Statement Condemning Israeli Boycott at the University of Regina

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Toronto, ON – Earlier this month, the University of Regina’s Student Union passed a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli academics and businesses.

In response, History Professor Emeritus & Author, Dr. Paul C. Merkley, Director on behalf of ICEJ Canada, issued the following statement:
"One of the most alarming signs of the eclipse of reason in our world is the eagerness of our University students (usually abetted by faculty) to join up to the very latest campaign of vilification and demonization of Israel.
The anti-historical narrative and even the symbolics that underlie this present exercise – the maps and the cartoon images– come ultimately from the mind and heart of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ahmadinejad’s Iran.
The cartoon maps of “Palestine” serve to proclaim that Israelis, indeed all Jews, must be made to vanish from the Middle East. If any Canadian imagines that this could be accomplished short of physical liquidation of every living Jew in the vicinity, he has not been paying attention to the Hitlerite rhetoric of these Islamist champions.
Has it not occurred to these spokespersons for the student body of this Canadian University that when Israel disappears from the map there will disappear with it the only polity in the Middle East in which democracy has  ever taken hold – the only community in which Christian citizens are permitted the full free and public exercise of their faith (and therefore the only polity in which Christian numbers have been growing while everywhere else in the neighbourhood Christians are being driven abroad, to satisfy the rage of the Islamists), the only Middle Eastern community in which exists freedom of religion, freedom of speech and expression, toleration for critical learning and advancement of the scientific sprit?
This Boycott and Divestment campaign is ultimately an exercise in self-loathing, into which these privileged beneficiaries of the Canadian way of life have been lured by the mad desire to appear in solidarity with the most irreconcilable enemies of learning. The fact that it is taking place in a Canadian University must set off alarm bells in the Canadian public."Read here