UofT: Withdraw support for A Canary’s Song – The Conference Promotes Anti-Palestinian Racism, Genocide Denialism, and Bigotry!

On Sept. 15th, U of T is hosting a conference at Chestnut Student Residence featuring several prominent Zionist academics and political figures. The conference program openly conflates antizionism with antisemitism and the speakers list brings together people who have built careers off of supporting the colonial state of israel and its apartheid policies while denying the human rights of the Palestinian people. The event features zero anti-zionist Jewish voices.

The conference program describes anti-zionism as “the contemporary face of Jew-hatred.” This is a blatant distortion of reality: Zionism is a settler-colonial project that resulted in the dispossession, displacement, and impoverishment of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, and the establishment of a violent supremacist state which is currently engaging in crimes of apartheid and genocide. To describe anti-zionism as hateful, or as akin to the KKK, as speaker Adam Louis-Klein has done, is an insult to every Palestinian and every person of conscience.

Speakers, including headliner Irwin Cotler, have denied the genocide in Gaza and described pro-Palestine activists as ignorant. This is despite a UN Independent Commission, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories all recognizing israel’s actions in Gaza as genocidal, and despite the ICC finding israel guilty of crimes against humanity.