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Vid: Confrontation at Concordia = Anti-Semitism?

March 20th, 2007

Earlier this week somebody on my bloglines had a post with a dead link to video from what I’m assuming was a documentary clip about some problems that were taking place at Concordia University in 2002. I think it may have been one of the Barbarians posts which originally caught my attention and reminded me of this Montréal fiasco, but I can’t recall and I’m too lazy to try and figure it out.

Anyhow my interest was tweaked enough to go and track down the documentary about the demonstrations and resulting problems between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli student groups at Concordia. The documentary I found is entitled “Confrontation at Concordia” and is available for your viewing pleasure at the bottom of this post.

I remember watching the documentary when it first came out (probably on CBC news world or TV Ontario) as well is another one which was a little bit more balanced and objective in my opinion. It’s certainly worth watching if you’ve got an hour to spend because it points out some serious problems which took place five years ago at Concordia and the negative consequences it had on the campus Hillel. However having said that five years ago is a lifetime away in university years and I personally believe that things have changed a lot since the time the events covered in this documentary actually took place.

From watching this video it’s clear that there was a breakdown in student governance at Concordia. Basically the real problem as I see it is that left of center activist types got control of student government and shifted focus from student and education centered issues, instead opting for a more global and political agenda. Specifically it would seem that student government was strongly pro-Palestinian and pro-Iraq, therefore strongly opposed to both Israeli and American policy in the Middle East.

I think this is inappropriate to student politics and that although student government should encourage various student groups to actively pursue their agendas they themselves should not be directly supporting any one position. At least not outside of issues that are directly related to student academic life. Having said that a lot of right wing pro-Israeli types have hijacked the situation in order to promote their own views and to suggest that what took place at Concordia in 2002 was equivalent anti-Semitism, which is in my opinion inaccurate.

However, I’m going to digress and let those of you who watch the video for yourselves come to your own conclusions about what actually did or did not take place.

As always if you do watch the video I’d love to hear your thoughts. I would however ask that you please watch the videos before you comment, this way you know that you are making an informed comment.

Confrontation At Concordia - 1/5