Hate Israel Week at Queens...

Students have to go through a checkpoint to get to a class...

Meanwhile, Josh Zelikovitz, president of Hillel at Queen’s, said he is communicating with his school’s administration about students’ complaints.

“An issue we’ve been having is with professors setting up fake checkpoints outside of their classrooms at the request of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights [SPHR] and forcing the students to go through these. We’ve been speaking to the university about this,” Zelikovitz said.

He said that in one instance, students didn’t have the option of not going to their Gender and Diversity class, because there was an assignment due that day.

“Once inside, students had a 25-minute presentation from SPHR, a slide show that was obviously completely one-sided and the professor discussed it for a while after.

Patrick Deane, Queen’s vice-principal academic, said “students have the right to attend class without restraints, and they also have the right to choose whether or not they take part in any political debate, presentation, or enactment.

“It has been stressed to all faculty that there must be no coercion and no impediment to free access. We have clearly stated that it must be made clear to all that this is an illustration, and students must not feel that that they are obliged to pass through a ‘checkpoint’ if they do not wish to do so.”

Deane added that, for the most part, the rules were followed last week, but “faculty officials” are addressing the incidents that violated those guidelines.

Zelikovitz spoke about a related incident at Queen’s. He said a Jewish campus group called Israel on Campus put together a campaign to bring in pro-Israel speakers and distribute pro-Israel material to debunk claims being made by IAW organizers.

“One of the things they distributed was a National Post article deconstructing the myths and lies of the allegations of apartheid,” he said.

A student found that on one of the sheets, someone had written, “Don’t support the Israeli government,” and had drawn swastikas all over it.

“In my opinion, this is just an isolated incident… I don’t think it’s coming from the upper echelons of the organizations running the [IAW] events, but I do think it is a symptom of the toxic environment that Israeli Apartheid Week creates on campus,” he said.