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Written by: Marthad Umucyaba
A group of academics are beginning to mobilize against Canada’s predatory foreign policy, with the launch of a new organisation.
Academics Kevin MacKay, Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui, and Dr. Radhika Desai, along with PhD candidates Tamara Lorincz and Ghada Sasa, joined Janine Solanki, the chairperson of Mobilisation against War and Occupation Vancouver (MAWO Vancouver) on a Zoom call on October 10 to oppose Canada’s foreign policy.
Over a year into Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign, and two years into Russia’s denazification of NATO-armed Ukraine, one can hardly say the Zoom call/webinar was timely, but it at least shows some measure of courage from academics. A number of the academics speaking during this forum had already been persecuted by their respective institutions and the state for pro-Palestine and anti-NATO activism.
While conversations prioritised discussing the personal experiences of the participants, the main purpose of the webinar was the launch of the new organisation, Canadian Academics for a Just Foreign Policy (CAJFP) and to promote its website. The new organisation has two running petitions demanding that universities ensure that the principle of “universal free speech” is applied without the pro-colonial and pro-NATO bias that characterises North American academia.
The organisation launch and its objectives
The launch of CAJFP has the goal of bringing together academics, professors, and students that were negatively affected by the Canadian government’s affinity to NATO and its party line. This mainly includes those who suffered under Canada’s racial caste, those who suffered in their careers after trying to expose NATO criminality, and those who suffered under a combination of the two aforementioned factors.
The organisation is trying to appeal to academics and students that are victims of the repressive nature of the Canadian state, that are personal witnesses to the repression, and that are sympathetic. One main initiative is the attempt to get students, alumni, and academics respectively to sign petitions urging compliance by the universities to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the realm of “universal free speech”, even if that speech supports the “enemies” of NATO or can be categorised by the government as “foreign interference”.
Repression against academics by universities and the state
Two out of the three academics invited to speak about their experiences with state and academic repression had run-ins with the Canadian security and intelligence forces. Dr. Desai and Dr. Ghaffar-Siddiqui, and Lorincz have even been interrogated by state security forces and CSIS. Dr. Desai, for example, was held captive by Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and interrogated for three hours on the subject of Canada’s predatory sanctions regime against sovereign states (25:04-25:24).
Dr. Ghaffar-Siddiqui was interrogated by Peel Police (53:35-53:40) and in her own words, gets “death threats daily”. Lorincz’s story, as she studies for her PhD, was mentioned already in a previous article for The Canada Files, where she was illegally held captive at the airport by security forces and by CSIS, after returning from Russia. This is a noted alarm bell on top of the usual disenfranchisement of academics like Dr. Desai and Dr. Ghaffar-Siddiqui from presenting papers that go against the NATO party line.
The sad state of academic “activism”
“I would like to just touch on something that Radhika said, you know, she talked about one year ago, the Canadian Parliament giving a standing ovation for a Nazi up in the gallery and, I have filed a hundred access to information [requests] about the war in Ukraine… the federal government knows internally,… that the Canadian military has been training neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine for the past eight years, but if I speak about this… this is.. deemed ‘disinformation’ even though I have the documents in black and white… I think we need to make the links between Canada’s support for Ukrainian fascism and Canada’s support for Israeli Zionism. The unifying force is fascism and it’s part of a broader war.”
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PhD candidate Tamara Lorincz, University of Waterloo (1:43:36-1:44:55)
Unfortunately, Canadian academics – in general – are only beginning to realise that Canada and the “democratic” universities are engaging in fascist political tactics. And worse, they are at even earlier stages of realisation. The tactics are to promote a white supremacist foreign policy that will naturally need to arm fascists and far-right political forces. But most of them don’t realize this yet.
And disconcertingly, after sounding the alarm bell with CAJFP, arguably two years late, very few academics and students are even willing to put their name on a petition making a polite request to universities to grant “universal free speech”. At the time of this writing, over two weeks after the site launch and petition launch, only nine academics and 13 students signed the petition, in a national post-secondary education system where approximately two million students are enrolled each year (as of the 2021/2022 school year).
Whether the lack of support is due to apathy, due to the strength of colonial propaganda, due to the result of a chilling effect where students and academics are fearful for their own careers, or due to a combination of the aforementioned effects, the prospects of the Canadian state facing an effective movement from principled academia is now dim. The backlash will have to come from the rest of the world first, and they will plan carefully to not go down with NATO. The West will have to own up to the consequences of their actions on their own, without dragging the rest of the world down with them. CAJFP could have a positive impact in this process of owning up to these consequences, if it is able to grow.
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Marthad Shingiro Umucyaba (formerly referred to as Christian Shingiro) is a Rwandan-born naturalized Canadian expat. He is known for his participation in Communist/anti-imperialist national and international politics and is the radio show host of The Socially Radical Guitarist.
He is also a freelance web developer in Hong Kong, China, striving to provide “Socially Radical Web Design at a socially reasonable price”.
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