me through a back entrance to the gym and
sequestered me in a holding room until I entered the gym,” he wrote in
this newspaper. “But surely the most memorable aspect of this talk was
the briefing by James Hogan, a detective in the Hate Crime Unit of the
Toronto Police Service, to make sure I was aware that Canada’s Criminal
Code makes a variety of public statements actionable, including
advocating genocide and promoting hatred of a specific group.”
The sheer audacity of this takes one’s breath away. Cops lecturing a
scholar on the law against hate crimes before letting him into an
auditorium is like cops lecturing a shopper on the law against
shoplifting before letting him into a department store. It would be
mind-boggling even if it were done as a matter of routine -- but what
makes it worse is that it’s done selectively. Such a demeaning,
officious insult is offered these days only to a speaker perceived to be
on Israel’s side in the Mideast conflict. By subjecting Dr. Pipes to
Det. Hogan’s briefing, for no other conceivable reason than that he’s a
scholar of Jewish background with pro-Israeli views, it was the Toronto
Police that came closest to committing a hate crime that day. Perhaps
this is something for Mr. Mulroney’s conference on anti-Semitism to
consider.