I want to applaud both the president and executive director of CAUT for their courageous editorial, “Universities Are Betraying Their Central Mission,” (Bulletin, March 2009) in connection with the banning of a poster during Israel Apartheid Week.

I am concerned with my rights as a faculty member to raise deeply disturbing questions relating to the suppression of free speech. Mentioning the Cold War years in your thought-provoking article, and publishing the Carlos Latuff poster, acutely reminded me of almost identical political caricatures that regularly appeared in the Soviet press of my totalitarian childhood. The more one-sided propaganda and the old prejudices I saw, the more sober I grew in my understanding of the concept of freedom of expression.

Eventually the USSR collapsed, but I am happy the ever-vigilant editors of the Bulletin continue to safeguard my freedoms, especially since it is difficult for many to see the difference between actual apartheid as it existed in South Africa, as opposed to the state of affairs in Israel, which affords all of its Arab citizens equal political and legal rights, access to universities, health care and parliament.

Thank you for reprinting the poster which otherwise many of us would never see. It shows an Israeli helicopter (mistakenly called a “warplane” in the editorial) firing a missile at a Palestinian child. Too bad that two other pos­ters inspired by Latuff’s artwork (this artist won second place in the 2006 Iranian International Holocaust Cartoon Competition) weren’t banned and therefore will never make it into your publication. The first shows two Israeli children holding teddy bears under the sty­lized Hamas-fired rockets, the second substitutes “Apartheid Week” with the phrase “Hypocrisy Week” and shows Palestinian freedom fighters hiding behind the Arab boy.

Yuri Leving
Chair, Russian Studies
Dalhousie University

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