In an article in the St. Catharine’s Standard (“Brock University reviewing sociology Professor’s blog posts,” The Standard, March 15) political science professor Emmett McFarlane is quoted as saying that if Professor Kitossa were “saying something like, all Jewish people are genocidal, that might trip Canada’s hate speech laws, but to say the State of Israel is genocidal—and even to assert that Zionism is a genocidal ideology— doesn’t.” And he adds: “Not all Zionists are Jewish and not all Jewish people are Zionist. Zionism is an ideology and people are free to criticize that no matter how offensive or even repugnant some of that might be.”

I share Professor MacFarlane’s view. Whether or not Tamari Kitossa’s speech is protected by academic freedom and the Charter depends on whether, “in the April blog post, the professor makes a distinction between the Israeli state and Zionism versus Jewish people at large.”

Does he make such a distinction?

The first paragraph of the first post (dated April 9th) begins: “The Jewish Holocaust of Gaza continues. Jewish, yes, because Israel, however Zionist, is the only Jewish State in the world.” This places the emphasis squarely on “Jewish,” treating “Zionist” (“however Zionist”) as a secondary matter. The logic of the inference runs: “Israel is the world’s only. Jewish state, therefore the alleged holocaust is itself Jewish.” But couldn’t one just as well argue: “Israel is the world’s only Zionist state, therefore … etc.”? One could so argue (by the same twisted logic) but the whole idea is to downplay the idea of a Zionist in favour of a Jewish genocide.

The rest of the paragraph just doubles down on this idea. “And, yes, while Zionism crosses religious lines, there is something deeply emotive about linking Jews with committing a holocaust and undertaking genocide the past 75-years.” If “deeply emotive” means ‘emotionally gratifying,’ what emotional appeal, one asks, is there in “linking Jews with committing holocaust and undertaking genocide”? But perhaps “Jews” means Jewish
Zionists and not “all Jewish people,” as Professor MacFarlane suggests. “Of course,” Professor Kitossa concedes, “there have been Jews resisting and protesting Israel’s 75-year long genocide, even to the point of questioning the very legitimacy of the State. But now that a larger number of Jews are belatedly protesting – “not in my name” – the holocaust of Gaza, they need to ask themselves where were they the past 75 years. Did they not know that Israel from its inception was a conquistadorial project with the explicit intent of ‘wiping out’ the Palestinians as though they are/were a human stain?” The answer to the question of what these anti-Zionist Jews must have known is that “no European Jew alive cannot not know (sic) that Israel’s very establishment was an act of genocide predicated on the racial ideology of Nazism.” Thus at least all European Jews alive today (which likely includes all Jews of European origin now living outside Europe) are “committing holocaust and undertaking genocide,” however anti-Zionist they may be.

And that, by Professor McFarlane’s academic freedom test, may be enough to “trip” Canada’s laws against anti-Semitic hate speech.

Murray Miles
Department of Philosophy
Brock University