APR, taqiyya and my lived experiences
A letter to Toronto District School Board Trustees that largely fell on deaf ears.
Preamble
On June 15th, I received an email from a volunteer with the Jewish Educators & Families Association of Canada (JEFA) urging me and several others to write to the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) Trustees to explain why they should vote against adopting the proposed Combatting Hate and Racism Strategy report. The report recommended that the TDSB recognize Anti-Palestinian Racism (APR) as a new category of racism to be tracked and tackled, despite providing no evidence in the report that there was any reason for concern regarding hate incidents against Palestinians. In fact, the only justification provided for adding this newfangled category of racism was the following note: “In response to student and community voices, an additional area of focus on addressing Anti-Palestinian Racism has been included” (p. 6). That’s it. Yet from 2022 to 2023, violent antisemitic incidents in Canada have more than tripled and the TDSB’s report offered no specific measures to combat the alarming rise in antisemitism. Clearly, the TDSB is ‘hearing voices’, but not attending to hate statistics.
Earlier, at the June 5th Program Services and School Committee (PSSC) meeting, the proposal received support from many delegates who spoke about the need to recognize APR. Most of these delegates also made a point of stating that their anti-Zionism was not antisemitism. Many of these delegates, it must be added, were Jews. That is, they identified as Jews and I have every reason to believe they were Jews despite their evident anti-Zionism.
The June 5th PSSC meeting ran past midnight and a vote on the adoption of the report was tabled for further discussion at the next meeting, which was scheduled for June 11. Many other Jews, myself included, requested to delegate at the June 11th meeting to explain why the report should be sent back and, in particular, why APR shouldn’t be adopted. I requested to do so the very next day. However, the TDSB denied oral delegations for what seemed like a highly convoluted reason. The meeting fell on Shavuot and one of the trustees, presumably a Jewish trustee, couldn’t make the meeting. However, for some bureaucratic reason that still behooves me, a special PSSC meeting was set for June 18th to specifically pick up on the report. Since oral delegations on the report had already been received at the June 5th meeting, no further oral delegations were going to be allowed. This naturally angered a larger number of members of the Toronto Jewish community, who felt their voices were being excluded before an important vote. According to Shelley Laskin, the procedure was entirely in keeping with the TDSB’s meeting protocol, and I personally do not infer anything nefarious. I do wonder, however, why so many delegates lobbying for APR and against Israel were primed to delegate at the June 5th meeting, whereas the mainstream Jewish community was blindsided. Are we lacking a source of leaked information, perhaps? By the time we learned what was on the agenda, there was little time to prepare delegates to speak, which is why so many mainstream Jews (i.e., the majority who are Zionists) were understandably upset that their voices were not being heard.
The email I received, then, on June 15 was meant to prompt a letter campaign instead of the opportunity to speak on record to the trustees, and especially to those with PSSC voting rights. I read the three letters that were offered, but none sounded like what I wanted to say, so I wrote my own. What follows is the letter I sent to the TDSB trustees on June 16, two days before the special meeting was scheduled. The subject line read exactly as the title of this post. I also shared the letter with many others in the Toronto Jewish community and many told me they were moved by it. Some even encouraged me to publish it more widely and, so, taking their advice, here we are.
My June 16th Letter to the TDSB Trustees
Dear Trustees,
I will be honest with you. I am not optimistic about the prospect of your collaborative consultation and decision-making. Hence, I am not optimistic about the outcome of your deliberations on APR. I suspect you will accept it. TDSB Equity will embrace it. Islamists who relish the destruction of Israel and the West and the reintroduction of an Islamic caliphate will rejoice, as will other antisemites. The silent majority will either not notice or once again clasp their heads in disbelief, wondering what madness has possessed the organizations we used to count on for good judgment.
I am not optimistic for several reasons. Some of these, nowadays would be called arguments from "lived experience", that redundant phrase which I have learned TDSB Equity embraces as part of its misguided commitment to critical theory, a theory that mainly serves to undermine critical judgment among Western decision-makers. My parents were both Holocaust survivors. My mother survived two death camps -- Auschwitz and Stutthof. When Auschwitz was destroyed, and after having the displeasure of meeting Dr. Mengele in the selection of Jews for human experiments, she was transported to Stutthof, where she got to lay on dead bodies for the journey to the second death camp, this one typhoid stricken. When Stutthof was falling, she was sent in the dead of winter on a death march, weighing 80 pounds and without winter clothes. When she finally collapsed she was lucky that one SS soldier told the other not to waste his bullets on her. They just kicked her to make sure she was dead and then left her in the snow. My father had it comparatively easy. Of course, his parents (my grandparents) and relatives were murdered for the crime of being Jewish, but he was comparatively lucky to have been a slave labourer. So, yes, when people lecture about slavery and systemic racism, I know all too well about the real thing. My father was a slave. My mother was a death camp survivor. Both languished in UN DP camps for 2 years and do you know why? It was because after all of the non-Jews were taken in, the only ones that no other country wanted were the Jews who had barely survived the worst human atrocity in recorded history. But how then did I, a Jew, end up in Canada, you ask? It happened that my uncle who was also in DP camp with my parents had learnt that only the non-Jews were getting out and so he arranged, in exchange for some packs of cigarettes and his natural charm, to have passports of German (non-Jewish) orphans "constructed". This was the ticket to America and then to Canada. What my parents endured was a worse version of what Theodore Herzl foresaw when European nations reneged on their promises to their Jewish communities. He saw the need for Jews to return to their 3000-year-old ancestral home long before the Holocaust because of the same sentiment. The same vile sentiments we now see skyrocketing across every major Western city, including our beloved Toronto.
I can write you a very long letter about my lived experience. Where I grew up in Chomedey, Laval on the east side, spray painting swastikas was a quite popular pastime for the kids in the neighbourhood. No one bothered to erase them and there was no Jewish community to object. My first-grade French teacher liked to call me, the only Jew in the class, by my last name while all the other kids were called by their first name. At the time, I did not understand why, though I hated it and she knew it. But let me not belabour the point.
I do, however, have other "lived experiences" that bear on the issue at hand. I am not only a second-generation Holocaust survivor (this is because every single Jew was targeted by the Nazis for extermination, so any that still survive are a measure of their failure)--I am also a Holocaust scholar and from 2007-2009 I represented Canada as a terrorism expert on NATO's task force on the social, organizational, and cultural aspects of terrorism during which time I critically analyzed the definition of radicalization used by various governments and NGOs. I have advised the US Pentagon on the threat of Islamist extremism and I have written several papers on the psychology of collective violence and organizational evil. As a cognitive psychologist who studies human judgment and decision-making by experts and novices in both individual and organizational contexts, I have a wide repertoire of concepts and knowledge that help me understand the current situation. It should be extremely empowering, but unfortunately, in this case, it has contributed to my pessimism.
You are going to get several letters making the case for why APR should be rejected. I am not going to repeat these arguments. I have read draft letters that are circulating and I have even written some of the content (e.g., the one that refers to logical fallacies "argumentum ad populum" is something I recall writing for an earlier campaign). I think they all miss the most critical point.
APR is not about racism at all. It is about war. The war on the West and the war against the Jews which is being waged by Islamists in our communities and abroad. APR is an example of the warfare practice of deception in which something designed to harm your enemy is concealed as something your enemy believes is beneficial. This practice was described by the Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, and is captured in Islam under the principle of taqiyya, which requires the use of deceit to advance strategic aims, usually of the weaker party who cannot simply rely on overt force. You can never make sound decisions about APR if you do not realize that it is being used as an influence tactic that is part of a larger strategy to weaken the Islamists' adversaries. If you do not realize that you are being exploited, then you cannot act against the exploitation. Moreover, if you are already convinced that there is a real problem called anti-Palestinian racism and if APR to you is a reified construct, then nothing I will write will matter much, for you are already a victim of this successful influence campaign.
If you are still unsure, however, I ask you to consider why you are seriously entertaining an anti-racism policy that would explicitly contravene the TDSB's commitment to the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The only definition of anti-Palestinian racism circulating is the product of an obscure organization with no provincial, federal or international recognition; an organization that lists no board members or mission statement, but has made it its unofficial mission to promulgate a definition of APR that is inconsistent with the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which not only the TDSB adopts but which the province and the federal government also adopt. This shadowy organization, the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA), has published documentation that repeatedly bends over backwards to challenge the IHRA definition and that seeks something no other formal definition of racism seeks to do: to define any challenge to Palestinian narratives as a form of racism. It draws the company of other shadowy organizations, such as the fine-sounding Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East. Look at their website and see how peaceful they are. All they want is the destruction of Israel; obviously, the most important step to fostering peace here in Canada. You see, they count on you to be uncritical thinkers. They expect that hearing the words justice and peace will convince you that their message must be one of love and kindness, not hate.
Look at how effective it has already been. You have been duped into drafting documentation that would consider formalizing APR in the TDSB and in a few days you will vote on a resolution that might even make APR official. The proponents of APR are giddy and celebrating, still very much in a state of disbelief. Even if you reject the proposal, they have now seen how easy it is to get a foot in the door. If they don't succeed this time, they will wait out the current decision-makers and try again in a short while. Moreover, they are surely amazed at how influential they have been even with such a rookie endeavour. The TDSB is considering the adoption of a definition of racism for a group that isn't a race and for the protection of their narratives, which just happen to include replacing the Jewish democratic state of Israel, homeland to millions of non-Jews including Muslims, Christians, Druze and others, with a terror state led by Islamist organization categorized as a terrorist organization in our country and many others. The TDSB is contemplating adopting APR when the highest per capita rate of hate crime in the city, province and country is antisemitism and when hate crimes against Palestinians are a marginal phenomenon at best. That you are seriously contemplating APR is remarkable and precisely why I have so little optimism in the outcome of your deliberations.
And just to be clear, I am not implying that the TDSB is systemically antisemitic. I simply don't believe that as a deliberating body, you are aware of the true nature of influence operations currently underway that are targeting you and other decision-makers who have the power to shape policy. If you adopt APR, as I predict you will, most of you will probably do it with good intentions. Unfortunately, good intentions are not enough to build a good society. Society is full of all sorts of actors. Many of them are malign and they do not state their true goals when they scream about their victimhood. They are counting on your uncritical judgment. I am counting on exactly the opposite and hoping that, by slim chance, my pessimism is misplaced.
Sincerely,
David R. Mandel, Ph.D.
The Immediate Aftermath
At the June 18th PSSC meeting, Rachel Chernos-Lin, a TDSB trustee and PSSC Chair proposed that the report be sent back to the TDSB for further revisions, both to address the problematic addition of APR and also to strengthen processes for combatting antisemitism. She was one of only two trustees to reply to my letter, and I knew this motion was coming. However, her proposal was defeated, and, the following day, at the June 19th Board meeting, the report was adopted, with just over 2/3 supporting it.
Unfortunately, my prediction that the TDSB would adopt APR proved correct. It is worth noting that a proposal by trustee Shelley Laskin (the other trustee who replied to me) to also include “anti-Israeli racism” was defeated in a tied vote. I don’t view APR as a coherent concept and neither do I think that introducing anti-Israeli racism (AIR?) into the discourse would be sound. In a sane world, we do not require either.
Except that it is (non-kinetic) war, and APR is a tactical maneuver. If the Islamists and their sympathizers in Canada were strong enough to impose their will through force, would they bother with APR? Of course not. This is a tactic used by a weaker party to subvert the stronger party through cognitive warfare. It is a tactic only deployed in Western theatres of operation, especially those drunk on critical race theory and its stupifying lexicon. Anywhere else it would be laughable and entirely ineffective. But the TDSB is steeped in critical race theory and the Islamists know exactly how to promote their cause by casting themselves as victims and members of an oppressed racial class.
I will be charitable in saying that the TDSB trustees who voted in favour of accepting the report (and APR) were either duped, feckless or both. I do not assume they are antisemites although some of them might be. I commend the minority of TDSB trustees who voted against the report, but the sad fact is that we lost that battle in the TDSB, and it was an important one. The TDSB is the largest school board in Ontario and the trustees who voted in this strategy have set a perilous precedent.
Fortunately, the TDSB has not adopted ACLA’s definition of APR. The Director of Education, Colleen Russell-Rawlins, who is soon to depart her position, wants to adopt APR but doesn’t want to define it. She has made a point of saying so at multiple TDSB meetings. After all, why get hung up on definitions of a highly controversial new category of racism that up until a few moments ago didn’t exist? Why get hung up on defining a term that only seems to be promulgated by a single shadowy organization that doesn’t list its mission or executive board? Why worry when that organization misrepresents terrorists as victims of APR such as Rasmea Odeh, which Shauna Small and David Roytenberg have already covered in great posts on their Substacks? Why worry when that organization (ACLA) obsesses endlessly about Israel and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA’s) definition of antisemitism, which it opposes as a form of APR? Why worry about that when the TDSB, which adopts the IHRA definition, is under pressure from Islamists and leftist regressives alike to ditch IHRA’s definition? (IHRA’s definition has the gall to call attempts to vilify, demonize or delegitimize the State of Israel what they are: brazen acts of antisemitism.) Clearly, nothing tactical going on here, right?
Unfortunately, we know all too well that the same community voices that pushed the TDSB to adopt APR are the ones that will be pushing the ACLA definition come September. No definition of APR is, therefore, about the same as the ACLA definition, except that Russell-Rawlins gets to end her term without being in the hot seat. It is nothing less than reckless abandonment of responsibility and it is utterly shameful.
Of course, defining APR as a form of racism would be a challenge for the TDSB. Any definition that did not lend itself to being an Islamist political tool, and which could serve to silence opposing narratives such as those virtually every mainstream Jew holds to be true, would likely be susceptible to the charge of APR under the ACLA definition. That could get the TDSB into more hot water than if they had just said no to those mysterious community voices in the first place.
The analysis of APR as a concept, and as defined by ACLA, is a topic for a future post. There’s a lot to unpack there, but unpack it we will. After all, this Substack was named Tackle for a reason.