Please come out for our events marking the 11th Annual Israeli Apartheid Week in Toronto from March 24th – March 28th:That last line encapsulates the Israel-haters' worldview: they have all "respect" in the world for "picket lines" but none at all for Jewish statehood.
Steven Salaita: Palestine, Academic Freedom and Decolonizing the University
The dehiring of Steven Salaita from a tenured position is one of the most serious assaults on academic freedom in recent years. Steven Salaita is one of a number of prominent academics who have paid a huge price for Palestine advocacy and/or anti-colonial expression. He was hired to a tenured position to teach in the American Indian Studies program at University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He was denied this job in August 2014 on the basis of tweets during the Israeli assault on Gaza that summer, having left his previous job and uprooted his family.
Join us to hear Salaita discuss academic freedom & the struggle to decolonize the university in relation to his own scholarship on indigenous expression.
Tuesday March 24th at 7pm
SteelworkersHall, 25 Cecil St., Toronto
https://www.facebook.com/events/1607819416118630/
Buidling the Divestment movement: A teach-in with a Stop the Wall Coordinator and member of the BDS National Committee
We are looking forward to welcoming the coordinator of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign and hearing about the Palestinian Boycott National Committee (BNC), which leads the Palestinian BDS movement.
This teach-in is a great opportunity to learn about the material effects of Zionist settler colonialism on Palestinian lives, from an organizer that is involved in popular resistance on the ground. It is also a great opportunity to engage in conversations about solidarity with Palestine, and taking action to tactically build the BDS campaign in Toronto.
Wednesday March 25th at 6pm
Beit Zatoun, 612 Markham St., Toronto, M6G 2L8
https://www.facebook.com/events/1085821148107693/
Gaza: Perspectives from the ground with Dr Rand Askalan and Professor Haidar Eid (by video link)
This is a unique opportunity to learn more about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement within Palestine and to show solidarity particularly in light of Israel’s recent assaults on the Gaza Strip.
Dr. Rand Askalan, who currently works at the Toronto Sick Kids, completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge in 1994, and then obtained her Medical Degree from the University of Toronto in 2001. She is the founder and director of the Palestinian Healthy Child Fellowship, which aims to provide fellowships for the training of Palestinian physicians. Dr. Askalan goes to Palestine on an annual basis to run clinics and provide medical services. She has therefore seen first-hand the consequences of the Israeli Apartheid regime’s assaults on Gaza: the scarcity of tools and resources, the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as limitations to the movement of people in need of life-saving operations.
Dr. Haidar Eid is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Postmodern Literature in the Department of English at Al-Aqsa University in the Gaza Strip. He is also a founding member of the One Democratic State Group, an organisation of Palestinian activists who are calling for the establishment of a secular, democratic state as a means to end Israeli Apartheid. Dr Eid is also an active member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). He has written widely on the situation in Gaza, with published articles in Al Jazeera, Electronic Intifada and the Palestine Chronicle, amongst others.
Friday March 27th 2015 at 7pm
POD366, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria St.
Rhythms of Solidarity: A Night of Multilingual Music, Spoken Word and Poetry
Saturday March 28th at 7pm
Margaret Laurence Room, Student Centre, Ryerson University, 55 Gould Street
Students Against Israeli Apartheid stands in solidarity with the workers of CUPE 3902 and 3903 on strike, who are fighting for safer, stronger and better living, learning, and working conditions. All events during IAW will be moved off campus to respect the picket lines.
Update: How fitting that the "Rhythms of Solidarity" event is being held in the "Margaret Laurence Room." Laurence's novel, The Stone Angel, is arguably the most victim-focused and depressing novel ever inflicted on Ontario High School students and is thus fully in synch with the Palestinians' victimhood narrative.
Update: Invaluable website Canary Mission fills us in about IAW speaker Steven Salaita:
Purveyor of anti-Semitic Incitement
Salaita became a focal point of controversy when the University of Illinois (U of I) withdrew its offer of employment for the position of professor of American Indian Studies in 2014, after attention was drawn to Salaita’s anti-Semitic tweets regarding the 2014 Israel–Gaza war.
One tweet, posted shortly after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped by Hamas from a bus stop (and later found murdered,) read: “You may be too refined to say it, but I’m not: I wish all the f**king West Bank settlers would go missing.” A month later, Salaita tweeted, “Zionists: transforming “antisemitism” from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.”
U of I defended its decision to withdraw its job offer to Salaita on January 29, 2015, in a press release, noting: “[Salaita’s tweets] demonstrate that Dr. Salaita lacks the judgment, temperament and thoughtfulness to serve as a member of our faculty in any capacity, but particularly to teach courses related to the Middle East.”
Salaita’s antagonism toward Israel and Jewish national self-determination continues to inspire his social media postings and scholarship.
After the 15 month-long saga, U of I offered Salaita a financial settlement in November of 2015, which he accepted. The settlement ensures that Salaita will drop his “pending legal claims against U of I, including a lawsuit alleging breach of contract and First Amendment violations.” Furthermore, the settlement specifies that Salaita will not work for U of I in the future.
On July 8, 2015, he tweeted that Zionists take sexual pleasure in the death of Palestinians. On January 11, 2016, he tweeted that he considers any success he has in deligitimizing Israel to be an achievement.
In December 2015, Salaita broadcast his continued rejection of Israel’s legitimacy and his belief that all Christians living in Israel are “Palestinian.” Salaita believes all Jewish residents of Israel, on either side of the 1949 armistice lines, are “settlers.” In January 2016, he advised liberal Zionists wishing to dialogue with Palestinians: “… Palestinians have the annoying habit of criticizing pre-1967 settlers, whom you adore. The best way to dialogue about [settlements] is to tell Palestinians that Israel must be preserved as an ethnocracy in which non-Jews are legally dispossessed because a few thousand ideologues from the American suburbs need a spare country to fulfill their Orientalist fantasies.”
Salaita began a national speaking tour after the controversy surrounding his firing became national news. He speaks primarily on “Palestine and Censorship,” alleging that pro-Palestinian speech is censored by the university system...He sounds utterly bonkers--which makes him the perfect speaker for the IAW crowd.
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