After two and a half months — and, still, ahead of schedule — Concordia University’s moratorium on Middle-East-related public events and information tables came to an end this week. The ban was imposed after a planned appearance by former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was cancelled due to campus protests. The Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) group at Concordia had pre-planned a major event for Monday when the ban officially lifted. Posters declaring “Welcome to Jenin” have been plastered all over campus since last week.

For over two hours Monday night, three members of the International Solidarity Movement shared firsthand accounts of the occupation in Jenin. They also patiently answered questions from the floor, including several from pro-Israeli students. There was no violence (university admin take note).

It’s a little reported fact that the moratorium has actually been defied ever since its imposition. The SPHR, one of the organizers of the protest in September, organized information tables and events in open defiance of the ban. Just two days before MPs Svend Robinson and Libby Davies and activist and rabble publisher JudyRebick were prevented from speaking on campus by an absurd Quebec SuperiorCourt injunction, Samer Elatrash, a leading member of SPHR, shared a panel on campus with native activist Splitting the Sky. Their event drew links between liberation struggles in Palestine and Turtle Island.

Even Robinson, Davies and Rebick’s open-air demonstration (moved outside the school itself after the court injunction) was powered by a sound system not so discreetly plugged inside the main campus building. Two days later, the Independent’sMiddle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, spoke to an over-capacity Concordiaaudience during a Sunday night snowstorm. His speech included film footageabout the evictions of Palestinians and the building of Jewish settlementsaround Jerusalem, as well as the Sabra and Shatila massacres ofPalestinians in Israeli-occupied Lebanon.

Pro-Israel students were also publicly active during the ban, including at least one demo.

What are we to make of all this fuss about a moratorium that no onewas respecting in the first place? In the view of Palestinianstudent activists on campus, and their allies, the free speechimbroglio was in fact very effective, just not at stopping discussion of the Middle East. Instead, it has served as a smokescreen for the Concordia administration. For while the free speech ban has been denounced andpilloried nation-wide (even by Izzy Asper-approved editorials), basicassumptions about what happened at the anti-Netanyahu protest have beenslowly normalized.

As exhibit A, read Svend Robinson’s recent Comment piece in the Globe andMail (“Shame on Concordia,” November 25). While criticizing Concordia’s moratorium, Robinson also writes of the Netanyahu protest in September:

“It was a shameful day for Concordia — for its appalling failure toprovide proper security for the speaker and for the handful of bullies whoviolently denied Mr. Netanyahu the freedom to speak, and who hurledchairs, broke windows and harassed and spat on some of the Jewish gueststrying to get into the meeting. There was no excuse for this behaviour.”

To that I say: shame on Svend, for accepting the logic of Concordia’sadministrators, while he criticizes the same for their illogical attacks on freeexpression.

When Robinson spoke outside Concordia two weeks ago, he was joined bythree of the “bullies” he implicitly denounces — Leila Khaled Mouammarand Samer Elatrash — Palestinian student activists at ConcordiaUniversity — and Aaron Maté, a Concordia Student Union executiveand an active member of Concordia Jews For Palestine.

Importantly, all three students were actively involved in the protest against Netanyahu’s talk. Elatrash and Maté have been charged criminally and, along with Mouammar, arebeing threatened with expulsion by the university. In total, theuniversity administration has moved to expel eleven students (most of whom are Arab or Muslim, as well as two outspoken Jewish allies) for their role in the protest. Robinson’s article, in Canada’s leading nationalnewspaper, doesn’t show much solidarity with their cases.

What of the voices of the Palestinian activists at Concordia? They have received much less airtime on the matter. What have they been saying?

For Mouammar, free speech is an issue that must be discussed inconjunction with the “administrative and institutional racism against Araband Muslim students” at Concordia. One clear example: the decision byConcordia administrators to deny SPHR a permit to hold a pro-Palestinianinformation bazaar on campus last year for specious securityreasons. When the university went ahead and invited Netanyahu onto campusthis year, while compelling students to avoid the main areas of campus,those “security reasons” disappeared.

Elatrash, who speaks weekly by phone with relativesliving under curfew in the West Bank, unapologetically describes September’s protest as an uprising. He told the crowd gathered outside the school earlier this month:

“[September 9] was an uprising against years of systematicinstitutionalized racism at this university — the type of racism thatleads the university to tell us, as Palestinians, that we’re not going tobe able to walk into our school, we’re going to have to take by-passroads, so to speak, in order that Mr. Netanyahu, a person responsible fortorturing thousands of Palestinians, could speak to a hand-picked audienceat our school.”

The “hand-picked audience” was also acknowledged byanother speaker at that demonstration, International Solidarity Movementco-founder Neta Golan. She spoke “as a Jew and an Israeli,” denouncingthe Netanyahu talk which pre-selected its audience (ticket sales went through a pro-Israeli campus group that took the names of those interested and then contacted those who would be granted tickets) and was organized as a pro-Israel rally (audience members were encouraged to bring their Israeli flags). Such was the self-serving respect for “free speech” exhibited by the Netanyahu event organizers. The goal was not to foster debate, the core of free speech, but to promote one view — the event was a campaign stop in Netanyahu’s now failed attempt to regain leadership in Israel by denigrating Palestinian self-determination.

What the September 9 protest has provoked, with its various smokescreens,is an attack on pro-Palestinian militancy at Concordia, by associating itwith anti-Semitism, violence and disrespect for the free speech ofright-wing former Israeli prime ministers.

No matter that the SPHR and their allies have continually denounced anti-Semitism in all forms or that none of the students and non-students charged in relation to the protest has been accused of engaging in any acts of anti-Semitism.

It is true, there were acts of racism and anti-Semitism committed onSeptember 9 (although, no one “hurled chairs at Jewishguests,” as Robinson suggests). I myself was spit on and called a “savage” by pro-Israel ticket-holders and I witnessed more of the same.

All forms of racism are vicious and pro-Palestinian organizers must be continually vigilant against anti-Semites who use Palestinian solidarity as their own smokescreen foranti-Jewish hate. But the SPHR is an anti-racist organization and has developed strong links with pro-Palestinian Jewish organizations.

As for the issue of violence, pro-Palestinian protesters attended the demonstration unarmed (without even gas masks or goggles) and gained access to the building where Netanyahu was to speak by simply walking into a building where thousands walk freely every day. As police escalated their tactics, with riot police startingto arrest demonstrators and beating them with batons, so did protesters,who refused to budge and fought back.

It’s been a frustrating time for Palestinian, Arab and Muslim activists,and their allies, who have tried to focus on combating anti-Arab andanti-Muslim racism. However, even among many on the progressive left, the focus seems to be on abstract free speech and civil liberties, divorced from the struggle for justice by Palestinian students at Concordia (or at best, a token acknowledgement) and anapparent distancing from the September 9 uprising at Concordia.

Elatrash calls this phenomenon a whitewashing of the issue of free speech.

Enough with the whitewashes, from any side. The post-September-11 scapegoating of Arabs and Muslims has compelled even normally outspoken people to be passive, to become the “good Arab” for mainstream consumption. The “good Arab” is quiet, not too political, and certainly not outspoken about injustice at home or abroad.

To their credit, Concordia’s Palestinian activists refuse to be the “goodArabs.” They courageously continue to organize, despite the attacks andsmears on their reputation and the transparent attempt by Concordia’sadministration to sabotage pro-Palestinian organizing on campus (a position no doubt motivated by the interests of corporate funders, who dislike investing in anything that seems volatile.) If Concordia succeeds in its attempt to expel key organizers and articulate speakers, the message sent to other young activists fighting for their rights is to shut up.

If people are to speak out, after all, they should stick to palatable topics like free speech and civil liberties, without talking too much about the actual context in which free speech and civil liberties are practiced — or the way in which these “freedoms” are used to suffocate the dissent of the marginalized and dispossessed.

This movement and alliance demands an attentiveness to facts, an awarenessof the smokescreens used to marginalize dissent and a commitment topractice genuine solidarity, a solidarity that will not always be neat andsanitized. In the words of Judy Rebick, speaking against the ban outside Concordia earlier this month, “It’s called struggle for a reason.”