June 12, 2024
Deep Saini
President and Vice Chancellor
McGill University
Room 506 James Administration Building
845 Sherbrooke Street West
Montréal (Québec) H3A 0G4
Dear Mr. Saini,
As mentioned in our letter of February 28 when we wrote about the shutdown by
anti-Israel protesters of the Bronfman Building, United Against Hate Canada is an
organization formed to promote cross cultural communication with a focus on dialogue
between different religious and racial minorities.
Our Board hails from numerous communities and is particularly concerned by the
unprecedented upsurge in antisemitism witnessed in Canada over the past months.
The recently issued B’nai Brith audit of antisemitic incidents showed a 109% increase
in such incidents in 2023 and police reporting for Q1 2024 suggested the record level
seen last year will be surpassed this year.
McGill has not been immune from antisemitism, much of it driven by those calling for the
destruction of Israel, the Jewish homeland. There has been openly expressed support
on campus for Hamas, a banned terrorist entity in Canada, that on October 7 brutally
massacred over 1200 Israelis.
Permit me to question the wisdom of McGill ceding to escalating pressure from
protesters who are calling on the university to be complicit in the false accusations
of genocide against Israel. The university is now offering to consider the shameful
demands to punish Israel and has actually proposed an amnesty to the protesters.
We write today to make a far more reasonable demand.
We call on McGill to boycott, divest and sanction all nations, businesses and
institutions that fund Hamas as well as cutting ties with all industries and
academic institutions that have links with the Islamic Republic of Iran and
its proxies including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other terrorist entities.
A lack of will to act has put McGill in a situation that other Canadian universities avoided
by taking resolute action. Elsewhere illegal encampments were quickly removed.
McGill today is dealing from a position of weakness with a relatively small group of
masked protesters, many of whom are likely not McGill students.
The message the public is receiving is that McGill is supine and will bend to the
protesters maximalist demands.
Elsewhere it has been shown that encampments have been coordinated by Samidoun,
a front group for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another banned
terrorist entity. We wonder if we will discover that Samidoun agents are involved in the
situation at McGill.
It is time for McGill to stand with its Jewish students who have been victimized
for months now on campus. It is time for McGill to stand with the Canadian public
which is horrified with on-going terror and the efforts of Hamas supporters in Canada
to delegitimize Israel’s right to defend itself and to free the hostages kidnapped
and brutalized by Hamas.
We would be pleased to meet with you to negotiate the timeline for McGill’s boycotting
divesting and sanctioning all connected to the above named terror organizations
and their state based sponsors.
Yours truly,
Marvin Rotrand
Director General
United Against Hate Canada
c.c. CIJA, B’nai Brith, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Raoul Wallenberg Centre
for Human Rights, Deborah Lyons