rabble.ca are appalled by the neo-McCarthyist response to a letter published on this site last week. Nick Day, the rector of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., is threatened with impeachment for an open letter he wrote to Michael Ignatieff about the Liberal Party leader’s statement on Israeli Apartheid Week. The letter was published on rabble.ca last Wednesday.

You can read Jonathan Kay’s apoplectic response to Nick Day’s open letter in the National Post and the comments underneath. It gives you a flavour of the hatred and fear of such debate.

The success of Israeli Apartheid Week as a week of discussion and boycott, which has seen it grow in seven years from an event taking place at a single a Canadian university to an international solidarity movement, also enrages supporters of Israeli government policies taken against Palestinians.

The tone of this debate resembles that of 30 years ago, when on Canadian campuses socially conscious university students and many others protested the business being done by Canadian mining and other businesses with the Pretoria government. They were denigrated, too, from top to bottom. Around this time, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher referred to the still incarcerated Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.

You don’t have to agree with the way Nick Day presented his case. But we at rabble published it because he had the right to discuss his views. We believe in the freedom to express your political views.

There is a petition in support of Nick Day. We urge you to sign it by clicking here

As for Mr. Ignatieff… In 2007, a book called The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy was published. It was written by by John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, Professor of International Relations at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

The book was highly critical of America’s pro-Israel lobby. It cause an enormous flap with that same lobby, unsurprisingly.

If you come across a hard copy of that book’s first edition you will see testimonials on the back of the jacket. One of them was this: “This is a book to argue with and to admire,” written by Michael Ignatieff.

Given his statement on Israeli Apartheid Week, what a horrible cynic Mr. Ignatieff is.