Concordia Root Causes
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From last year, a story at JTA about Concordia University’s Student Union handbook for 2001/2002 makes it very clear that the anti-Jewish riot earlier this month did not happen in a vacuum: Concordia’s Revolutionary Student Handbook.
The soft-covered, spiral-bound agenda is titled “Uprising,” with the image of what appears to be a Muslim woman and the word “revolution” written in several languages on one side.
At a news conference organized by B’nai Brith Canada earlier this month, BBC Executive Director Frank Dimant called the handbook “a call to intifada, anarchy and revolution.”
“It threatens to be a blueprint to campuses not just in Canada, but across North America,” Dimant said. …
The handbook, paid for with annual student fees, is a virtual glorification of worldwide revolution, containing articles advocating Canadian flag-burning and calling for a Steal Something Day.
“Stealing is just. Theft is exploitative. Stealing is when you take a yuppie’s BMW for a joyride and crash into a parked Mercedes, just for the hell of it,” the article reads.
A poem in the handbook calls on students to “take arms for the revolution� rise up�.. gripping like a fist�.. smash the state�.” …
The comprehensive calendar inside is filled with dates commemorating anarchists and revolutionaries.
May 15, Israel’s Independence Day, is listed as “Al-Nakba (the 1948 Palestinian Catastrophe).”
The Student Union’s vice president, Laith Marouf, recently was expelled from Concordia and banned from campus for spray-painting pro-Palestinian graffiti on university property. He also allegedly assaulted security guards during an ensuing brawl. …
Perhaps the most outrageous part of the book, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a page-sized graphic of a plane crashing into an office.
“This is not an agenda called uprising,” the headline states. “It is an agenda for uprising.”
Beneath the headline, in a room full of corporate types, several men huddle together, asking “tell us, is it too late to try this grassroots organizing?”
The books were said to have been printed before Sept. 11, but many here are asking how anyone dared to distribute them after the catastrophe.
UPDATE: Earlier today Instapundit linked to the PDF version of the handbook. Someone’s getting touchy at Concordia, though; it has already been removed by the powers that be. If one of our readers grabbed a copy, would you please email it to me?