The CSU council of representatives has voted to restore Hillel’s club status, but the freeze on their funding will continue.
Funding will be restored, said CSU President Sabine Friesinger, if Hillel signs an accord along with all other CSU clubs agreeing to respect all persons, commit to non-violent behaviour, and not to distribute hate materials or make hate speech, then Hillel’s funding will be restored.
Hillel has refused to sign Friesinger’s accord.
Before the Dec.12 meeting, about100 Hillel supporters rallied in the lobby of the Hall Building. “People are going to say things that disgust you,” said Hillel co-president Noah Sarna. “Don’t do anything you have doubts about. Just try to stay calm.”
The Hillel supporters then packed into a crowded Simone de Beauvoir Institute lecture room along with the CSU council and members of the press only to leave en masse 10 minutes into the meeting, after which the CSU voted to restore Hillel’s club privileges, but not their CSU funding.
CSU councillor Naomi Sarna condemned the CSU council for failing to give Hillel advance notice of their meeting on Dec. 2, where council voted 8 to1 to suspend Hillel’s club status because of the presence of flyers for Mahal found on the Hillel table.
Mahal is a program that enlists non-Israeli Jews aged 18 to 30 to serve in the Israeli Defence Force. If this constitutes recruitment for a foreign military, which Hillel attorney Michael Bergman says it does not, Hillel would be in violation of the Canadian Foreign Enlistment Act.
Naomi Sarna said freezing Hillel’s funding and suspending their tabling privileges was an obviously anti-Semitic act, and that Hillel was owed an apology by the CSU, and not the other way around. She added councillor Adam Slater acted rashly by proposing the motion to suspend Hillel’s CSU funding and tabling privileges in an emergency meeting of the CSU’s council of representatives on Dec. 2.
Slater said Hillel’s outrage at the decision was out of place because of the way co-Presidents Noah Sarna and Noah Joseph had acted in the past. “When we had condemned the Student Association for Muslim Awareness [SAMA], neither Mr. Sarna and Mr. Joseph objected to that, so I’m offended that they would say that I acted irrationally and didn’t follow due process in one situation, when they had no objections when it happened to another group,” said Slater.
Hillel member Benjy Levine said he left the room because, “We’re here to support Naomi and what she said. We’re disgusted with the CSU and what it’s done and we don’t support it.”
While CSU members continued their meeting inside, outside Noah Joseph told the Hillel group: “The CSU doesn’t control Hillel; Hillel controls Hillel!”
Joseph has admitted the Mahal flyers as well as ones equating Palestinians to the Klu Klax Klan were on the Hillel table in the Mezzanine on Nov. 26, but Hillel believes they have not broken any law.
There is a precedent for student groups having their funding suspended by the CSU. In August 2002, the CSU discovered SAMA had a link on its official website that led to another website that linked to hate material. SAMA was only notified an hour before the CSU council meeting that their funding would be cut, but wrote up a complete apology and removed the link, said councillor Louis-
