Jewish Philanthropy and Simon Fraser University

"I am 96 years old. I make no secret of my Jewishness, nor do I conceal my deep attachment to Jewish history, including centuries of persecution and violence. I lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust: aunts,  uncles, cousins yet to blossom into their full selves. The horrific events of October 7 were a stark reminder that antisemitism has, in the worst sense possible, endured, and, astonishingly enough in recent months, deepened in Canada, the United States, Europe and well beyond."

"When my husband and I celebrated the opening of the library 34 years ago, we could not have imagined such ugliness within its walls. Our hopes in endowing the library were rooted in our commitment to create a space where facts and information were centered, a place that would foster mutual understanding, not a cascade of social-media vitriol from one of our own librarians. I am concerned not only about the messages themselves, but also about the unwillingness of officials at Simon Fraser University to publicly disavow them."

"The extraordinary irony is that the library exists within the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue -- whose stated mission is to "use dialogue and engagement to facilitate transformative conversation and create real world impact for society's most pressing challenges."

Frances Belzberg, C.M. O.B.C., philanthropist, Vancouver

Frances and the late Samuel Belzberg are seen in a file photo from May 2016 when they received the Simon Fraser University President's Distinguished Community Leadership Award. Photo by Postmedia News file

The late Samuel Belzberg and his wife Frances, endowed a library within Simon Fraser University's Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue. The Samuel and Frances Belzberg Library had a purpose, meant to advance debate on issues of the times, and in the process also advance educational opportunities for students attending the university. However, like many other universities, their unions and their satellite institutions across Canada and the United States, the hidden spectre of antisemitism has become full blown, finding its expression in viral condemnation of the State of Israel.

This is the Middle East country which in 1948 re-established its formal presence as the reawakening of the ancestral geography of Judaism, the homeland of Judaeans that stretches back 5,000 years into antiquity. Only a limited proportion of the original Judaean geography was allocated to a reestablished Jewish homeland, with the United Nations formulating a geographic partition that would benefit both Jews and a fairly historically recent population of Arabs originally migrated from Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

Ever since the migrated Arab population refused the UN offer to establish a state of their own alongside that of the nascent Jewish state, bitter recriminations over the presence of Israel ensued, along with several ME military coalitions intending to destroy the nascent state, yet each time Israel's fledgling military was able to fend off the attacks and in the last of the combined military pursuits to destroy Israel, Syria lost the Golan Heights and Egypt the Sinai to a victorious Israel. Each time Israeli negotiators offered the Arabs -- who named themselves "Palestinians" to credit themselves with land entitlement -- enticements to peace, it was refused, even though 90% of their demands were met.

 

But 'Palestinians' presented themselves to the world as perpetual victims, the underdog in an existential disagreement that became increasingly violent as first the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLFP, then Fatah and Hamas, launched violently lethal attacks against Israel, all the while portraying themselves as the victims and Israel the aggressor. Messages that the world community seemed satisfied with, many among them, particularly union groups and academics taking up their moral cudgel against Israel.

 

Simon Fraser University in Vancouver is just one other university among the dozens in Canada and the United States that have embraced a version of events that portray Israel as the aggressor and a 'colonialist occupier', in line with the 'Palestinian' campaign of slander and vilification in their attempts to delegitimize Israel on the world stage. 

 

 

 

Canadian-Jewish philanthropist Frances Belzberg, decried the blatant antisemitism being conveyed in messages from academia, veiled in denial of Jew-hate, as 'merely' criticism of Israel's right to exist. At the Samuel and Frances Belzberg Library, the librarian whose specialty is ironically enough, history, international studies, liberal studies and political science at Simon Fraser University -- posted a number of statements on social media, oozing with antisemitism.

The librarian denounced Zionism and Israel as "vile, inhumane, deranged and monstrous", urging that people boycott Indigo books, the successful commercial purveyor of literature through its popular bookstores, on the basis that its owners had founded a charity to fund former Israeli soldiers' education. "Don't give your book money to Israel", she posted. 

The astonishing amount of vitriol against Israel, messages depicting Israel as having launched a genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, that has motivated people who subscribe to the left with its penchant for Jew-hate, to join the Palestinian-linked organizations that champion Hamas, posing its barbaric blood-fest in Israel and the vicious raping of Israeli girls and women who were mutilated and slaughtered as a 'just' response to 'occupation', is totally unnerving, revealing the depth of antisemitism manifesting its presence in a current of hatefulness and celebration of terror.

"And so, simply as a citizen and as a patron of the library, I think it is within my rights to express the obvious; this is an institution based on free and civil discourse. Such messages on social media from our librarian are no more tolerable in a library than bigoted social media messages from a professor or student leader should be at this university. It runs entirely counter to the values of such institutions; tolerance, decency, learning, and open exchange."

"But the university has failed in its moral obligation to condemn this speech unequivocally, and in this failure, leaves its Jewish students vulnerable to the very attacks we are witnessing across Canada and elsewhere."

Frances Belzberg