When Concordia's student union embraced the Palestinian cause,
did it go too far?

By JANICE PASKEY

Montreal

Concordia University is one of Montreal's two English-language
universities. But wander the bustling downtown campus, and
you're as likely to hear another language -- Arabic. "It
reminds me of being in Beirut," says Lynda G. Clarke, a
religion professor who is an expert on Islam.

An estimated one-quarter of the students are of Arab origin,
and they have brought pro-Palestinian politics to the campus.
But Montreal also has one of Canada's largest Jewish
populations, and Concordia has an active Hillel and many
Jewish professors.

As a result, Concordia feels every bump and twitch of the
Middle East conflict. But unlike many campuses where students
of different beliefs face off over political issues, the
tensions here have overshadowed academics in the public eye.
"Concordia University is the most outrageously anti-Israeli
campus in Canada and perhaps in North America," editorialized
The Canadian Jewish News last month, charging that Concordia's
Arab-student groups are supported by Arab governments and
Islamic groups.

The tensions have also divided the campus. Many students on
either side of the debate claim they have been intimidated or
harassed, and two students have been charged with making death
threats. The student newspaper, The Link, says it gets a
steady stream of letters to the editor on the Middle East,
more than on any other topic, even when it isn't publishing
articles on the subject. Solidarity for Palestinian Human
Rights, a group with chapters on all Montreal campuses, began
at Concordia, tapping into strong Arab sentiment at the
university. For their part, many Jewish students say the
anti-Israel activists are against them. "I believe
anti-Semitism is hidden behind anti-Zionism," says Sharon
Koifman, an engineering student.

Canada's B'nai Brith, the Jewish service organization, is a
sharp critic of student activism at Concordia, once calling it
a hotbed of terrorists and linking its student union to Osama
bin Laden, although that accusation has not been repeated.
"Concordia is extremely generous and open to diversity," says
Raphael Lallouz, director of advocacy for B'nai Brith's Quebec
chapter. "There is a small movement that has taken over the
Arab cause, and replaced Arab culture with Palestinian
culture."

Concordia's name comes from "Concordia Salus," or "well-being
through harmony," the motto of the city of Montreal.

This academic year, though, there's been anything but those
qualities. The strife in the Middle East, the events of
September 11, and a student union with a pro-Palestinian
stance have ratcheted up the campus tension. There has been no
violence, but some students say they don't feel comfortable
coming to the campus. Concordia's administration clearly is
distracted from its central academic mission. Yet others say
the campus's Middle East passions are a good expression of
Concordia's own slogan: "Real education for the real world."

Outside Scrutiny

Things might be a little too real for Concordia these days.
Over the last 10 months, all of the administration's decisions
-- from barring a pro-Palestinian rally on university
property, to banning Concordia Student Union executives from
the campus, to allocating prayer space for Muslim students --
have been scrutinized by those looking to see if Concordia, as
an institution, is taking sides. "When the Middle East flares
up, supporters of either the pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian
position become more active," says Concordia's rector,
Frederick Lowy, a Jewish professor of psychiatry who grew up
in Montreal. "We have a large number of first-generation
immigrants. They are in a rush to get somewhere. They are a
highly ambitious, upwardly mobile lot. But there is a degree
of insecurity there as well, and attachments to homelands."

Concordia University has 22,000 students, a gritty downtown
campus that comprises brownstones and grim high-rises, and a
green suburban campus, where the journalism and science
departments are housed and the football team practices. A
burgundy bus shuttles students back and forth. Most Concordia
students aren't focused on the conflict in the Middle East.
They are more likely to be so busy working to put themselves
through school that they don't have time to debate the issue.
A recently published list of graduates was so diverse, "it
brought tears to my eyes," says one professor.

A public university with open admissions, Concordia reflects
Montreal's diversity. Some 96,000 immigrants with Arab origins
have settled in Montreal, a number that now surpasses
Montreal's 90,000 Jews. The Jewish community here includes
many Holocaust survivors, and their children and
grandchildren, and most of them support Israel. Recently,
American and Canadian security agencies have identified
Montreal as a center for Islamic terrorist activity, and
uncovered a plot to bomb Outremont, an area where many Hasidic
Jews live.

Some Jewish students say the campus is unwelcoming. "When I go
around school, I say I am Russian, I don't feel comfortable
saying I'm Israeli," says Mr. Koifman. "When I hear someone
speak Arabic, I always think, What do they think of me? The
pro-Palestinian lobby starts the first day of school with
demonstrations and continues throughout."

Most of the public activism takes place in the foyer of the
largest campus high-rise, the Hall Building, with students
manning tables and handing out literature. The most active are
the Concordia Muslim Students Association, Solidarity for
Palestinian Human Rights, the Syrian Students Association, the
Arab Students Association, and Concordia Hillel. Both Hillel
and the Palestinian group have had to disconnect their
answering machines after taking too many abusive calls.

A Key Vote

The balance of power tipped here when the Concordia Student
Union took a stand on the rights of Palestinians in the
Israeli-occupied territories. Under Quebec law, the student
union has the power and autonomy of a labor union. It sets its
annual fees, which the university collects from all students.
Last spring, students elected a slate of union officers who
were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and who believed
that corporate interests had taken over Concordia and that the
Israeli government deserved to be condemned. With less than 10
percent of students voting in the election, a minority of
interested students could easily dominate the results.

Later in the spring, the union held a referendum calling for
Canada to cut its ties with Israel until Palestinian refugees
were allowed to return to their homeland. The referendum,
argued the student union and its supporters, was simply a vote
on human rights and international law, not unlike the campus
movement of the 1970s and '80s to end apartheid in South
Africa. The referendum passed.

But the vote polarized the student body, and for some, it drew
a line in the sand. "Personally, I think what [the union
leaders] did was wrong," says Jack Lightstone, Concordia's
provost. "By taking sides in this debate, they betrayed their
mandate to represent all students." Then in July, security
guards seized one of the student union's executives, Laith
Marouf, the son of a Syrian diplomat, while he and another
student were spray-painting an anti-Israeli slogan on a campus
building. The guards and the dean of students later alleged
that the two students had threatened to kill the guards. The
students denied that allegation, but Concordia banned them
from the campus, and at the university's request, the police
finally filed charges against them this month.

The situation has made many outside organizations wonder if
Concordia has lost its neutrality. The Jewish groups say the
incident showed that Concordia had let pro-Palestinian
messages get too loud on the campus. An Arab group offered to
participate in mediation, but only away from the press
spotlight. "We were concerned that the university had policies
that weren't followed, and banned this student without
following its own rules," says John Asfour, president of the
Canadian Arab Federation. "Concordia has let this situation
get out of hand." He is frustrated that the situation has
prompted claims that there are Arab terrorists on the campus,
stigmatizing Arab students. Dr. Lowy says he has met with all
of the interested outside groups, and insists the university
hasn't taken sides.

There are good reasons for Concordia's skittishness about
conflict. The university, formed 28 years ago from the merger
of two colleges, is just finding its feet and coming into its
own. Enrollment has risen 15 percent over three years, new
buildings are going up, and the university, in an effort to
renew its faculty, has hired 65 new professors this academic
year. But the first sign of conflict or violence on the campus
recalls memories of 1992, when an engineering professor,
Valery Fabrikant, murdered four professors. Now, the prospect
of violence always has Concordia on edge.

The week of September 11 hit Concordia hard. First,
Concordia's fear of violence led it to turn down a request by
a Palestinian student group to hold a rally and bazaar on a
vacant university lot on September 15. Solidarity for
Palestinian Human Rights charged university officials with
suppressing the group's views. "They provided reasons that
weren't good enough, weren't strong enough -- they gave very
weak reasons," says Sami Nazzal, the group's head.

Muslim students said they were hassled by other students, who
were angry about the terrorist attacks and who grabbed womens'
headscarves and told Muslims to leave the country. Dr. Lowy
called for an end to the harassment of Arab and Muslim
students. "There has been much interest at Concordia about the
Middle East. It must be clearly emphasized that the university
takes no position with respect to the complex unresolved
Israeli-Palestinian conflict," he wrote.

The week of September 11, the union issued a free student
handbook and calendar called "Uprising." The handbook was
in-your-face student publishing: The usual information on
where to find campus support services was accompanied by
political diatribes and articles on such topics as how to get
high. It took an anti-corporate and pro-Palestinian position,
with articles denouncing racism toward Arabs, supporting the
establishment of a Palestinian state, and looking
sentimentally at what it means to be Palestinian. Mixed in
were articles with an anarchist flavor, including one that
supported a "Steal Something Day," along with sexually
explicit language.

The calendar listed July 1, normally celebrated as Canada Day,
as "Anti-Canada Day burn the flag." For the day after Israel's
independence day, it listed "Al Nakba," "the catastrophe" for
Palestinians.

An article by Mr. Marouf, "Arabophobia," criticized coverage
of Concordia in the Jewish press and in the national news
media, which he wrote were largely "owned by two Zionists." He
also accused Canadian Jews of co-opting the Concordia
administration. "The 'Jewish Rector' knows how much money the
university owes to Zionists," he wrote. There were no
alternative points of view.

Canada's B'nai Brith immediately called a press conference at
which its executive vice president, Fred Dimant, charged: "Is
this the blueprint for Osama bin Laden's youth program in
North America?" Mr. Dimant's inflammatory accusation caught
even the radical student union by surprise.

Getting Worse

The line that had been drawn by the student referendum last
spring was further entrenched. "I'm very upset about this
agenda. I feel as if they have thrown stones at me," says
Audrey Maman, a Hillel member and a student of French and
Spanish translation, who furiously inhales a cigarette outside
the Hall Building. She has come from a heated exchange with a
Palestinian student at the Hillel table, where the two started
a calm discussion, then argued over the occupied territories.
She believes the student union's actions have exacerbated
campus strife. "Things were bad between us [Jews and Arabs]
before. They are worse now," she says. "I can't wait to
graduate, to get out of here."

One defender of the student union's position is Lillian S.
Robinson. A New York-born Jew, she heads Concordia's Simone de
Beauvoir Institute and its women's-studies program. She
contributed to "Uprising," writing in favor of ending the
Israeli occupation.

"There are students who are complaining they are not
represented [in 'Uprising,' but] I don't see why this has to
represent everybody. What it does represent is the positions
you don't find in the mass media, and one of those is
pro-Palestinian human rights," Ms. Robinson says. "I wrote
from the point of view of a progressive Jewish academic to
Jewish students who have, by and large, not been exposed to
another point of view."

Ms. Robinson doesn't think Jewish students have any reason to
feel scared at Concordia. "There are students who say they are
intimidated by Arab students who wear the kaffiyeh, which is
to say they are intimidated by their identity. If they confuse
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitic, then they are going to see
anti-Semitic everywhere."

Dr. Lowy thinks Mr. Dimant's charge was extreme and untrue,
but believes "Uprising" gave Concordia a bad image. When the
handbook came out, "it really began to hurt the university,"
says Dr. Lowy. "It hurt our general image with the public, we
began to get angry or confused phone calls from parents and
prospective students about why we allow this, and finally from
potential donors at a time when we've been seeking funds to
build new buildings."

Putting Its House in Order

Tensions have persisted on the campus since the controversy
over the handbook. Dr. Lowy asked the Quebec agencies with
legal authority over the student union if it had overstepped
its bounds. The agencies told Concordia they did not want to
get involved. In December, the student union's leadership was
voted out of office. The winning slate, which promised to stay
out of Middle Eastern affairs, was led mainly by business and
engineering students upset at the student union's
anti-corporate stance and at the hassling of recruiters at
campus job fairs.

But in January, the election was declared void because of
rules violations, and the student government appointed the
former officers to their old posts. Dr. Lowy froze funds for
the student union, saying that he would not transfer money
unless there were elected officers.

The rector also set up an institutional peace process,
appointing Mr. Lightstone, the provost, and Nabil Esmail, the
Egyptian-born dean of engineering, to head a committee to
foster debate. Mr. Esmail is afraid of what fractious Middle
East sentiments could do to the campus. "I think we have to
defend Concordia from the problems of the Middle East. Why?
Because we have a very large population of pro-Palestinian
students, and we have a reasonably large population of Jewish
professors, and we have to survive as an excellent educator."
He wants his committee to develop guidelines for peaceful
debate.

Meanwhile, Ms. Clarke, the religion professor, and a colleague
are teaching a joint course on Islamic and Jewish traditions,
in an effort to build up rapport between students. The student
newspaper, The Link, has started an online forum on Israel for
students who think their views are absent in the polarized
debate. The Muslim students say the administration is trying
to find space for their prayers.

Mr. Koifman says he ran in the latest student-union elections,
to defend engineering and restore Concordia's reputation with
employers, not to press his political views. But when the six
members of his slate put up posters of themselves, someone
took aim at him, he says, by defacing only his image on the
poster. He maintains a sense of humor about it. "They kept
ripping me out, and I kept pasting myself back in again."