Perhaps we should have the names of those people who are behind the group "Students Against Bigotry" so we know who they are - they like to sling a lot of mud at people...
Students Against Bigotry calls on the entire community to stand up to white supremacy at UBC
If you aren’t fascists, why do you keep platforming them?
Students Against Bigotry continues to call attention to the ongoing series of hateful and deliberately misleading speakers being hosted at the University of British Columbia, in collaboration with alt-right groups masquerading as free speech advocates.
Ricardo Duchesne and Mark Hecht are scheduled to appear at UBC on Wednesday, October 9, as guests of the so-called “Students for Freedom of Expression” (not to be confused with the similarly deceptive “Free Speech Club”). This event is merely the latest symptom of UBC’s long-standing complicity with white supremacists, anti-Semites, Islamophobes, transphobes, and misogynists.
When UBC president Santa J. Ono talks about the need for Truth and Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, or makes such statements as “Islamophobia is simply unacceptable” (as he did after the tragic Christchurch mosque shooting), he demonstrates a hypocrisy of the highest magnitude.
Duchesne, Jordan Peterson, Armin Navabi, Ben Shapiro, Meghan Murphy, Jenn Smith, and more have all been welcomed as speakers at UBC in the past two years alone. The university also attempted to host Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern this past March, but had to change plans when the newly formed SAB and other groups started organizing against them.
Students, faculty, and staff at UBC have clearly had enough of the far-right hate speech on our campus.
Prior to Jenn Smith’s talk on June 23, the UBC Faculty Association issued a letter calling on the administration to cancel it, arguing that “the UBC academic community as a whole may be harmed by this event.”
The Association of Administrative and Professional Staff, which represents nearly 5,000 university employees, was even clearer. It stated that they "feel violated and/or unsafe as well as wholly disrespected by their employer,” who “values the so-called 'free speech rights' of hate mongers more than the safety and well-being of the University community.”
And yet the university went ahead with that event anyway — prompting the Vancouver Pride Society to kick UBC out of the annual Pride Parade. At that point, President Ono assured the VPS that the issue would be addressed by the Board of Governors as well as both the Vancouver and Okanagan Senates. But those bodies have all met, and nothing has changed.
UBC’s administration has shown nothing but contempt for our concerns, repeatedly choosing to side instead with far-right extremists. Moreover, the university has explicitly supported the claims of the “Students for Freedom of Expression” and “Free Speech Club” by framing the issue exclusively in terms of academic freedom and freedom of expression. This obfuscates the key fact that these events are being used by extremists to increase their visibility, organization, and strength at UBC. It has become clear that students, faculty, and staff will have to join together in order to defend ourselves and our university from them.
We call on the administration to stop patronizing us by deliberately conflating “academic freedom” with “freedom of speech.” We call on it to stop responding to our legitimate opposition to far-right hate speech by simply telling us to seek counselling or go complain to the RCMP. We call on it to respect its own policies (e.g., Policies 3, 7, and 107, which have been renamed SC1, SC7, and UP9) and statements (especially the April 2018 “Freedom Matters” statement).
And we call on it to cancel the event scheduled for Wednesday, October 9.
Should these calls not be answered, Students Against Bigotry is organizing a rally to confront the white supremacists. But we can’t do it alone.
We call on the entire Vancouver community to speak out on social media, to discuss this issue with your friends and co-workers, to put up posters in your neighborhoods and workplaces, to voice your opinion directly to the university, and to mobilize and join our rally in large numbers.
Together, we can shut down white supremacy at UBC!
----------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment