Letter from Richard Sherman to the Editor of Marlet Magazine, University of Victoria, following the despicable decision by the student body to disallow the registration of a Jewish student body, SSI

February 3, 2026 

Dear Letter to the Editor/ Op Ed of the Marlet:

By a 3-121 vote the University of Victoria Student Society (UVSS) denied the Students Supporting Israel( SSIUVIC), a university club, membership TWICE while perfunctorily approving every other student club. (" SSI Victoria Canada DENIED Registration for a Second Time")

As Nobel Peace Prize winner the Rev Martin Luther King Jr said with great wisdom and prescience in Cambridge, Massachusetts in October 1967: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews; you're talking antisemitism ".  See: "The Socialism of Fools - The Left, the Jews and Israel", Seymour Martin Lipset, "Encounter", December 1969, page 24; see also: " The Words of Martin Luther King", Harvard website 2016, Professor Martin Kramer.

Further this overwhelming vote to deny Jews university club membership clearly violates the anti discrimination provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the BC Human Rights Code....making all the institutions involved..administrative and student... subject to sanctions as human rights violators.

Most importantly such overwhelming Jew hatred by the University of Victoria student body does not happen in a vacuum. It is the result of Jew hatred promoted from the top down. From administrators and professors that promote Jew hatred or look the other way while their colleagues promote Jew hatred...which ultimately makes no difference.

Further statements, asides, poisonous antisemitic pedagogy whether through lectures and/or assigned readings, also contributed to this vote.  Assigned antisemitic readings by Edward Said are a perfect example.

As human rights lawyer and distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Jerusalem Center For Public Affairs,  Justus Reid Weiner, wrote in " The False Prophet of Palestine":

"Although Said has defined his own intellectual vocation as one of “tell[ing] the truth against extremely difficult odds”—he has sweepingly declared that the duty of the intellectual is “to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible”—it turns out that, in retailing the facts of his own personal biography over the years, he has spoken anything but the plain, direct, or honest truth. Instead, he has served up, and consciously encouraged others to serve up, a wildly distorted version of the truth, made up in equal parts of outright deception and of artful obfuscations carefully tailored to strengthen his wider ideological agenda—and in particular to promote the claims of Palestinian refugees against Israel...."

In fact, " he (Said) himself grew up not in Jerusalem but in Cairo, where his father, an American citizen, had moved as an economic expatriate approximately nine years before Edward’s birth and had become the owner of a thriving business; and there, until his own departure for the United States as a teenager in 1951, the young Edward Said resided in luxurious apartments, attended private English schools, and played tennis at the exclusive Gezira Sporting Club as the child of one of its few Arab members."

Said's entire body of "scholarship," is based on his intentionally obfuscating this biographical truth about his actual Egyptian childhood and substituting a fictional " Palestinian" phantasmagoric childhood as its foundation.

See: " 'My Beautiful Old House' and Other Fabrications of Edward Said", Justus Reid Weiner, Commentary Magazine, September 1999.

The Nazis described this immersion in Jew hatred by institutions including educational institutions as "Gliechshaltung".  There is no question this 3-131 vote in favor of Jew hatred and discriminating against Jews leaves no doubt that Gliechshaltung is now foundational to the University of Victoria.

There is also no doubt that the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, if voted on today by the administration, faculty, and the students of the University of Victoria would be approved overwhelmingly.

Richard Sherman, Florida