With the annual Israel-bashing ritual known as Israel Apartheid Week kicking off at campuses around North America, Canada’s National Post takes a look at the mounting tension that is making some students feel uncomfortable.
An event that began four years ago in Toronto, IAW, as it is also called, kicked off on 40 campuses across the globe yesterday.
Though much of the rhetoric is familiar, the tactics used to attract attention to Israel’s alleged atrocities in Gaza has taken a turn for the shrill and, sometimes, threatening.
In early January at the University of Manitoba, the school’s Muslim Students’ Association put up a series of posters near a campus bookshop that drew irate complaints. One of them depicted a Jewish fighter plane targeting a baby stroller. Another featured a caricature of a hooked-nosed Hasidic Jew with a star of David, pointing a bazooka at the nose of an Arab carrying a slingshot; a third one showed an Israeli helicopter with a swastika on top, dropping a bomb on a baby bottle.
The school forced their removal the same day.
With outcries from pro-Palestinian groups and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the University of Ottawa has banned the poster that depicted the doomed Gazan boy with the teddy bear, as did its competitor across town, Carleton University.
