Re: I tried to enter the U of T encampment to speak with protesters, but I was blocked and cursed at — Kenneth Green, June 11 Reading Kenneth Green’s account of his attempt to enter the encampment the University of Toronto, I was reminded of the iconic scene in the film Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) has to enter a pit of roiling, hissing cobras, in order to rescue the Ark. It is an apt analogy. Nobody should be surprised that this monument to untrammelled hate continues to foul the grounds and the very atmosphere of a once-beautiful university campus.
It has been building for years, starting with the first so-called Israel Apartheid Week and continuing year after year, through a succession of increasingly antisemitic speakers and events. As someone who taught at U of T for 26 years, I saw it all. Letters and petitions to the university administration over the years, protesting these events and predicting the evolution of an environment hostile to Jewish students and faculty, were met with benign indifference.
Responses, if we got them at all, were the same sort of pablum and meaningless bromides that Dr. Green received. The universities, Toronto, McGill and others, have brought this on themselves, and deserve nothing but contempt, fiddling, like Nero, as the sparks were lit that have led to this conflagration.
In contrast, the Universities of Alberta and Calgary didn’t equivocate or strike committees and task forces t.
