Re: “Universities Are Betraying Their Central Mission,” (CAUT Bulletin, March 2009). I am encouraged by the excellent editorial on academic freedom by Penni Stewart and James Turk, and grateful they have spoken out in support of basic principles, especially concerning criticism of Israeli policies.

Otherwise, Canadians may ask: Is the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands a lie contrived by some unstable characters? Is the Israeli separation (read Apartheid) wall that is tearing apart Palestinian communities and swallowing their lands a story from One Thousand and One Nights?

Are the 600 Israeli checkpoints where Palestinians are humiliated and prevented from free movement an optical illusion? Are the thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons a verse in a national epic? Are the thousands of demolished Palestinian houses a story that obfuscates the meaning of a legitimate homeland? Are the one million Palestinian olive trees uprooted by Israeli bulldozers a nasty nightmare?

Are the racist laws in Israel a fictive story disseminated by an undeserving landless goat herder? Are the Palestinian refugees from Mars or maybe Saturn? Are Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, and former U.S. president Jimmy Carter anti-Semites (or self-hating Jews in the case of Falk) because they speak about Israeli apartheid?

In fact, Israel is not really like pre-1994 apartheid South Africa, it is worse. In July 2008, a team of prominent South Africans, including members of the African National Congress, who visited the Occupied Territories were horrified by what they saw.

“What I see here is worse than what we experienced — the absolute control of people’s lives, the lack of freedom of movement, the army presence everywhere, the total separation and the extensive destruction we saw … was not the case in South Africa,” said ANC parliamentarian Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge.

Similarly, Mondli Makhanya, the editor-in-chief of the Sunday Times (South Africa) oserved: “Nothing can prepare you for the evil we have seen here. It is worse, worse, worse than everything we endured. The level of apartheid, the racism and the brutality are worse than the worst period of apartheid.”*

In Canada, talking about brutality is becoming the violation — not the violation or the crime itself. How Orwellian this all seems! It must seem especially wicked for Gazan mothers, whose children were killed by Israeli phosphorous or possibly DIME bombs just a few weeks ago. There, in wretched, ghettoized and besieged Gaza, the memory of the massacre is indelible, and no amount of silencing in Canada can erase it.

Randa Farah
Anthropology
University of Western Ontario

* See Stephen Lendman’s article at www.countercurrents.org/lendman250209.htm.

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