Sid Ryan Is An Embarrassment To CUPE And To Trade Unionism

CUPE Ontario's Sid Ryan is at it again. This time, the pretext is Israel's December 28 shelling of a campus of the Islamic University of Gaza, an iconic Hamas institution established by the founder of Hamas, Ahmed Yassin; only last year, the Palestinian Authority stormed the campus and found dozens of rockets, grenade launchers, assault rifles, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Ryan professed outrage: "They deliberately targeted an institution of learning. That's what the Nazis did."

Only a few days ago, Ryan was calling Israel's military operations against Hamas "acts of genocide," so now we've got both 'Nazis' and 'genocide' to help round things out with 'mass extermination,' 'ovens,' 'atrocity,' 'blitzkreig,' 'holocaust' and 'prison camp'.

Ryan says he wants Israeli professors barred from Ontario universities. He wants Israeli academics prevented from working, teaching, or even speaking at Ontario campuses, a demand that Avi Benlolo of the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center calls "an affront to civil liberty and academic freedom." Benlolo is wrong, however, when he says Ryan's proposed boycott is "based solely on Israeli citizenship." It's actually worse than that.

The CUPE Ontario plan would not only single out Israeli academics, but would then discriminate among them against those who refuse to swear what Ben Cohen calls a disloyalty oath. Ryan's version borrows from the recently-aborted British UCU academic boycott attempt, which failed after warnings that it would violate British anti-discrimination laws and the UCU's own rules on academic freedom.

Can we at least dispense with the fiction that Ryan's boycott plans have anything to do with the recent bombing of a campus in Gaza? A boycott is what he's wanted for quite some while. The last time Ryan embarrassed his union like this was in 2006, when he championed a resolution calling on CUPE members to boycott Israeli products. Back then, Ryan's mischief caused no end of headaches for CUPE districts and locals across Canada, put several Ontario CUPE locals up in arms, and forced CUPE's national office to declare, unambiguously: “We will not be issuing a call to our local unions across Canada to boycott Israel.”

Back then, Buzz Hargrove, then head of the Canadian Auto Workers Union, was compelled to deliver Ryan a not-so-subtle thrashing, which still stands up quite well: "We must all condemn Hamas for its support for terrorism and its refusal to recognize the right of Israelis to exist within secure borders, free of the threat of terrorism. . . if a boycott is warranted, why not direct it at the extremist government in Iran for its continuing push to develop nuclear weapons and its official policy to annihilate the Israelis? Indeed, workers are regularly jailed for any effort to form unions in Iran."

Paradoxically, while Ryan was giving out of himself at that Toronto demonstration last week about Israel's "genocide" in Gaza, Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad - whose regime is the key international sponsor of Hamas - was saying exactly the same thing as Ryan, while simultaneously, his secret police were quietly busy with the work of arresting more trade unionists.

Two years ago, Ryan's cudgel was Resolution 50, which came from York University's Local 3903, where Rafeef Ziadah made it quite clear that the boycott was intended to eliminate Israel entirely. All gussied up in the noble language of 1980s'-era "anti-apartheid" campaigns, the current anti-Israel boycott effort is best understood as an attempted revival of the failed 1951 Arab League boycott of Israel. Old reactionary wine in new and progressive-looking bottles will still tend to have a very short shelf-life, as Brian Henry explains.

Last year, at least 22 Canadian universities considered and resoundingly rejected the academic boycott Ryan is now attempting to revive. Our own Stephen Toope, president of the University of British Columbia, was one of the first to give the proposed boycott its proper name, "a dangerous and unsupportable attack on the core values of academic life. . . an affront to modern society [that] must be condemned wherever it arises."

And I see that when Jonathan Kay looks at Sid Ryan, he is compelled to ask: "There's a name for that kind of bigotry, isn't there?" Before anybody goes off half-cocked at Kay for making an impudent insinuation, the European Union has asked the same question, and answers it by defining antisemitism [.pdf] in a handy document. It cites such contemporary examples as the denial of the Jewish people their right to self­-determination (i.e. by claiming that the State of Israel is a racist endeavor), the application of double standards that require of Israel what would not be expected or demanded of any other democratic nation, and comparing contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

I'll leave it to these two wiseguys to consider the question of whether boycotting and barring and discriminating against and among Israeli academics is simply and plainly antisemitic. But it seems self-evident that at the very least, calling for such measures is not helping matters at all. As I've said, if it's real solidarity work that progressives might attend to in order to intervene in some way with the ongoing agonies in Palestine and Israel, these people could use a hand, and these people are an inspiration, and a friend has brought to my attention another initiative, called Just Vision. Here's a wee film about them:

UPDATE: Sid's lame apology.