Excalibur, the campus newspaper at York University in Ontario, last week featured an editorial penned by Features Editor Abdul Malik, who was attempting from a Muslim perspective to come to terms with the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.
Malik’s take on this event elicited a sharp response from another student, Danielle Shachar, who charged that at the third largest university in Canada, “Jewish students are being compelled to pay for a newspaper that incites against them and threatens their safety and well-being on campus … Abdul Malik’s article is not an anomaly; it is a manifestation of the systemic, vitriolic anti-Israel bias.”
If this Muslim student’s reasoning is indicative of York’s academic atmosphere, Shachar is right in titling her response “J’Accuse,” thereby linking the situation at the university with France at the time of the infamous Dreyfuss Affair.
Malik, who it must be reiterated was writing about a massacre perpetrated by two Muslims, opens up by comparing “Orthodox Jewish men who refuse to sit next to women on airplanes” with the unqualified “gunmen” that killed 12 people “responsible for publishing cartoon images of the prophet Muhammad.”
Since Malik’s article is an Excalibur editorial, it can be assumed that it reflects the opinion of a newspaper representing some 50,000 students. Though Malik wrote it, it is Excalibur that believes an Orthodox Jew refusing to sit next to a woman is as much a terrorist as those obscure, murderous “gunmen.”
The further insinuation that the cartoonists are as responsible for their own deaths as the “gunmen” speaks volumes about Excalibur, a newspaper so obviously lacking knowledge and journalistic ethics.
As the editorial continues, the reader discovers that not only are Orthodox Jews as bad as the Paris terrorists, but Zionism itself is comparable to ISIS and Al-Qaeda in that they are all “designed to create suffering.”
Of course, to suggest that Zionism, a national movement started among other reasons to end Jewish suffering, is a terrorist movement of the same ilk as ISIS is as credible as saying that monkeys were created to eat cakes. Such baseless comparisons correspond to nothing except the twisted and bizarre world created in depraved minds.
Progressive as it may pretend to be, the type of rhetoric Excalibur publishes on its pages has nothing to do with progress. It would be utterly naïve to think that such vitriolic articles could convince Jews to turn Israeli swords into plowshares. If anything, this type of journalism is likely to further incite those prone to knee-jerk reactions and lead to calls to bomb the Jews along with the “Islamists.”
More than once in our history have Jews experienced how inflammatory rhetoric spoken in the name of progress can end in catastrophe. That’s why rather than yield to such incitement, many Jews will be inclined to harness their incredible talents in order to defend themselves against the likes of Excalibur before the latter is able to facilitate the creation of an atmosphere conducive to another holocaust.
