CAEF Submission re: Guide to Law and Policy re Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism
- CAEF
- Feb 3
- 20 min read
Updated: Feb 9
Submission to the University of Toronto Regarding the Guide to Law and Policy
Regarding Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israel Discrimination at the University of Toronto
To the Committee,
Thank you for this opportunity to comment on the Guide to Law and Policy Regarding
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israel Discrimination (Guide). It is heartening and encouraging to
see the university directing resources towards addressing all forms, sources, and levels of
what is, for all practical purposes, vitriolic, unabashed Jew hatred.
We have organized this comment into the following four sections:
The current social and political climate on campus
Anti-Zionism as a Cloak for Antisemitism
The effectiveness of the existing policy framework
Recommendations
1. The Current Social and Political Climate on Campus
We invite the university administration and Governing Council to consider this historical
moment and the power they hold to shape direction in combating antisemitism. What this
committee decides matters, a lot. The University of Toronto is Canada’s most prestigious
university and the way in which you address the Jew hatred on your campus will set the
gold standard for other universities’ reactions to Jew hatred. Your response will create
precedents that will influence not only the political culture of Toronto, of Ontario, but quite
possibly, that of the entire country. If you allow the status quo on your campus to continue,
you are signaling to all of Canada that the vile Jew hatred that has consumed our country,
and that is openly manifest at U of T, is acceptable.
Transformative social movements often begin on university campuses and spread to society
at large. Hitler’s government wasn’t a group of thugs: roughly ninety percent of his top
officers had doctorates. The transformative humanistic potential of higher education is
undercut when universities allow any marginalized group in its midst to be ‘otherised’, as
has happened to your Jewish students and faculty. This is to say that a failure to eradicate
Jew hatred is a failure of institutional purpose. Jew hatred is a poison that has infected U
of T, not just its head, but its entire body.
Since October 7, 2023, Jews half-jokingly remark “this isn’t our first rodeo.” Globally,
Jews see the same patterns that have repeated themselves throughout history, with the same horrific results each time, are occurring again. And each time we are convinced ‘it’ cannot happen here. The progression of Jew hatred today is quite similar to the progression of Jew hatred in 1930’s Germany. Jew hatred is the world’s oldest hatred because it is the easiest hatred. It can assume any shape, and Jews are eternally vulnerable to being accused of whatever mortal sin is dominant at a particular point in history. Adolf Hitler, for example, often spoke of putting an “end to the Marxist-Jewish nightmare” because communism was seen as evil in a fascist society. Today, in Canada, “colonizer” is to democracy what Marxism was to fascism.
Jew haters are exploiting Canada’s recent engagement with its colonial past to label Jews
as colonisers, and given the evils of colonialism, the label allows Jew haters to justify
violence against Jews. Of course, in order to weaponise our nation’s guilt about its colonial
history as a justification for violence against Jews, antisemites use the linguistic cloak
“anti-Zionism” to disguise their target and enable the argument that, despite radically different histories, Israel’s formation is no different than that of Canada. This fallacious
claim is but one of the “word crimes” used to discredit Israel and punish Jews.
In the next section we will discuss the term anti-Zionism as a veil for Jew hatred, but now,
we turn to the political contexts on and off campus.
Almost all Jew hating behaviours on and off campus are carried out under the banner of
anti-Zionism. Virtually everyone who engages in Jew hatred claims to hold no prejudice
toward Jews. They attack Jews and Jewish institutions as anti-Zionists.
Does it matter what words they use?
Jew hatred off-campus provides context within which Jew hatred on campus occurs.
Societal Jew hatred shapes the experience of Jew hatred on campus, it informs its
interpretations, and it imbues campus Jew hatred with an emotional intensity by conveying
to Jewish students that the hatred they experience outside the university is not only within
the university, but part of its normative fabric. Campus hate informs Jewish students,
faculty and staff that the hatred they experience off campus is normative; they experience
a message that they are unwelcome and unsafe in both environments. The current response,
or lack of it by the administration creates a permissive environment for Jew hating
behaviours on campus, which in turn rightly elevates the perceived and actual level of risk
felt by Jews on campus. Further, expressions of violent Jew hatred began on university
campuses, and in that regard, universities, especially U of T, bear some responsibility for
the recent explosion of Canadian antisemitism. The anti-Israel campaign known as Anti
Israel Apartheid. Week began at U of T unfettered and has expanded globally, providing a
smorgasbord of hateful, anti-Jewish programs on an annual basis, even expanding beyond
a week and always featuring hateful, fallacious representations of the Jewish state. Such
events fuel Jew hatred, intimidate Jewish students and faculty and belie any university
policy of respect, decency, honesty, fairness, and inclusion.
This note exemplifies the social milieux within which. Canadian Jews find themselves
today. It was sent to an Ottawa Jewish mother in 2023, and reported by B’nai Brith Canada.
It was sent prior to October 7, before antisemitism exploded.
February 1, 2023. You will die, kike. Roses are red Violets are blue There are
millions of Canadians who want to kill you. You are a vicious, irresponsible
kike. You deserve to be beheaded with a dull knife in front of your disgustingly
unattractive children and cuck husband. You have done so much damage to
our society that there is no way of measuring it. You deserve a horrific, painful,
slow death. For what you have done to the children of this area, I hope someone
creeps inside your house in the middle of the night and stabs you to death with
a butcher knife. Then maybe they will have the good taste to carve a swastika
on your corpse. This would be a day of celebration throughout the country. Be
very cautious, Nili. Your authoritarian ways will come back to bite you if you
are not careful. Lock those doors at night.
Similarly, during a meeting of the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights,
Member of Parliament Marco Mendicino related similar calls for the murder of Jews. He
recalled statements that had come to his attention, including, “All Zionists are
racists/terrorists” and “Long live October 7.” He went on to recall a case of a Montreal
man, calling in public for the enemies of Gaza to be killed, and that the killers should “spare
none of them” (i.e. “from the river to the sea” is a common refrain calling for genocide of
the Jews). Mr. Mendicino expressed confusion at the fact that a person explicitly and
publicly calling for the mass killing of Jews was not even charged with a hate crime, despite
his actions clearly falling within the ambit of hate speech law in the Criminal Code. This
is one of hundreds of examples of the normalizing of Jew hatred.
There were 5252 incidents of harassment of Jews in Canada in 2023. Statistics Canada, in
its report Disproportionate Harm: Hate Crimes in Canada, notes that up 95% of hate
crimes aren’t reported. Online activity saw 4847 incidents of Jew hatred. There were over
several drive-by (Mark, that number seems very high and so where was it reported)
shootings at Jewish schools, synagogues have been firebombed, Jewish businesses
regularly vandalized, and it has been reported that Jewish parents are afraid to send their kids to neighbourhood schools because of the level of Jew hatred within them. Below is an
example of the kind of things that are being said about Jews, online and to their faces.
Jew hatred is so high in Canada that our country has developed an international reputation
for it. An article in the American online site The Free Press, titled The Explosion of Jew
Hatred in Trudeau’s Canada, begins by stating that between 2022-23 there had been a
670% increase in Jew hating incidents (even though the author included fewer incidents
than the B’nai Brith Canada report). The author notes that “despair has become a feature
of everyday life for Jews across Canada who are experiencing open hatred—and yet are
living under a government that appears either blind to it, paralyzed by it, or indifferent to
it.” The article spotlights the pain caused by Canada’s institutional denial of this hatred,
and part of that denial is the refusal to recognise that violence against Jews wrapped in the
rhetoric of anti-Zionism is still violence against Jews. The author also discusses the sheer
overwhelm of law enforcement by antisemitic hate crimes:
…[Police] cannot keep up with the volume of hate crimes—crimes that arise from
a widespread ideology that has normalized the idea that “Zionists” anywhere are a
fair target for attack.
Jews constitute 1% of Canada’s population, and yet are the victims of 70% of its hate
crimes. During demonstrations on and off campus, masked protestors scream “Every day
will be October 7 for you Jews” and “go back to Poland, Jew!” They also shout “from the
river to the sea” and “by any means necessary.”4 These phrases reverberate from similar
hateful rhetoric emanating from Haj Al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the
1940’s, who collaborated with Hitler and planned on setting up gas chambers in the Middle
East to exterminate Jews in the region. These plans predate the reconstitution of Israel, thus
confirming that anti-Zionism is a rebranding of a much older Jew hatred. These slogans
mean that no Jew shall remain alive in all of Israel and that the ‘removal’ of the Jews should
be unbounded by any ethical or legal considerations. They are calls for genocide in Israel,
and the statement “globalise the intifada” is a call for the genocide of Jews around the
world including in Canada. Bolstering these sentiments is the characterisation of Jews as
Nazis.
This is the social and political context in which Canadian Jews are living, and the Jew
hating at U of T is an extension of that vile hate. Indeed, it is one of its sources.
The political context on campus.
The Political Context on Campus
There is limited data available to evince the level of Jew hating behaviours at U of T. What
is available, however, are reliable qualitative reports. It is imperative that the university
capture the data on antisemitism, impose consequences and report its findings and actions.
Our hope in reporting some of the incidents is to raise the committee’s awareness of what
U of T Jewish students and faculty experience. Any other marginalized people’s
experiences would have been dealt with very differently. If a professor or student were to
say something even non-hateful in class that makes a member of another equity-seeking
group feel uncomfortable, the university would likely respond with severe consequences.
But for some reason, the comfort level of Jews is irrelevant: “Me Too…Unless you’re a
Jew,” is the lived experience of the Jewish population at the University of Toronto.
Concordia professor Gad Saad noted that universities have become “cesspools” of Jew
hatred. Hillel Ontario, a Jewish campus organization that advocates for Jewish students,
stated that reported antisemitic incidents on Canadian campuses rose from 55 to 500
between the academic years 2022-23 and 2023-24. Jewish students are regularly subject to
intimidation, desecration of sacred Jewish objects, lectures and tutorials that impose onesided arguments against Israel (and by implication, against Jews), and Jews frequently
encounter swastikas in classrooms and bathrooms.
A recent survey of grad students has found some interesting patterns. Sixty percent of
Jewish students have experienced Jew hatred, fifty percent are uncomfortable attending
Graduate Student Union (GSU) meetings, and eighty three percent believe the Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement contributes to Jew hatred on campus. What
would the university’s response be if it were Muslim instead of Jewish students going
through isolation and harassment? Don’t answer—just notice your internal response, and
realize that if you accept there should be a difference, you have internalized antisemitism.
Jewish U of T students encounter claims that all Jews are rich and that they control the
university. Identifiable Jews get called “terrorist” and “Zionist slut” and Jewish holidays
are mocked by fellow students. Jews have been denied access to information and to social
circles because of their religion. Perhaps the most horrific example of active Jew hatred is
the call among some grad students that Jewish dietary needs on campus ought only to be
addressed once those of Gazans are satisfied. It is similar to the position held by the Nazi
administrators responsible for the maintenance of Jews in Poland’s Lodz ghetto. The
Jewish leadership requested more food for the starving Jews but “to no avail as long as an
improvement in the food supply (to the Jews)…meant diverting food supplies from
someone else.” There is no connection to feeding the Jews in Toronto and the Arabs in
Gaza, and this call is intended to dehumanize a significant proportion of the Jewish
students and their identity as Jews.
Finally, we’d like to summarize the experience of a Jewish professor in the most elevated
department of your university: the Temerty Faculty of Medicine (TFOM). The author of a
report on antisemitism, Dr. Ayelet Kuper, observed that the environment in that faculty is
heavy with dog-whistles and ancient oppressive stereotypes. She had been told that all Jews
were liars and that they lie to control the university or the world, to oppress others, and
that any claims of antisemitism ought not to be taken seriously because they are Jewish
lies, so Jew hatred can’t exist. The report points out the belief among TFOM faculty is
that any Jewish colleague who claims to have witnessed Jew hatred is, in fact, lying in
order to oppress Palestinians. Apparently, this view was taught to faculty members in an
off campus gathering. Finally, Dr. Kuper had been told that Zionism stands for the hatred
and desire to murder all Palestinians. Ironic, given that the explicit purpose of Hamas and
Hezbollah, two terrorist entities, is to murder all Jews, and their public declarations affirm
this. While facts show that the population of Arabs has in fact increased in Israel, Gaza and
the disputed territories, hardly a sign of genocide, the truth is deemed irrelevant to Jew
haters.
The idea that Jewish people control everything from universities to the world is an old and
powerful tool to generate vitriolic Jew hatred. It is not the first time this form of Jew hatred
has emerged:
At the core of Hitler’s beliefs was the “Jewish question,” code words for
Hitler’s conviction that there existed an extraordinary organisation of Jewish
people that was very pervasive and intent on world domination and whose
victory would mark the end of human survival.
We now turn to the question of whether violence against Jews is still violence against Jews
if it is wrapped in the language of anti-Zionism.
2. Anti-Zionism as a Cloak for Antisemitism.
If a Jew was shot as he exited a synagogue by someone who ‘didn’t hold anything against
the Jewish people’ but was merely taking political action against Zionism, would we
recognise it as Jew hatred? If Jews are harassed, intimidated, belittled, demeaned and
dehumanized by people who are ‘fighting Zionism,’—as they are—could we recognise it
as Jew hatred? What is the University of Toronto waiting for in its refusal to recognize
antisemitism, and its refusal to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
definition of antisemitism? This is the gold standard, adopted internationally, including by
Ontario, Canada and 8 other provinces.
The Guide to Law and Policy lists a number of policies and laws that theoretically combat
Jew hatred, which we will examine in the next section. Unfortunately, those policies are
not catching Jew hating behaviours and expressions on campus because they are set up
around rigid doctrinal definitions that draw bright line distinctions between the terms Anti-
Zionism and Antisemitism where no such distinction is meaningful nor justified. Despite
its arguably causal relationship to today’s violence toward, and harassment of, Jews, the
current discourse of Jew hatred—anti-Zionism—has been cleverly structured to avoid being seen for the Jew hatred that it is, by definition. Because Jew hatred characterised as
anti-Zionism is definitionally excluded from policies to protect Jews from Jew hatred, the
substance of the hateful behaviours isn’t considered: it doesn’t make it past the proverbial
starting gate. But it is Jew hatred, nonetheless. Therefore we use language that makes that
connection clearer: instead of the word Zionism, we will occasionally substitute the phrase
Jewish national self-determination, and ‘opposition to Jewish national self-determination’
instead of anti-Zionism.
Most Jews, over 80% in Canada, support Jewish national self-determination, and most
people, though not exclusively, who support Jewish national self-determination are Jews.
It is naïve in the extreme to view violent opposition to national Jewish self-determination
as anything but a cloak for Jew hatred, and it is the purpose of this section to show that, to
borrow the language of your existing policy, Zionism is a “proxy” for Judaism for reasons
we discuss below.
Zionism is an exclusively Jewish philosophy and political movement. Zion is referred to
in the Holy Scripture, the Torah which is ancient, and bears the meaning or expression of
love of Jerusalem and of Israel. The political movement called Zionism emerged in 19th
century Eastern Europe in response to the deadly pogroms Jews endured within every
country in which they lived. It was the dream of reclaiming their ancestral homeland—
from which Jews had been forcibly evicted by colonialists- Greeks, Romans, Arabs and
British—with the hope of establishing a nation in which Jews could be safe from corrosive
hatred and lethal violence. From their birth in the Middle East five thousand years ago,
Jews have endured relentless repression and violence. National self-determination is a
response to that historical context, and if anything, today’s virulent anti-Zionism—
manifesting as violence against Jews—shows that Israel is as needed now as it was then.
“Zionism” is the dream that Jews will one day live without fear of violence, with selfdetermination in the place that gave birth to the Jewish people, to Judaism and which
continues to be the centre of their spiritual faith, and in which some Jews have always
remained. To attack a people’s desire for national self-determination when other people
enjoy it—98% of the Middle East is governed by Islamic national self-determination—is to dehumanize and demean those people. Also striking is that the modern State of Israel,
came into being by UN resolutions that also created Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, Iraq.
Anti-Zionism is the rejection of those dreams, and rejection of the legal status of Israel, not
because they are illegitimate, but because they are Jewish dreams and international law that
applies to Jews.
To be an anti-Zionist is to hold that the colonial conquests that originally and repeatedly
forced most Jews from their homeland were acceptable, and by implication, that it’s
acceptable to forcibly remove Jews from Israel today—“from the river to the sea.” It is to
hold that Jews do not have the right to establish a nation in their historical homeland,
despite maintaining a presence in the land of their people’s birth, and despite numerous
imperial aggressions. It is to hold that, unlike the plethora of existing Islamic and Christian
states (created by colonial conquest), a Jewish state, for which there was no invasion or
conquest, is illegitimate. And by extension, it is to hold that Israel does not have the right
to protect its Jewish, Muslim and Christian citizens from internal and external terrorist
attacks. It is impossible to ply apart attacks on Zionism from attacks on Jewish identity and
Judaism itself.
It is difficult to imagine the arguments against Israeli Jews being applied to anyone else.
Anti-Zionists denounce Israel while standing on Indigenous land, stolen by those whose
antecedents were settler colonialists. (Though this isn’t entirely true either as treaties gave
land to Europeans.) U of T exists on the same “stolen land”. Does any faculty, student body
or other entity plan to leave? Have any anti-Zionists organised to remove settlers from
Canada? No. Why not? The so-called ‘sins’ are the same. That is because anti-Zionism
isn’t a movement against colonialism, it’s a movement against Jewish self-determination,
and to attack Jewish nationalism while ignoring every other national entity is simply
antisemitism.
That is why it is impossible to see anti-Zionism as anything other than Jew hatred behind
a mask, and it should be treated as such. The most recent focus of the anti-Israel movement is unavoidably on the war-related tragedies in Gaza, but they eclipse every other existing
tragedy in Afghanistan, Sudan, the Sahel, Yemen, Myanmar, Congo, Ethiopia and, of
course, Syria and Ukraine. Ousted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad murdered and tortured
over half a million of his own citizens, some with chemical weapons, and he subjected tens
of thousands more to lethal, brutal torture. Not only is he not being arrested for crimes
against humanity, but the army of militants that supported him, Hezbollah, are celebrated
because it was trying to eliminate Jews from the Middle East.
“Anti-Zionism” as Dog Whistle for Antisemitism
A word is a combination of arbitrary sounds that refers to some thing or action beyond
itself. Words have no inherent meaning. Rather, we associate the things to which words
refer with the words themselves and, in time, those words come to mean that to which they
refer. That is what ‘meaning’ means: it is a customary relationship between, in this case,
words, and an object or action. When it comes to action words, it’s not the formal definition
of the word that is its meaning, but the action that flows from its use.
The word ‘create,’ for example, refers to activity that causes the emergence of something
new. The word ‘destroy’ refers to the act of causing something to cease to exist. Given
enough repetitive associations, however, it is possible to change the meaning of ‘create’ to
mean destruction. If an influential group of people began using the word ‘create’ to incite
destruction—say, to use suicide bombers to kill innocent civilians—the word ‘create’ no
longer means bringing about something new, it means causing destruction. The law, then,
would change to prohibit calls for ‘creation’ because it is the destructive actions that it
wants to stop. If lawmakers refused to change the law and calls for ‘creation’ continued to
cause destruction because the law refused to recognise the new meaning, we would say
that the law is using linguistic tricks to allow destruction to continue.
This hypothetical scenario mirrors the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
In response to aggressive proclamations against Zionism, synagogues are being vandalized,
Jewish schools are being shot at, Jewish organisations, including hospitals are being
protested, and Jewish students at U of T are being harassed, bullied and ridiculed. Anti-
Zionism is antisemitism if only because it incites Jew hatred. Anti-Zionism is a call for
violence against Jews because that’s what it does.
Meaning is partly determined by context, and speakers can exploit a particular context to
deliver a hateful message that, on its face, is innocuous. However, in disagreement with
three US university presidents that calling for the murder of Jews, “depends on context,”
we do not accept any claim that such heinous language is ever acceptable, in any context.
Similarly, those who demean, or provoke hatred or violence against, U of T Jews with anti-
Zionist language should be held accountable for the results of their speech. The interpretive
context of false claims about Israel as an apartheid state, conducting ethnic cleansing or
choosing to kill civilians in. Gaza, to cite some lies, by some faculty in class and in social
media postings, student votes and anti-Israel campaigns, display the vitriolic level of Jew
hatred both inside and outside the university, and draw Jew hatred from whatever source
and in whatever form of expression it can. We may not be able to prove their intentions
beyond a shadow of a doubt, but it’s enough that we can say that such anti-Zionism has an
intended vile meaning, and in some cases could be shown to be a criminal act of hatred.
Anti-Zionism isn’t a rational critique of Israeli governance. It is an attack on the right of
Jews to have their own state, and a denial of legal and historical evidence. The singular
focus on Israel is itself a form of Jew hatred. Were the criticisms of Israel’s creation part
of an equally emotional and totalising critique of nations that were actually created by
imperial conquest, it might garner an air of legitimacy. But every single nation that was
born of imperial conquest and every single government that is committing actual genocide
against its people, right now, is completely ignored by the purveyors of anti-Zionism. And
that is Jew hatred.
Like the Nazis, and under the guise of “social justice,” anti-Zionists argue they are
supporting human values, but theirs is not a righteous cause but one easily proven
otherwise; it is Jew hatred and under any other name it is just as vile.
3. The effectiveness of U of T’s existing policy framework.
“The telos of tolerance is truth.”
- Herbert Marcuse in Repressive Tolerance
Given the level, frequency and intensity of Jew hatred at U of T, it is clear that the existing
policy framework is not working. That is tragic. This university committee is in a position
to steer the university in the right direction, hence influencing the entire country away from
its current terrifying and unjust submission to antisemitism. We, the Jewish community,
cannot wait.
The lesson of German history for American academia should by now be clear.
In Germany, to use the legalistic language of 2023, “speech crossed into
conduct.” The “final solution of the Jewish question” began as speech—to be
precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles. It began
in the songs of student fraternities. With extraordinary speed after 1933,
however, it crossed into conduct: first, systematic pseudo-legal
discrimination and ultimately, a program of technocratic genocide.
“Pseudo-legal discrimination” is underway, particularly in the form of harassing, demeaning, and excluding of Jewish students on campus, which is unjust, anti-democratic, anti-freedom. These behaviours are discriminating and dangerous in the extreme as they allow for pervasive antisemitism, which always threatens the rest of society. And we add that these tools of antisemitism were used by the Nazis to dehumanize the Jews and we will not stand by and watch history repeat itself.
The Guide names a plethora of policy documents that speak to the issue, and generally fall
into two camps: policies to restrict speech and policies to protect speech. The justifications
for restricting speech include needing to protect people from demeaning comments that aim at prohibited grounds of discrimination. According to the Statement of Free Speech,
the policies to protect speech seek to advance “the pursuit of truth, the advancement of
learning and the dissemination of knowledge.” And the Guide quotes the University’s
Statement of Institutional Purpose which recognizes that the university is unjustified in
restricting speech simply because it raises “deeply disturbing questions and provocative
challenges to the cherished beliefs in society.” We fully agree with this principle. But what
possible truth could be advanced by a statement like “all Jews are liars”? Further, what
deeply disturbing questions and challenges are raised by calling Jewish students, “Zionist
sluts” or “terrorists”? If these statements are seen as merely challenging cherished beliefs,
then obviously antisemitism will continue to grow on campus. The existing policies are
thus ineffective, and the University in refusing to recognize that such attacks, will be seen
as antagonistic by the Jewish community and unreliable in protecting all students and
faculty.
These racist stereotypes sometimes operate explicitly through reference to “the Jews,”
and other times through coded language: in the nineteenth century the word
“Rothschild” was meant to stand for Jews in general, more recently, “Soros” and some
uses of the term “globalist” and “Zionist” figure similarly as tropes for antisemtic
stereotyping, as do images of Jews as powerful puppeteers controlling others. It also
occasionally manifests crude biological images: several focus group participants
reported being asked whether Jews had horns. (Report of the University of Toronto
Antisemitism Working Group)
The University’s policies recognize that anti-Zionism is a code for antisemitism, on par
with other oppressive terms that disguise Jew hatred in an alternate vernacular.
Rather than prioritize that language of hate speech, it makes more sense to adopt a more
sophisticated frame of reference. This frame of reference can be derived directly from
existing policies. Speech that demeans or excludes a person or group is hate speech, for
which there must be consequences. Such speech does not advance the pursuit of truth which is the purpose of protected speech. While this is seemingly complicated, it is an approach to regulating speech that akin to other legal questions that involve weighing amorphous issues. The jurisprudence on the criminal prohibition of hate speech includes complex issues but these cannot be avoided, nor rigidity applied, for there is the risk that allowing that which should be prohibited from being stopped which is precisely what is happening on campus today.
This is all to say that a policy restricted to narrow doctrinal definitions creates the risk of
hateful messages being articulated in coded language in ways that avoid the application of
policy while provoking hatred and exclusion nonetheless.
4. Recommendations
Numerous groups submitting comments on the Guide will be making specific policy
recommendations and we do likewise; key is the adoption of the IHRA definition of
antisemitism, mandated training on IHRA, monitoring and reporting on acts of
antisemitism that meet the definition, and consequences for those whose actions meet this
definition of antisemitism. CAEF notes that the current situation in which policies exist but
are not adhered to, does not protect Jewish students and staff and the experiences of Jews
are minimized.
Laws and policies may govern relationships but can only go so far, if the relevant
population is not informed about them, the administration does not take them seriously,
and enforce them, and if breaches are ignored or dismissed under the guise of “words” with
meanings not intended. Thus, a defense of antisemitism, suggesting it was just anti-
Zionism, cannot be accepted.
CAEF recommends the following:
Consistently enforce university rules, regulations, and codes of conduct. These rules exist for the safety and well-being of all students. A failure to enforce them simply leads to further license for students and outside actors to assert their control over campus.
Restrict outside agitators from accessing campus and fomenting violence and discrimination. It is clear that many of the participants in unlawful protest activities are agitators from outside groups. To the extent it is legally permissible, we encourage universities to prevent outsiders from co-opting campuses for their political ends, and implement security measures necessary to restrict their access to campus spaces.
Anticipate and plan for a variety of scenarios involving potential protests and disruptions and establish a clear delegation of responsibility for campus security, law enforcement, and related university functions to respond to each scenario.
Prevent protests from targeting Jewish locations, student groups, and individuals. Take all necessary steps to protect Jewish facilities such as Hillel, and other locations where Jews congregate together as a community.
Adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism and ensure implementation across
campus institutions and bodies
Recognize Zionism as a protected category under the university’s nondiscrimination
policy
Create a dedicated position to oversee antisemitism complaints and reporting
Actively monitor courses and related curriculum for antisemitic content
Provide public reporting on antisemitic related incidents and their outcomes
Institute mandatory training on antisemitism for staff reviewing antisemitism
complaints
Institute a review system to accredit outside trainers and speakers
Expand academic programming on antisemitism.
Establish partnerships with Israeli and Jewish focused universities
Create a campaign to actively counter antisemitism while creating programing to
build respectful dialogue and scholarship.
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