Navigating the TDSB: An investigation into the document's aims and source (part 3)

In part 3, I'll begin to examine the incoherent fiction known as anti-Palestinian racism, which is the focus of a large chunk of the document.

OK. We’ve cleared page 1 and we’re skipping p. 2 and going straight to pages 3-14, which are all about this newfangled concept called anti-Palestinian racism or APR. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been a big fan of analyzing definitions. In graduate school, I nearly went mad one year (in the mid-90s) analyzing the many disparate concepts of causality in philosophy and related fields and eventually went on to study the even more esoteric issue of how contingency information is given weight in the induction of causal regularities.¹

Many years later (around 2009), when I was serving as a Canadian representative to NATO on a research task group examining social, organizational and cultural aspects of terrorism, I nearly went nuts hearing over and over again about these psychosocial processes called radicalization and deradicalization. No one (including organizations and countries) seemed to use the definitions consistently and it all seemed a bit wishy-washy to me, so I wrote a chapter on it called “Radicalization: what does it mean?”, in which I concluded that “the current usage of the term radicalization is problematic for the productive social scientific analysis of the motivational bases of socio-political violence since the term is relative, subjective, and value-laden” (from the chapter’s abstract). And I proposed a definition that was less of all that, and 15 years later the paper is still regularly being cited.²

So, let’s see what APR has to offer.

The document starts with a definition taken from a 2022 document prepared by Dania Majid, a founding member of the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA). (In 2020, Al Jazeera described Majid as ACLA’s President, but the ACLA website currently lists no information at all about its members, not even its executive team.) So let’s go to the source, as after all, this is long overdue. According to Majid (2022),

“Anti-Palestinian racism is a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives. Anti-Palestinian racism takes various forms including: denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians; failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine; erasing the human rights and equal dignity and worth of Palestinians; excluding or pressuring others to exclude Palestinian perspectives, Palestinians and their allies; defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander such as being inherently antisemitic, a terrorist threat/sympathizer or opposed to democratic values.”

Majid repeats much of this in a CBC interview, in which she repeats the lie about Israel committing genocide in Gaza and invokes other lies (e.g., Israel is an apartheid state). Isn’t it rich how she slanders Israel while complaining about slander against Palestinians? The CBC claims that “She explains how it's different from other types of racism” but this is also untrue. She doesn’t explain that at all. Listen for yourself.

Since proponents of APR such as Majid and the authors of Navigating who were not brave enough to identify themselves as authors love to obsess about the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism—the so-called IHRA (pronounced like the name Ira) definition—let’s pose it in contradistinction to the APR definition:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Well, for one thing, the APR definition is much longer. It’s 2.6 times the length of the IHRA definition. I am not sure if it is already an established law, but if not so I would like to claim the following as Mandel’s law:

The probability of a definition having incoherent properties is proportional to its word count.

This follows from the even more general principle that the fewer words you say the less likely you are to stick your foot in your mouth.

Now, I am not implying that the IHRA definition of antisemitism is fantastic. I do not even care for the term antisemitism, which was popularized by antisemites, most notably, Wilhelm Marr whose Antisemiten-Liga (League of Antisemites) provided an organized movement for racism against Jews, which influenced Hitler’s thinking and presaged the Holocaust. In other words, those Germans, like Marr, who coined the term antisemitism or at least adapted its meaning from the earlier “anti-Semitism” which did not refer specifically to Jews but to peoples of Semitic languages, regarded antisemitism as not only a good thing but also as a necessary movement required to preserve the German volk.

At any rate, I digress. Let’s turn to APR. What is the history of this concept? I Googled the term and this landed a top hit of “Anti-Palestinianism” on—you guessed it—Wikipedia, which had this to say in its first paragraph (and the one most relevant to an analysis of definition):

Anti-Palestinianism or anti-Palestinian racism^[1] refers to prejudice, collective hatred, and discrimination directed at the Palestinian people for any variety of reasons. Since the mid-20th century, the phenomenon has largely overlapped with anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians today are Arabs and Muslims.^[1][2] Historically, anti-Palestinianism was more closely identified with European antisemitism, as far-right Europeans detested the Jewish people as undesirable foreigners from Palestine.^[3][4] Modern anti-Palestinianism—that is, xenophobia or racism towards the Arabs of Palestine—is most common in Israel,^[a][5][6][7] the United States,^[2] Lebanon,^[8] and Germany,^[9][10][11] among other countries.

There are several interesting aspects of this. First, it traditionally referred to European prejudice and discrimination against the people of Palestine, especially the Jews, who had a much stronger presence than Arabs in Europe. So, anti-Palestinianism, it seems, was traditionally a form of Jew-hatred or antisemitism with a specific focus on what might be described as Middle Eastern traits.

The concept of modern anti-Palestinianism seems to be quite modern, indeed. Virtually all references to modern forms of the concept, which exclude Jews and focus only on Arab Palestinians, in the Wikipedia article on the topic are from within the last decade, and most are within the past few years.

Also new is the rebranding of anti-Palestinianism as anti-Palestinian racism. This is a prime example of the conceptual incoherence of the concept. On the one hand, it is argued that an APR concept is needed that is distinct from anti-Arab racism or Islamophobia, but then, on the other hand, it must be because of something particular to the Palestinian society. Yet if that is the case, it cannot be a form of racism as societal groups are not races. The race concept itself is of little value since it has been littered with so many misconceptions linked to identity-based hatreds (such as the Nazis’ belief that Jews were a distinct race or “anti-race”) that invoking it can only be described as, David Bowie sang in Cat People, “putting out the fire with gasoline”. (It’s fine, go ahead and have a listen, but remember to come back!)

So why trade an already troubled concept, which historically seems to have mainly pertained to Europeans’ hatred of Jews and their Middle Eastern attributes, for an even more convoluted notion that injects racism into what isn’t about race? The answer is simple: the modern proponents of the APR concept are hoping, and to some extent, succeeding, in tying this garbled idea to the DEI train which must paint all forms of hatred and inequities as “racism.” Such racism is, in this lens, endured by members of an intersectional hierarchy in which those most victimized must be rebalanced with the most affordances, whereas those judged to be least victimized are subjected to what these utopian knuckleheads view as noble forms of inequity.

Playing this game involves two general influence strategies. One is to paint yourself and your people as the greatest victims you can conjure up. The other is to paint your adversaries as ruthless, racist powerholders who oppress victims and therefore need to be victimized so that the necessary and righteous rebalancing can occur. APR fuses these two influence strategies into one overarching approach by simultaneously claiming Palestinian victimhood and pointing to mainstream Jews and their organizations as oppressors who commit APR. We will see this in the Navigating document, but let’s stick with ACLA’s definition for a moment.

Let’s start with the root definition which is subsequently fleshed out in terms of examples “Anti-Palestinian racism is a form of anti-Arab racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives.” So, this quite clearly defines APR as a form of anti-Arab racism. Putting aside the fact that Arabs are not a race, what this establishes is that APR is meant to constitute a subset of anti-Arab ‘racism.’ So APR presumably refers to Arabs who live in “Palestine.” However, since there has never been a state called Palestine and the region that was formerly known as the British Mandate of Palestine was populated also by Jews, Christians, and other non-Arab groups, there is little in the way of argument for a specific type of anti-Arab ‘racism’ called APR. After all, do we speak about anti-Egyptian ‘racism’, anti-Libyan ‘racism’, anti-Lebanese ‘racism’, or anti-Saudi ‘racism’, and the list goes on? Do we speak about specific types of ‘racism’ for Christians living in the area formerly defined by the British Mandate of Palestine? And if so, would we not need separate terms for anti-Orthodox Christian and anti-Catholic ‘racism’? And of course, these terms would only pertain to Christians of that type living in that region. Oh, and while we’re at it, don’t forget the Jews of the region, who these days go by the name Israelis. So if you accept APR and wish to at least have a chance of being coherent, then you need all these other ‘racisms.’

It is plain to see that the APR concept is incoherent. But it gets worse; for not only is the fundamental concept incoherent, it is extended from a people (Palestinian Arabs) to their narratives. And what exactly is it that when interacting with Palestinian Arabs or their narratives provides a basis for labelling an action as racist? Well, it is any of the following actions: exclusion, erasure, stereotyping, defamation, or dehumanization. So if I do something that excludes Palestinian narratives that’s APR! What does this even mean? Most acts in life exclude Palestinian narratives. So what? As for erasing, it’s pretty hard to erase a narrative, unless by “erase” Majid meant “not subscribe to”, but of course, that’s far from erasure. Narratives, as nonhuman entities, cannot be stereotyped, defamed or dehumanized, so here we go again—more conceptual incoherence. Enough to make your eyes roll over.

And who exactly determines these protected narratives? Do all Palestinian Arabs have a single immutable set of narratives to which every member agrees? Do they not have differing views that often conflict, and when they do are they, too, all guilty of APR since each excludes to some degree the counter-narratives of their fellow member with whom they disagree? Are the narratives of Arabs in Israel who fully partake in Israeli life afforded the same protection as the narratives of Gazan Arabs who support Hamas? (Duh, no!) Is anyone even pretending that all of these Palestinian Arabs share the same narrative? Or that narratives in the future will cohere with narratives of today? And if such narratives do not all cohere, as surely they don’t, then how could all of them be equally protected when they conflict?

And even putting all of that aside, why on earth would it be racist to challenge Palestinian Arab narratives? Since when has it been racist to challenge any narrative? I’ll tell you when—since 2022 when Dania Majid, a Toronto lawyer/activist, proposed this preposterous idea. Since when have Palestinian narratives occupied some anointed position in the space of ideas, making them virtually untouchable? Wouldn’t that be convenient! Does Majid and her fellow travellers wish to assert that all such narratives are unassailable truths to which we must all bow lest we be stigmatized as racist?

Well, to hell with that. We won’t even bow before good ideas, let alone bad ones. We won’t sacrifice free and critical thought to protect brittle ideas riddled with distorted representations of history. No, we will not accept this definition because we will not bow to tyranny or foolishness. We remember that people who resisted dogma were once called heretics and killed for their beliefs. Now, the APR squad desperately wants to dust off that old playbook. They want to replace the term heretic with racist. But we are on the other side of The Enlightenment and scientific revolution and not so intellectually lazy as to let the wool be pulled over our eyes—at least many of us aren’t.

Are there any other groups claiming to be victims of racism who demand that their narratives are legitimate targets of racism? Narratives are essentially stories we tell. They usually have a causal structure and like any causal story, a narrative can be closer or further from the truth. The catchiness of the story also does not serve as a cue to truth. For instance, consider the counterintuitiveness of modern physics (e.g., consider the counterintuitiveness of 4-dimensional spacetime or the quantum notion of particles not being particles but probability waves). Much of the history of science has involved shedding the stories that seemed intuitively right but which did not accord with empirical evidence and which eventually had to be thrown out. Thus, we might venture to guess that when it comes to narratives, quite the opposite is true: what makes for a catchy narrative is probably false. This is hardly surprising if you think about it a little. Truth highly constrains the storyteller. There may be a handful of ways to compellingly tell a true story, but if we can take liberties with the truth, then the possibilities for narrative construction are endless.

So, no, we will not protect narratives from racism because narratives cannot be victims of racism any more than pigs can fly. Narratives are stories we tell ourselves and we will not be made to believe in stories we don’t believe in. When those stories refer to historical matters of fact, we will always reserve the right to question them and forward alternative accounts.

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The remainder of the APR definition gives examples of how APR can be manifested. These examples reappear in virtually identical form in the Navigating document. I am going to break here because the examples will take us into territory that will require quite a bit more unpacking and I do not want to make this post much longer than it already is. However, I hope you will stay tuned for Part 4. As you will see, if you stay tuned, there is much more at stake in all of this than the prospect of releasing an incoherent definition. We have not even begun to outline how APR is being used as an influence operation in a game of information warfare. Please stay tuned.

1. Mandel, D. R., & Lehman, D. R. (1998). Integration of contingency information in judgments of cause, covariation, and probability. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 127(3), 269–285. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.127.3.26

2. Mandel, D. R. (2010). Radicalization: What does it mean? In T. M. Pick, A. Speckhard, & B. Jacuch (Eds.), Home-grown terrorism: Understanding and addressing the root causes of radicalisation among groups with an immigrant heritage in Europe (pp. 101-113). Amsterdam, Netherlands: IOS Press. [In NATO Science for Peace and Security Series E: Human and Social Dynamics -- Vol. 60]