Category: Canada and Empire

A website has been set up with all the materials on the case of Daniel Freeman-Maloy, the Jewish student activist at York University in Canada who was expelled for blatantly political reasons — namely, his anti-poverty and anti-militarist activism.

Campus activists who work on Israel/Palestine issues will know about Hillel. Hillel is a group that ostensibly exists to promote Jewish cultural and religious life on campuses, but in fact promotes occupation and militarism in many cases. When the Hillel chapter President at University of Richmond objected to this, she was removed as President a day later. This is a story worth reading in full, so I’ve posted the entire story from the Chronicle of Higher Education below. The bare bones: Jillian Redford, the Hillel chapter president, had been receiving messages from the Israeli Embassy. She wrote to them:

“Could you please stop sending me email after email about radical zionist propaganda?… “I don’t know if you realize that Hillel’s mission statement is based on fostering religious life on college campuses and not organizing marches, protests, or listening to speakers who encourage us to hate our Palestinian neighbors.”

The next day, she was no longer President of Hillel U of R…

Wednesday, May 5, 2004
Student President of Hillel Chapter at U. of Richmond Is Ousted After Criticizing Israeli Embassy
By ERIC HOOVER

The organization that sponsors the University of Richmond’s Hillel chapter removed the group’s student president this semester after she sent a critical e-mail message to the Israeli Embassy, in Washington.

Jilian R. Redford, a junior, had served as the Hillel chapter’s president since the beginning of the fall semester. On February 12, after receiving an e-mail message from the Israeli Embassy’s office of academic affairs, Ms. Redford wrote in a response: “Could you please stop sending me email after email about radical zionist propaganda?”

In the message, a copy of which she gave to The Chronicle, Ms. Redford continued, “I don’t know if you realize that Hillel’s mission statement is based on fostering religious life on college campuses and not organizing marches, protests, or listening to speakers who encourage us to hate our Palestinian neighbors.”

She also asked to be removed from the embassy’s e-mail list.

In an interview on Tuesday, Ms. Redford said that the next day she was summoned to the Weinstein Jewish Community Center — a Richmond-based organization that oversees the university’s Hillel chapter — to discuss the e-mail message, which the embassy had forwarded to officials at the center

In a meeting, two staff members of the center asked Ms. Redford to apologize to the embassy, but she refused to do so, according to both Ms. Redford and Lisa Looney, the center’s director of university services.

Ms. Redford said that during the meeting Ms. Looney and another staff member told her that the embassy had demanded her ouster. She said that she was “grilled” about her opinions on Israeli policies, and also that one of the two staff members mentioned that Ms. Redford, who had been raised as a Southern Baptist, had converted to Judaism only after coming to the university.

But Ms. Looney disputed those assertions.

“The embassy had absolutely, unequivocally nothing to do with the decision,” Ms. Looney said in an interview.

“Her political views never came up” during the meeting, Ms. Looney said. “All I wanted to see happen was for her to apologize for the tone of her letter, not the content.” She said she had had a good working relationship with Ms. Redford before the incident.

Ms. Looney said that if Ms. Redford had not included her title in her e-mail message to the embassy, the center’s staff would not have objected to it.

In a February 18 letter to Ms. Redford, Orly Lewis, the center’s director of adult services, suggested that Ms. Redford’s goals were “in conflict” with those of Hillel. “While all of us are entitled to our own opinions, in this instance you are representing the Hillel organization and not yourself,” Ms. Lewis wrote.

The letter also referred to Ms. Redford’s refusal to invite to a Hillel event a speaker the center had mentioned earlier in the semester. Ms. Redford said she had told a staff member at the center that the speaker, a faculty member at Richmond, was a “racist.”

After Ms. Redford again declined to apologize, Ms. Looney informed her of her dismissal in a letter, dated March 3, that called Ms. Redford’s conduct “both unprofessional and disrespectful.”

Ms. Redford said Tuesday that she had mixed feelings about her ouster. “It feels good not to be a part of an organization like that,” she said. “After the way they treated me, it made me want to completely distance myself from them.”

Richmond’s Hillel chapter receives its financing from the center. Previously, the chapter did not have a clear policy governing the election and removal of student leaders, according to Leonard S. Goldberg, Richmond’s vice president for student affairs. But following the incident, the university helped students and the center draft bylaws.

“I questioned whether an outside organization should be able to fire or terminate a student leader,” said Mr. Goldberg, who met with staff members of the center this spring to discuss the new policy. “We had a cordial conversation, but I made it quite clear that we can’t have an outside organization removing students.”

Officials at the Israeli Embassy did not return calls requesting comment on Tuesday.

I assume that a (small) part of my (humble) readership consists of campus activists working on Israel/Palestine issues. These very strange stories will be of interest to that demographic and others. First is the tale of Daniel Freeman-Maloy, one of the En Camino co-conspirators, a member of OCAP, and a very principled activist. He has done work on anti-poverty issues and anti-occupation/war issues, which has brought him into conflict with the organized right-wing ‘zionist’ groups on the York University campus where he studies, and also with the administration on that campus.

He’s been expelled by York for 3 years for ‘unauthorized use of a megaphone’ on two incidents. Lucky for us, today’s activists are often armed with cameras, and some activists put together a film of the two incidents. The film shows Daniel getting shouted down and roughed up by zionist activists who far outnumber the anti-occupation group in both instances. But Daniel was the one who was ‘disrupting the academy’ and hence expelled. Just a little story to indicate the hypocrisy and double standards on campuses in North America. The story made national news, in the National Post and the Toronto Star, today. Below is Daniel’s initial statement.

My Expulsion from York University: an appeal for support and reconsideration

On April 30, 2004, I received a letter signed by York University President and Vice-Chancellor Lorna Marsden declaring that I “will have no purpose on campus” after May 1, 2004. If I set foot on York’s campus at any point in the three years following this date, she threatens, I will be charged for trespassing. My expulsion comes in the context of escalating repression of student dissent by York’s administration, and sets an ominous precedent regarding student rights to freedom of speech, expression and assembly.

The administration’s declaration that I now “have no purpose on campus” is baffling. I am a full-time student at York, and May 1 was both the very day I formally started my job as an editor at York’s main student paper, Excalibur, and nearly three weeks before my last exam. I am being treated as if I have acted dangerously and criminally, even in the absence of any allegations of criminally dangerous conduct.

In fact, those looking for a description of my behavior as dramatic as the administration’s response to it are likely to be disappointed. The alleged crime for which I have been exiled from my school for three years is use of “an unauthorized sound amplification device” (that is, a megaphone) on two separate occasions: October 22, 2003, and March 16, 2004. While general issues of freedom of expression and procedural fairness lie at the heart of this matter, I still feel compelled to address the specific allegations in turn.

Firstly, the events of October 22, 2003. On this date, the administration provided space for “Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Appreciation Day,” an event at which people sporting Israeli military paraphernalia congregated in one of York University’s principal public spaces to celebrate Israeli militarism. The mayor of an illegal Israeli settlement led the event, which was attended by many people who have served in the forces. In this situation, as a Jewish anti- nationalist and an avid anti-militarist, I did use a megaphone to highlight the event’s glaring impropriety. But vocal opposition to militarism, even expressed loudly, is far from criminally threatening.

The second instance cited, March 16, was the first anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, a US peace activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to block it from demolishing a Palestinian family’s home in the Gaza Strip. What happened on that day was without precedent in my experience. While approximately thirty of us set up a mock check-point, some dressed as soldiers and some as civilians, a crowd of some 150 militant Zionists that had been congregating nearby in preparation proceeded to rush our display. We had postponed our action for a period to avoid a clash, but were unsuccessful. We were surrounded, and for nearly an hour faced physical and verbal intimidation.

In this context, I was one of many students organizing the mock check-point who tried, through chants and small speeches, to let confused onlookers know the purpose of the display that was being aggressively swarmed. President Marsden is contending that this somehow “contributed to the threat of harm to the safety and well-being of York University community members.” If this is the case, why am I not being charged criminally? Why did the administration wait so many months to paint my conduct as dangerous?

When I was informed in early November by Ms. Ridley from the Office of Student Affairs (OSA) that I needed to review the student code of conduct, which she alleged I had broken on October 22, I told her that I would do so and then get in touch with her. That same month, I visited her to set up an appointment (I was in and out of the OSA office throughout this period regarding the status of Students for a Critical Consciousness, a campus club of which I am President). She informed me that she would need to coordinate the meeting with the security personnel who had been present on the day in question. I told her that the meeting had been called at her request, and that I was in no rush to meet – Ms. Ridley smugly responded that she was not surprised, and that she would contact me in the near future. She never followed through.

The administration had every opportunity to contact me. Again, I am the President of a recognized student club, my York University email account is listed online as the group’s contact information (and is used readily by York’s library to notify me of late fines), and I even had a minor debate in late February/early March in the pages of Excalibur with Nancy White, York’s director for media relations (regarding some of our school’s questionable corporate connections). Plainly, it is hardly as if I had gone underground.

Over the past year, as a York-based social justice activist who is both Jewish and anti-Zionist, I have been called a “self-hater” and a “terrorist”; I have received death threats. Now, the administration of Lorna Marsden is topping all of this off with a summary suspension order. York University’s mission statement describes the school as “a community of faculty, students and staff committed to academic freedom [and] social justice.” In the hope that this is truly the case, I appeal to the administration to allow me to return to my studies and to my job without any further harassment.

To everyone else reading this (in case the administration’s response is not immediately favorable), the York Free Speech Committee, which recently formed to deal with this situation, will be circulating an important call-out shortly. Please keep posted on this situation, and consider providing your personal support to our campaign if you get the chance.

Sincerely,

Daniel Freeman-Maloy