Last week Jonah Fried launched a lawsuit against the Students Society of McGill University (SSMU), Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) and McGill’s administration. He is alleging that they are responsible for discrimination and harassment.
Leading Canadian apartheid lobby group B’nai Brith announced it would finance the legal action. The wealthy, government-subsidized charity has a legal department largely devoted to anti-Palestinian cases.
It’s unclear if B’nai Brith reached out to Fried or vice versa, but what is clear is that this isn’t the fourth-year student’s first repressive move in support of racial apartheid. Before students voted on a Palestine Solidarity Policy in March Fried tried to block the vote. He sought an injunction with SSMU’s Judicial Board to disqualify the resolution, citing an earlier Israel lobby effort to outlaw motions supporting the BDS movement.
But the vote went ahead and 71% of McGill undergraduates supported boycotting “corporations and institutions complicit in settler-colonial apartheid against Palestinians.”
In response to the overwhelming vote of fellow undergraduates, Fried sought to have SSMU’s Judicial Board annul the democratic will. Amidst extreme pressure from the university administration, B’nai Brith and others, SSMU’s board of directors struck down the already adopted resolution. But that wasn’t enough for Fried. He now wants a provincial court to block McGill students from being able to collectively take action in support of Palestinian rights. In other words, the New York transplant wants Québec’s Superior Court to prevent McGill students from exercising their democratic rights in the hopes this will further protect a violent, colonial, system in the Middle East.
Fried is a fellow with the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis. CAMERA fellows receive $1,500 and are asked to carry out a number of activities on campus including “monitoring of the campus media, classrooms/professors, and anti-Israel events.”
A rabidly pro-apartheid ‘flack’ group, CAMERA says university “campuses are the scene of propagandistic assaults on Israel”. The group monitors Israel discussion on campus and calls for “tracking all relevant class curriculum offered at your university.” According to the Jewish Forward, CAMERA is “known for intimidation and smear campaigns against scholars and students whose views they oppose.”
The Boston-based group had a $5.7 million budget in 2020. Though the organization tries to keep its donors anonymous, a 2016 Haaretz investigation found CAMERA received more than $1.5 million from Seth Klarman, a billionaire hedge fund manager who cofounded The Times of Israel, was a board member and major donor to the anti-Muslim The Israel Project, as well as providing funds to NGO Monitor and illegal West Bank settlements. Haaretz also found that CAMERA received hundreds of thousands of dollars from now deceased Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. According to the Jewish Forward, CAMERA was one of the “organizations aligned with right-wing and hawkish political views” that presented at the 2015 Adelson-sponsored Campus Maccabees summit, which raised at least $20 million and maybe as much $50 million to attack critics of Israel.
In addition, CAMERA fellows are paid to write anti-Palestinian articles, which indirectly subsidizes a number of pro-apartheid media outlets. Fried has written for arch-Zionist Algemeiner, The Suburban and Jerusalem Post. Last year he published “An anti-Israel professor teaches at McGill”, which sought to intimidate Rula Jurdi Abisaab and criminalize her Palestine solidarity as “supporting terrorism”.
Seeking to intimidate professors, labeling opposition to apartheid as “antisemitism” and suing your peers is a tacit admission that you’ve failed to make the case for Israel. Unable to win the argument, the apartheid lobby increasingly relies on smears and legal action. But anti-democratic maneuvers can only stunt Palestine solidarity for so long and in many ways will achieve the opposite effect.
Thank you, Yves Engler, for keeping us in the loop.
B’nei Brith etc. used to be civil-liberties orgs. Now all they do is shill for Israel.
Would this pass a Charter of Rights test? I doubt it.
Hardly a surprise. Thank you Yves. For all you do.
Looks at the trash McGill produces. Trudeau, Brooke Goldstein, Neuer. So many others. Time to spread some sunshine on their human rights profs as well as ethics instructors. They seem to produce an endless list of trash.