Solidarity with Palestinian Human Rights

Student unions and councils in various universities across Canada appear to have aligned themselves compassionately and passionately with the plight of Palestinians, living under the hard occupational boot of the Government of Israel. Or so the interpretation would have it. The inconvenient minutiae of history and politics is of no interest and simply confuses a simple issue: the brutal government Goliath and the cowering, helpless Palestinian victims.

So here's yet another student group, at University of British Columbia, with their Alma Mater Society happily sharing angst over the plight of the Palestinians, prepared to approve a donation of $700 of student funding to a charity responsible for organizing the Canadian Boat for Gaza. These are mature university students. One might imagine they have information at their fingertips, should they choose to exercise an option to look for a balanced view.

Doing so, they might discover that Gazan Palestinians are governed by a terrorist group, one that is identified as such by many governments, including that of Canada. They might learn that the charter of Hamas - a fundamentalist Islamist group dedicated to the eventual return of all land in the area to the Palestinians - contains a key provision for the destruction of Israel. They have a moral obligation to inform themselves that Israel suffers continual attacks from Gaza resulting in the need to control border crossings to restrict the importation of weapons.

Still, the students are invested with a humanitarian need to support a venture purporting to represent solidarity with Gaza Palestinians. That charity named Alternatives based in Montreal, has not been providing charitable receipts for this Gaza-blockade-running charter, though it has thus far collected $100,000 for the cause. Some saner heads on the UBC campus have cautioned the funding will support terrorism.

President of the Alma Mater Society, Bijan Ahmadian, has his doubts: "I think we've definitely got ourselves to a bit of a dilemma here", he concluded. And they have. Thanks largely to the successful infiltration of fundamentalist Arab- and sympathizer-groups like Solidarity with Palestinian Human Rights and the Canadian Arab Federation. Former CAF vice-president Omar Shaban presents as a typically type-cast principal. Taking the slander of Canada into his orbit, along with Israel-bashing.

The student government's Social Justice Centre takes its role seriously, with its budget of student money to be allocated for donations out of its $10,000 disposable income toward activist projects "that promote awareness about social justice issues on campus and supports students and student organizing". Which doesn't quite explain why it would send $700 to a radical-left group dedicated to opposing and slandering a foreign government.

But of course this group dedicated to opposing "capitalism and other authoritarian systems", also endorsed and promoting the recent speaking tour that permitted George Galloway to deliver his once-thwarted, twisted message about human rights and state apartheid, and enthusiastic support of terror groups.

It is interesting that the AMS president Mr. Ahmadian felt it might be wise to freeze the donation, claiming the need to produce "fiduciary duty to exercise due diligence in handling student fees", and for his pains the Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights has accused him of being "anti-Palestinian", and "belligerent"; obviously "motivated by an inherent bias towards Israel's policies".

Mr. Ahmadian has now been labelled as being complicit in denying human rights to Palestinians. This is the kind of typically vicious intimidation that such solidarity-with-Palestinian groups exercise in a free exchange of their Charter-guaranteed rights and freedoms.