York to hold stinker of a conference....

It's an ingathering of Israel-haters all in one conference....

The president of York University in Toronto has issued a statement defending his university's sponsorship of an on-campus conference entitled "Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace," scheduled to take place June 22-24. This response attempts to portray serious criticism of the event as an attack on academic freedom. However, in examining the details and the debate over the conference, and in the context of vulgar anti-Israel activities and physical intimidation of Jewish students at York, these bland words are a diversion -- a straw man aimed at deflecting criticism and blocking the important public debate over the role of university campuses as battlefields in the Arab-Israeli narrative wars that perpetuate the violent conflict.

York's defence seeks to answer the public statement issued by Hershell Ezrin, head of the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy. This analysis was based on a careful examination of the speakers and their topics, which reveals that this conference "aims to explore a one-state, binational solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, the imposition of which would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state. The conference will include a number of speakers who are recognizable for their roles as organizers and outspoken proponents of 'Israel apartheid week' and the Israel boycott movement."

This sort of criticism is not an attack on academic freedom -- far from it. Such analysis highlights the very absence of the free exchange in a marketplace of ideas, which is the indispensable foundation for academic freedom.

The extremely complex history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and multiple dimensions of peace efforts contrast starkly with the narrowly constricted ideologies reflected in the conference's list of 44 speakers. Had the event's 11 sponsors -- six from York, four from Queen's University plus a government-funded research framework -- exercised due diligence, they would have found that many of the speakers are virulent anti-Israeli activists, with little or no connection to academic research on this subject.

For example, the first speaker on the list is Ali Abunimah, who runs a propaganda Web site known as the "Electronic Intifada" that specializes in demonizing Israel. The Electronic Intifada is home to articles such as "Why Israel won't survive." He is also affiliated with The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, a political organization based in Gaza that systematically distorts and exploits the language of human rights to attack Israel.

Abunimah's groups frequently condone Palestinian terrorism, using the euphemism of "resistance" and terms like "apartheid" and "racist" in reference to Israel -- the exact opposite of promoting compromise and a two-state solution.

Read the whole think for a flavour of some of the other speakers...