Is Gaza’s Islamic University an Educational Institution Academics Should Be Defending?

Taking a cue from a similar effort by its union brethren in Britain, the Ontario chapter of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) made the smarmy announcement that, “as a protest against the December 29 bombing of the Islamic University in Gaza,” it would introduce a resolution seeking to ban Israeli academics from speaking, teaching, or conducting research at Ontario university campuses. Acceding to an appeal from the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees, Sid Ryan, president of CUPE Ontario, announced that the union had decided, no doubt after thoughtful and troubling deliberation, that it was “ready to say Israeli academics should not be on our campuses unless they explicitly condemn the university bombing and the assault on Gaza in general.”

Apparently it has not dawned on union members that demanding loyalty oaths or proclamations of one’s political ideology as a prerequisite for scholars on campuses is usually anathema, particularly since Leftists in American and Canadian universities can barely contain themselves when bloviating about the necessity for academic freedom and free speech when they wish to rail against imperialism, the war on terror, capitalism, or conservative values. In fact, academics, many of whom have never had to defend themselves against anything more threatening than student evaluations, clearly have no problem deciding for Israel that it should continue to let their civilians be targets for Qassam rockets while Hamas jihadists randomly seek to murder Jews. Where Israel is concerned, the standard of how nationhood defines itself somehow changes.

So in the recent years during which some 6000 rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza were raining down on southern Israeli neighborhoods, there was a curious silence from the unions and academia about the safety of civilians and no talk of protecting educational institutions. Only when Israel began its defensive incursions against terrorist arms and infrastructure were union members sufficiently outraged to issue condemnations and start a body count—but only of the Left’s favorite Third-world victims, the Palestinians. 

“Clearly, international pressure on Israel must increase to stop the massacre that is going on daily,” chimed in Janice Folk-Dawson, chair of the CUPE Ontario University Workers Coordinating Committee, adding that since now Palestinians were dying and not Jews she wanted “to add CUPE voices to others from around the world saying enough is enough.” When Hamas thugs were murdering fellow Palestinians in their violent takeover of Gaza in 2006, slaughtering families in their homes, throwing opponents off the rooftops of buildings, nearly decapitating other terrorists with machine gun fire to their necks, or torturing and hanging perceived traitors in front of their families, neither the sanctimonious Ms. Folk-Dawson nor Sid Ryan apparently were apparently concerned enough at that point to say “enough is enough.”

Nor, apparently, have they bothered to look at the values and teaching traditions that define Palestinian institutions of higher education. In fact, Gaza’s Islamic University, which was destroyed by the IDF last week and which the CUPE has decided to champion in order to denounce Israeli scholars, is hardly a bucolic college campus, free of the perverse indoctrination and teaching of terror, either. When Hamas formed its cabinet after being voted into office, for example, 13 of its ministers had been teachers at either at the Islamic University in Gaza or at the Al-Najah National University in Nablus, and virtually every leading figure of Hamas has taught or studied at Islamic University. The research labs of the university were also being used to refine the lethality and range of the Qassam rockets that have been terrorizing southern Israeli towns. A professor there, Jameela El Shanty, was quoted in 2006 as admitting that "Hamas built this institution. The university presents the philosophy of Hamas. If you want to know what Hamas is, you can know it from the university."

Nor had Islamic U escaped an earlier assault on its facilities at the hands, not of the IDF, but of fellow Palestinians: during the 2007 internecine violence in Gaza between factions of Hamas and Fatah, Palestinian Authority forces, believing it was being used as a staging area for Hamas rocket launches, stormed the 17,000-student university, setting the entire campus ablaze, destroying books in its library, and gutting offices, classrooms, and the student center.

The moral clarity of Islamic University’s educational mission can also be evidenced by the rantings of another of its professors and former board of trustee member, the late Sheikh Dr. Nizar Rayyan, Hamas leadership's liaison with the group's military wing, who found himself one of the unlucky jihadist targets of Israel’s initial counter strikes on Gaza. A lecturer in Islamic Sharia studies, Rayyan was clearly interested in students’ extracurricular activities, as well; he madly advocated unrelenting suicide attacks against Israel, and ardently sought new shahids, martyrs, in the peculiar Palestinian cult of death, not inconsequentially including his 14 year-old son, who was killed by the IDF when he attempted to self-detonate and murder Jews in an Israeli settlement in 2001.

Nor is Islamic University alone in its role in helping to germinate radical Islam and jihadism. In fact, says Matthew Levitt,  director of the Washington Institute's Stein Program on Terrorism, Intelligence, and Policy, the 11,000-student Al-Najah is the largest university in the territories, and “the terrorist recruitment, indoctrination and radicalization of students for which Al-Najah is known typically take place via various student groups,” among them the Hamas-affiliated Islamic Bloc. “Of the thirteen members of Al-Najah's 2004 student council, eight,” he says—“including the chairperson—belong to Hamas's Islamic Bloc.”

The CUPE boycotters may be frustrated that Israeli academics do not denounce the actions of their leaders, but the same can be said of students at Al-Najah University, for example, who fondly remembered the outbreak of the Second Intifada by constructing a macabre attraction called "The Sbarro Cafe Exhibition," named for the location of a 2001 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem pizza parlor where 15 Jews were murdered and dozens more wounded. Created not as a memorial but as an inspiration for further terror-laden savagery, the diorama included scattered pizza slices amid Israeli body parts, splattered blood, calls to martyrdom with Koran and Kalashnikovs close by, and, beaming out of a loudspeaker behind a mannequin version of an Orthodox Jew, the inspiring take on an oft-repeated Islamic exhortation:  "O believer, there is a Jewish man behind me. Come and kill him."

Nor are Palestinian students unimaginative in demonstrating their newly-found hatreds when they actively participate in student government activities. “During student elections at Bir Zeit University in 2003,” Leavitt recounts, “Hamas candidates reenacted suicide bombings by blowing up models of Israeli buses. In one Bir Zeit campus debate, a Hamas candidate taunted his Fatah challenger by boasting, ‘Hamas activists in this University killed 135 Zionists. How many did Fatah activists from Bir Zeit kill?’ ”

Insightful commentator Melanie Phillips, in speaking about the British lecturer union’s call for a boycott, lamented how those academics, with a long tradition of learning, had incredulously shamed that legacy and that their action, as she puts it, “represents a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavour, which is freedom of speech and debate.” The act of condemning Israel’s universities, of excluding them from the fellowship of the international academic community, is, Phillips thinks, a disgraceful calumny that contradicts all those values that the university should, and usually does, hold dear. By proposing that Israeli scholars be banned from Canadian universities’ “marketplace of ideas,” from vigorous inquiry and debate, the CUPE is violating what should be the core precepts of the academy: bringing in many views so that the better ones are revealed, and not suppressing dissent based on whose views and ideology are currently in favour.

 “Censorship, suppression of ideas and intellectual intimidation are associated with totalitarian regimes,” Phillips says, “which attempt to coerce people into the approved way of thinking.”  As Hamas shuts downs internet cafes, stifles dissent, murders its political foes, and begins introducing Islamic law in Gaza, one wonders if the CUPE, in its misguided quest to take moral sides in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and introduce a ban on Israeli scholars, perhaps has chosen the wrong horse to ride.