-An ugly infection - Anti-Semitism is never incidental. It is always
insidious. It is insidious because it's not just an action but also a habit.

http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/editorials/story.asp?id=70A0E
58B-D7BD-45B7-BD47-CB69D97214B5

The Gazette Sunday, December 15, 2002

Common sense has prevailed at a Montreal university, but that should lull no
one into blissful ignorance about the ugliness infecting campuses across
North America.

The ugliness is anti-Semitism. Voices as learned and restrained as that of
the president of Harvard University are warning of its virulent renewal in
places of higher learning. "I have always ... been put off by those who
heard the sound of breaking glass in every insult ... and conjured up images
of Hitler's Kristallnacht at any disagreement with Israel," Harvard's
Lawrence Summers said recently. "Such views have always seemed to me
alarmist ... but while they still seem to me unwarranted, they seem rather
less alarmist in the world of today than they did a year ago."

What happened at the Université du Québec à Montréal last weekend gives
Canadian context to Summers's cautionary note. In the face of two anonymous
threats, administrators cited security concerns as they prohibited Israeli
journalist and professor Gideon Kouts from speaking to the Jewish student
group Hillel. After Montreal's Jewish community and others raised proper
hell, the university regained its nerve and stood up for freedom of speech.
Kouts graciously - and puckishly - thanked UQÀM for generating publicity
that increased his audience.

As The Gazette has written, UQÀM officials were right to reverse their ban.
Yet the initial, reflexive administrative silencing of Kouts remains deeply
troubling, shaking us awake to the reality that anti-Semitism is never
incidental. It is always insidious. It is insidious because it's not just an
action but also a habit. As much as it is acts of insult or violence, it is
even more the habit of minds schooled to ignore clear patterns of hatred.

UQÀM officials would doubtless protest - without question truthfully - that
they haven't an anti-Semitic bone in their bodies. And yet they evidently
failed to discern the larger pattern: Kouts, after all, is not the only
prominent Israeli recently prevented from speaking at a Montreal (read:
Canadian) university. In September, glass-smashing thugs silenced former
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Concordia.

Apologists quickly absolved the pro-Palestinian hooligans responsible for
the window breaking. Blame, they argued, belonged to Mr. Netanyahu for being
so controversial. Concordia, they maintained, was at fault for letting such
a controversial politician speak. No violent controversy would have
occurred, they insisted, had the university foreseen the security risk
inherent in Mr. Netanyahu's appearance.

Mob violence, in other words, wasn't the fault of the violent mob.
Responsibility, rather, was placed on those who saw no reason for a mob or
violence. Windows were smashed because the university failed to install
glass strong enough to resist pounding fists.

Such insidious logic, once accepted, quickly replicates. Gideon Kouts is a
journalist and professor, not a controversial politician. Yet he is also a
Jew, invited to Montreal by a Jewish student organization. He is a Jew
kicked out of Lebanon last fall for the crime of being a Jew in Lebanon.

Two threatening phone calls later, he - not the callers - became a security
risk. And so those who had silenced Mr. Netanyahu through violence needed no
violence to stop - temporarily at least - a second Jew from speaking. Thus
are habits of mind developed. Thus is the pattern of intolerance - notably
anti-Semitism - bred.

It is a pattern that finds repetition in the deplorable action of
Concordia's Student Union in expelling Hillel, the Jewish student group, on
the flimsiest of pretexts. The CSU-Hillel incident might be written off as a
petty post-secondary shenanigan were it not for the chilling, ugly reality
that it meant Jewish voices being silenced on a Canadian university campus.
History is witness to the evils that can spring from such silencing.

Lawrence Summers was correct that not every cross word between Jews and
non-Jews is the start of a new Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass. But
we have heard glass breaking on the streets of Montreal. Our response must
not be the silence of blissful ignorance.