Human Rights Commission Charges University with Anti-Arab Bias

By John Dirlik

In what has been hailed as an important precedent, Arab students at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) recently celebrated a victory for freedom to debate Middle East issues. Their lengthy battle against university intimidation and coercive tactics began in 1987 when they filed complaints against UWO with the province's Human Rights Commission. Last month, the university finally agreed to apologize publicly for its "differential treatment" of Arab students, and to pay $2,000 as compensation to each of the four complainants.

Conceding that UWO hadnot lived up to the "ideals associated with freedom of speech," university President George Pedersen apologized for "any hurt caused to the students and other members of the Arab/Palestinian community," In a letter the school published in the London Free Press and in the two campus newspapers, Pedersen also promised that a comprehensive race relations policy would be implemented to ensure a "quicker identification and resolution of racial conflicts."

The dispute began in the spring of 1987, when Jewish groups complained that a poster advertising a lecture by a PLO representative was "provocative, misleading and offensive. " The poster included a prize-winning drawing of Palestinian children being rounded up by Israeli soldiers dressed as Nazis, and was inspired by the famous photograph of a young Jewish boy surrounded by German soldiers in the Warsaw Ghetto.

The dean of the UWO law faculty ordered the poster removed. University President George Pedersen also reprimanded the sponsoring group, charging the cartoon "satirized" the Holocaust, and that the text accompanying it which compared Zionism to apartheid had "no place on any Canadian university campus."

The second incident that provoked a complaint from Arab groups involved the university's reservations office, which hesitated for several days before allowing a Lebanese student to book a room for a public event. Officials first inquired if the student making the reservation was an Arab, and then warned her that the university did not want "any riots on campus."

The third complaint centered on the university's lack of response to a string of blatantly racist cartoons about Arabs in the student newspaper, as well as the university's refusal to denounce publicly groups of Jewish students who were habitually disrupting Arab-sponsored lectures.

One of the Arab complainants, James Kafieh, expressed a degree of satisfaction with the university's belated apology. "It's edifying that institutions, big or small, can be held accountable for their actions," said Kafieh. But he remained cynical about the university's intentions, citing the seven-year span between the initial complaints and the final agreement.

The university "did not act in good faith," Kafieh said. He credited the victory to the tenacity of the students. They had long since graduated, but they persisted in their struggle.

"The initial strategy [of UWO] was to run the students into the ground, " he said. "They were trying to use their power as a major institution in the hope that over time the complainants would just disappear."

Despite the absence of goodwill, the UWO decision was welcomed by Edward Corrigan, an attorney who has represented Arab groups facing similar controversies on other campuses. "It's a very important precedent," said Corrigan. "To the best of my knowledge this is the first time that the Ontario Human Rights Commission has intervened against a major institution for discrimination against Arabs." Corrigan said the decision sends "a clear message that differential treatment of Arabs is contrary to the law."

Not Everyone Pleased

Not everyone, however, was pleased with the settlement. B'nai B'rith of Canada expressed "dismay" that an agreement was reached with Arab students who had "trivialized the memory of the Holocaust" by portraying Israeli soldiers as Nazis. The Coalition of Western Jewish Students also protested and asked if the university was saying that "it's now okay to use that poster."

Responding to those queries, the UWO president defended the decision to apologize, while being careful to avoid igniting another controversy. In an interview with the Canadian Jewish News, Pedersen stressed that he still had "strong personal feelings about those posters, but that is not what is at issue here. "

Dismissing objections of the Jewish groups to the lecture notice, Kafieh cited ongoing atrocities against Palestinians, such as the recent Hebron massacre. "I would in fact argue that this poster is as appropriate and applicable today as it was then," Kafieh said.

John Dirlik, a free-lance writer from Quebec, writes on Canadian and Middle East affairs.