Letters to the Editors – Web Only

Dear Editors,

I write this letter in support of Nick Day, and against the efforts of some on campus to strip him of the rectorship for his comments in support of Israeli Apartheid Week. I understand that Nick has apologized for attaching his title to his comments in support of the event, but also understand that he has a responsibility as rector to promote ”scholarly dialogue among students,” which in effect means that no apology ought to have been required from him. Of any pressing intellectual and political issue facing the world today, the question of Israel-Palestine is one of the most salient.

The question of the State of Israel’s official policy attitude in the Occupied Territories of Palestine (for this is what they are, illegal occupied zones following the Six Day War in 1967) is one most deserving of global public scrutiny. In point of fact, critics of Israel’s hurtful, violent policies in the occupied territories have included Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former US President Jimmy Carter, both of whom used the term ‘apartheid’ to describe what is happening in that sad, war-torn part of our planet. Unfortunately, in North America, a common reaction of Israel-supporters to those who wish to promote dialogue including critical viewpoints toward Israel seems to be the attempted vilification of any critical commentary whatsoever. These reactions are particularly vehement when it comes to the use of the term ‘apartheid.’

If universities are to be public spaces for thoughtful consideration of pressing social, scientific, political and policy issues, how can we pretend to be fulfilling our mandate by allowing Nick Day to be suppressed and censured for his comments?

By allowing Israel-supporters undeserved legitimacy in their attempted, and spurious, characterization of Day’s comments as ‘anti-Semitic’, we abandon all pretense to the promotion of dialogue and debate at the public university, as a site where intellectual freedom must prevail. Please do not allow this to happen. One of the core issues behind this movement against Day is the conflation—on the part of Israel supporters—of any criticism of the State of Israel and its policies and actions, with ‘anti-Semitism.’ Such a characterization is a deliberate attempt to silence critical voices toward Israel by associating them with racism and prejudice, while critical voices attempt to raise valid questions and criticisms of Israel’s policies and stance.

Indeed, as someone who has taught peace and conflict courses at the undergraduate level and who has followed the Israel-Palestine question closely for some time, I would assert that now more than ever it’s clear that vigorous debate is needed on Israel’s stance in the Occupied Territories, as well as the US’ uncritical and substantial financial support.

In truth, to get ahead in Israel-Palestine, violence must be eschewed on all sides, and this goes without question. However, Israel has felt justified in using disproportionate violence in Palestine, while those supporting violent resistance in Palestine also feel justified (and indeed are, morally speaking, under the Geneva Conventions). Talk of the justification of violence misses a central point, however, which is that Palestinians and Israelis both suffer materially and morally through the continuation of an endless cycle of violence.

By bringing critical questions to bear on the social and political status of Israel-Palestine, we in other parts of the world can help build pressure on various national leaderships (not least our own as well as the US) to press for a peaceful resolution which must see Israel stop the construction of settlements, agree to a right of return for Palestinian refugees, and withdraw to the pre-1967 borders. Israel must be pressured to stop its economic and political stranglehold on Palestine, which both prevents human and economic development and perpetuates vast human suffering.

Indeed, what we see there now is arguably and effectively a state of apartheid where Palestinians enjoy nothing close to equal rights to those of Israelis and are prevented from having an effective voice as regards their own social and political situation. This awful situation must be transcended in order to work for peace, and to move away from violence on all sides. Israel must take the first steps in this direction, and it will not do so without substantial external pressure.

Please bear these questions and issues in mind when taking the necessary decision to support Nick Day. Do not allow Queen’s to become the latest venue co-opted by the push for uncritical support of Israel and the attempted vilification of anyone who dares question the violence and suffering that state is responsible for in the territory under its own effective, illegal control.

Adam Davidson-Harden

Adjunct Assistant Professor, Cultural and Policy Studies

Faculty of Education, Queen’s University

Dear Editors,

Though I usually loathe undergraduate student politics, the mob mentality that has arisen concerning Nick Day’s comments about Israel Awareness Week has lost sight of what is really under attack: freedom of speech. Both the University and the Canadian Charter protect this right, and it affords any individual, regardless of social or institutional standing, the ability to voice their opinion on any subject so long as it does not incite violence or injury.

Did Mr. Day call for any violence against the Jewish people? Absolutely not. He was contributing to a debate on a contentious international issue. The Queen’s community should take this opportunity to discuss the ideas that were raised, rather than attack the individual. A university at its best has the ability to foster critical, and even controversial, thinking and a commitment to public service. We should not condemn a person in office from exercising this fundamental right.

Brandon Tozzo, Ph.D ’12

Dear Editors,

I’m writing this letter in support of Nick Day’s courageous and moral response to Michael Ignatieff. By the following information which I will provide to you in this letter, I will prove that Rector Day’s reference to Ignatieff’s intellectual dishonesty is borne out by an interview which Ignatieff granted to the newpaper The Guardian (United Kingdom) in 2002. .

In that interview (The Guardian, Friday 19, April 2002,”Why Bush must send in his troops: Imposing a two-state solution is the last chance for Middle East peace”), Ignatieff stated the following:

”Two years ago, an American friend took me on a helicopter ride from Jerusalem to the Golan Heights over the Palestinian West Bank. He wanted to show me how vulnerable Israel was, how the Arabs only had to cross 11 km of land to reach the sea and throw the Israelis into it. I got this message but I also came away with another one.

“When I looked down at the West Bank, at the settlements like Crusader forts occupying the high ground, at the Israeli security cordon along the Jordan river closing off the Palestinian lands from Jordan, I knew I was not looking down at a state or the beginnings of one, but at a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control”.

So, if I’m to understand correctly, what was apartheid for Ignatieff in 2002 is no longer the case in 2011? Could that be because Mr. Ignatieff has been co-opted by those members of the pro-Israel lobby who sit in the Liberal caucus in Ottawa? Is it because he lacks the moral fibre to stand up to those who call every legitimate criticism of Israel’s brutal occupation of a neighbouring people ”anti-Semitic”?

Is it simply that Ignatieff, for all his Ivy-League intellectual paraphernalia, is just another run-of-the-mill opportunist whose only real objective is attaining power for the sake of power? Whatever the reasons for the turnabout subsequent to 2002, we see that Nick Day is a man of moral substance—Michael Ignatieff is the opposite.

Bruce Katz
President, Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU)

Dear Editors,

I don’t believe that the content of Rector Nick Day’s actions can be so easily divorced from the actions themselves. While elected representatives are called upon to argue the consensus of their constituents, they are also expected to act as conscientious human beings.

Let’s take a look at the context in which Rector Day signed his name as representative of 20,000 Queen’s students. Michael Ignatieff—leader of the Liberal Party of Canada—made a statement condemning Israeli Apartheid Week “in no uncertain terms.” In doing so he did not represent me, or many other voting Liberals in this country.

The statement correctly characterizes Israeli Apartheid Week as “stand[ing] in the way of peace.” IAW is not about promoting peace; peace is something that is useless if enforced against the rights of the people. Whether or not it “is an attack on the mutual respect that holds our society together” seems rather unimportant, given that respect is somewhat impossible when one’s family is starving in Gaza.

Allies of South African blacks did not succeed in overthrowing Apartheid by protesting in a respectful, tolerant fashion. The Civil Rights Movement did not make headway merely by debating oppression in Congress (an environment which is known so well for its respectful tolerance), but by declaiming hatred on the steps outside. IAW is not respectful or tolerant, because it’s about making noise and drawing the attention of a stolidly apathetic populace. Let the facts and the pundits do the convincing one way or another; right now the issue of Palestinian rights isn’t even on the table.

Canadian leadership has clearly demonstrated that our respectful, tolerant governance does not intend to entertain any opinions that challenge the status quo. Nick Day, I take it, saw this stance as the same moral embarrassment that I do, and used his power to draw some attention. This he did successfully, but only by violating his own mandate.

Certain acts of conscience require sacrifice. I hope that Rector Day will also see it this way, and resign, in order to allow the debate to focus on the issue which he brought into the spotlight—Palestinian rights. If this whole debacle leads even five Queen’s students to take a critical look at the facts and wake up to an ongoing human tragedy, then it will have been worth the scandal.

Jeff Fraser, ArtSci ’10

Dear Editors,

The controversy surrounding Rector Nick Day’s response letter to Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff on the matter of the inclusion of “Israel Apartheid Week” (IAW) on Canadian university campuses uncovers some fundamental contradictions in the notion of our University as a democratic institution committed to academic freedom.

Some criticsof the Rector’s letter to Ignatieff—including Principal Woolf—have questioned whether addressing IAW somehow overstepped the purview of the office and veered into so-called political territory that somehow went “beyond the confines of the institution.”

This notion of “confines” within which an elected student rector can legitimately utilize the status of the office to address matters relevant to Queen’s students is itself highly problematic and undemocratic.

Queen’s University is embedded within both Canadian society as well as the wider global community. The University both impacts and is impacted by the wider world. Queen’s University is a major institution that operates in a number of ways—from providing space for education and research to, problematically, operating as a corporation with investments and property holdings. In short, we cannot and should not ever conceive of the University as existing within some kind of confined, “non-political” bubble since to do so denies our individual and collective responsibilities to the wider world.

As such there cannot and should not be supposedly legitimate “confines” for an elected student representative and for the Principal to articulate that opinion is dangerously irresponsible and serves to undermine the legitimacy of an independent student government and the University as a democratic institution. The Principal had no cause to intervene except to protect the interests of the University as a corporation and in doing so he revealed himself to be beholden to “shareholders” (read: alumni and other University funders) rather than democratic values.

The University is and always has been a political space and, under our current system of student government, the rector is invested with a democratic mandate. So long as we as students utilize a representative form of government we must accept that our elected representatives will inevitably take courses of action up to and including speaking out on controversial “political” matters that we will not agree with in total. In publicly stating an opinion on IAW and the Israel-Palestinian conflict the rector may or may not have expressed a minority opinion among the student constituency.

Regardless, he took an unambiguous stand for academic freedom. Asserting a minority opinion should not be grounds for removal from office; removal of a sitting elected official from office is a drastic course of action. This would set a severe precedent and will certainly reflect poorly on students’ collective commitment to academic freedom in all circumstances.

As a constituent, my wish is that the rector will continue to utilize the bully pulpit associated with the office to speak out publicly on matters of academic freedom and global issues in which Queen’s University and the student body are inevitably implicated.

Further, I urge the Rector to act on a challenge he has received from students to speak out on behalf of the demands made by the Queen’s Native Student Association, and the findings made in the Henry Report, among many other vital campus matters.

Finally, I urge my fellow students to vote “No” on the referendum regarding the recommendation of removal of Nick Day from the position of rector.

Karl Hardy, Ph.D ’12

Dear Editors,

Since the last issue of the Journal contained so many letters and editorials condemning Nick Day, and precisely none in his support, I thought I would try to get in a couple of points to correct that deficit.

I should point out that while we have the same last name we are not related, other than at some distance. Nick is, however, one of my grad students, so those who would like to discount what I have to say without actually engaging with my intervention can feel free to use that as a basis.

While there are many important issues here for students of various identifications to work out, I’d like to make a point about one of the apparently unquestioned assumptions being made in this debate. This is the belief that anyone, elected, appointed, or merely shooting off their mouth, can or should speak for anyone else.

I would like to suggest that, after Nietzsche and Freud, it’s easy to see that the former is impossible—no one can speak for anyone else, never mind even for one’s own self, in any consistent or meaningful way. We are all multiple, and communities are composed of multiplicities of multiplicities.

The latter idea—that anyone should speak for anyone else—is undesirable, as it can only create the kind of moral panic that we are seeing on and beyond the Queen’s campus right now. But this should not be taken as meaning that I agree with those who would like to have Nick Day’s head. Rather, I think it means that we need to assume that anyone who speaks is speaking for/as some aspect of their own ineffably complex identifications, and that anyone listening should know this.

Why then, one must ask, are so many well-educated people so worried about Nick Day speaking for them? The answer seems obvious—it’s because they don’t like what he has to say, but are afraid/unable to address his interventions at the level of content. To provide what is hopefully an instructive counter-example, I might point out that the Principal of Queen’s has weighed in on this issue, and many others, in a manner that I find abhorrent. This person could never speak for me, but I have to live, every day, with the fact that he’s the boss here, for the time being. I wouldn’t ever bother to take him on in public, as it’s clear we don’t share enough discursive space to have any kind of discussion about anything. But I’d never try to get him fired, even if I could, because he’s doing what he should be doing, as far as I’m concerned—publicly stating what he feels and believes.

Of course, there is a double standard at work here, and that’s the final thing I want to point out. I can’t help but notice, over the 10 years I’ve been at Queen’s, that people who identify themselves as connected with the University can spew out colonial, racist, pro-capitalist, nature-hating authoritarian nonsense with impunity. But if one tries to speak out in any way that offends the ‘old boys and girls network’ that runs this place, the silent minority will suddenly get very vocal, if usually in a back-room sort of way.

I therefore applaud Nick Day for being a courageous and wise person who is willing to bet his political life on the viability of that oh-so-twentieth century idea, the rational public sphere. It’s what’s supposed to exist in ‘liberal-democratic’ societies in general, and at universities in particular. It’s what I wish would exist, more often, here. And I’m hopeful that this bloodbath will help to achieve that, if nothing else.

Speaking only for and as my divided self,

Richard J.F. Day

Associate Professor

Global Development Studies / Cultural Studies / Sociology

Dear Editors,

As an alumna of Queen’s, I decry the impeachment process that the AMS has put into motion to remove Nick Day as rector. This is not a sensible thing to do as it will set an unfortunate precedent that will be difficult to undo.

Mr. Day was exercising his right of free speech and although some may question using his official signature, he was simply alerting Mr. Ignatieff—a man of substance—that he too is a man of substance and, as such, asked to be listened to.

On Wednesday, March 9, a group of community-minded, social justice activists who several times have supported the Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) demonstrated at Carleton University, as there are people who would have them banned from the university.

Alas, this is not what a university is about and so these individuals who call themselves “The Radical Relics,” average age 70, don hippie wigs and garb and stand up for the rights of these students to voice their concerns over what is happening to Palestine.

We fervently hope that commonsense prevails at Queen’s.

Shannon Lee Mannion, ArtSci ’86

All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s)-in-Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.

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