The Rotberg Letter on Free Speech

From: Howard Rotberg
Date: Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 7:50 AM
Subject: Israel Apartheid Week
To: president@utoronto.ca

I am a graduate of University College (1973) at which time I had the honour of standing first among the students in the Department of History. I received an excellent education, specializing in the history of values and ideologies. Then I attended, and graduated from, the Faculty of Law, in 1976.

I have tried to live a life of ethics, respect for individual human rights and social justice, and service to my profession and the community. I have won awards for my service to my municipality in volunteering on municipal committees and for my development of affordable rental housing for low income working people. I have a record of writing about race relations and participating in conferences meant to accomplish respect for diversity in the context of adherence to foundational Canadian values.

I am ashamed that University of Toronto hosted the first Israel Apartheid Week, and continues to make its facilities available to this distortion of “free speech and respect for diversity”. I read your February 24 remarks on freedom of expression and diversity, and sadly, I feel that you misstate the basic issues. My university is now known as the birthplace of this vile hatefest.

The University would never allow an “Islamic Apartheid Week” because of course the speakers would be violently attacked by mobs of illiberals who have brought with them to the University no respect for free speech but only a respect for their upbringings where they were taught that Jews and the Jewish State are evil, and inferior.

I am disgusted that in a time of war against our liberal values, University of Toronto chooses to support one side, and that is the side that supports the war against our freedoms and our civilians from Sderot to Manhattan, from London to Madrid, and from Buenos Aires to Mumbai.

I myself have had my lectures shouted down and my books effectively banned. [See here]

I know that freedom loving writers like myself no longer have the freedoms that you are so proud of extending to people who support the murder of Jewish children, less than a century after the Holocaust.

I do not advocate censoring them, unless they pass into hate crimes, and even then I am not supportive of use of the criminal law, in all but the clearest of cases. But the notion of feeling compelled to have such an event in effect sanctioned by the University is clearly wrong. If they want to speak such words, there are, I am sure, other facilities that would welcome them.

I hereby adopt the positions taken in the following two essays: here and here.

We have now reached a stage where Jewish students and others identifiably Jewish fear for their safety at various universities in North America and Europe, and where various Jewish speakers are denied permission to speak because of Islamist intimidation. We have now reached a situation where various student groups, such as the Muslim Students Association are being funded by radical Islamist groups, and where various University departments across the “free world” are becoming beholden to radical Islam due to financial funding from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

I am sure you have read how young Muslim students are being “radicalized” at universities in England, and such was the case with the attempted terror attacker on the Delta airlines jet on Christmas Day.

The situation at English universities and even at York University has gotten out of hand. To the extent that your views are infused with cultural and moral relativism, I suggest that the University of Toronto is poised to eventually join those institutions where Jewish students will be viewed as “offensive” per se to Muslim students and other illiberal antagonists who apply double standards and factually incorrect legal and historical judgments against the Jewish State, and interpret Islam as holding Jews and Christians to be second class citizens, which is the real apartheid that your University will not allow to be discussed. Moral equivalency is not appropriate between liberal democrats and terror supporting illiberals.

I feel such shame to have been associated with a University that feels that its facilities must be given to those who would destroy our freedoms, and one which fails to understand that tolerance is a two-way concept. Your moral equivalency is misplaced. Israel is the first front in a war that has already come to our shores. That war has nothing to do with “sharing” land, but is about an attempt to enforce Western submission to Islamic values, including Sharia Law.

I have recently written a book called TOLERism: The Ideology Revealed. You might be interested in reading it, although I must warn you that while Chapters Indigo carries 8 different titles by or about Noam Chomsky, my works have been banned by Canada’s monopoly book retailer because they are “offensive” to illiberals.

My grandparents and aunt were gassed to death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and my father was slave labour there and barely survived. For years, I felt that it was possible as a Jew to attend the University of Toronto and still publically adhere to the biblical value of justice. Unfortunately, in your quest for “tolerance” you have abnegated the historical values of our country, based on Justice being a more important value than Tolerance.

My father and his family were certainly not helped by “Tolerance” and I dare say that a continuation of the trends at your university will make it impossible for my grandchildren to attend there. My daughter has two degrees from University of Toronto and my son-in-law has three degrees from U. of T. I believe that if present trends continue, no further members of my family will be able to attend University of Toronto. By abnegating all standards in the name of freedom and tolerance, and by failing to stand for Justice over Tolerance, you are party to the decline of a once-great university.

Please take me off all mailing lists for University of Toronto, University College, and the Faculty of Law, whether it be for financial solicitations, reports or magazines.

I am removing from my office wall my two degrees from University of Toronto. I shall be mailing them back to you.

Shame on you.

S. Howard Rotberg B.A., LL.B

Rotberg Development Group
Brantcord Group of Companies
Southern Ontario Affordable Housing Inc.
www.howardrotberg.ca