Four students and two student organizations filed the lawsuit on Aug. 30.
Concordia University and its President and Vice-Chancellor Graham Carr received a lawsuit on Aug. 30 accusing them of allowing what the plaintiffs consider to be antisemitism at the university.
The plaintiffs, four students and two organizations from Concordia, notably claim that the university permitted several instances of misconduct, allowed individuals and groups to intimidate them freely and enforces its codes of conduct selectively and arbitrarily.
“[Concordia] appears to overlook these standards when addressing groups like [the Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) Concordia, Independent Jewish Voices Canada Inc. (IJV), Bara Iyad Abuhamed], and others deemed problematic on Campus while holding Plaintiffs to a different standard,” states the lawsuit.
The case is headed to trial in the Superior Court of Québec. The date of the trial has not yet been publicly announced. The allegations in the lawsuit have not been proven in court.
Among other things, the plaintiffs are demanding that the Court declare that Concordia University and Carr failed to enforce the university’s policies, by-laws and regulations, and that they “have tolerated and supported an environment where hate and intolerance have flourished and been normalized on Campus.” They also demand that the court order the defendants to rectify the situation, authorize the plaintiffs to call any policing authority should the orders not be respected and pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees.
The plaintiffs and their lawyers declined to comment on the ongoing legal procedure.
Concordia University also declined to comment on the lawsuit. However, the university’s spokesperson, Vannina Maestracci, said the administration has worked to keep everyone safe on campus.
“We’ve taken disciplinary action against people who have violated Concordia’s Code of Rights and Responsibilities on campus,” she wrote in an email.
The lawsuit lists 15 distinct events which the plaintiffs consider to be antisemitic. The first one, labelled in the lawsuit as the Oct. 7 “Terrorist Attack Celebration,” details reactions from some pro-Palestinian Concordia students and groups to the Hamas-led attack on Israel. One such reaction is a now-deleted Instagram post by SPHR Concordia.
“Last night, the resistance in Gaza led a heroic attack against the occupation and has taken over 30 hostages [sic] including Brigadier General [Nimrod] Aloni,” read the post. “Their march toward liberation is as monumental as their rockets — the resistance will free the prisoners who have been facing a fascist attack by the occupation and liberate our land from the fangs of the enemy.”
The plaintiffs, two of which are organizations Hillel Concordia and The StartUp Nation Montreal, say in the lawsuit that they have felt threatened by antisemitic conduct around campus as well as online. The lawsuit uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s definition of antisemitism, which both the federal and provincial governments have adopted.
In a 2021 article published in The Conversation, Jewish professors from various Canadian universities criticized the IHRA definition, calling it “a seriously flawed statement” and accusing institutions of using it to silence criticism of Israel.
“We never really addressed them [the plaintiffs’ claims] because they’re just empty accusations, and I don’t think we will,” said a representative of SPHR Concordia, which now stands for Students for Palestine’s Honour and Resistance, when asked for comment about the lawsuit.
The representative commented on the condition of anonymity.
On May 8, a news conference was held at Parliament Hill in Ottawa to discuss antisemitism on Canadian university campuses. Concordia University student Anastasia Zorchinsky, the president and founder of The StartUp Nation Montreal and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, detailed some experiences she has gone through since Oct. 7.
Among those experiences, she mentioned “waking up one morning with an Instagram comment saying ‘Anastasia, we will find you on campus,’ and on the same day, proceed to be accosted by a group of five pro-Palestinian men during [her] lunch break on campus.”
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit also denounce the use of multiple chants they deem as antisemitic in pro-Palestinian protests at Concordia, such as the ones using the term “intifada.” This word was most recently used in a protest at the Hall Building on Sept. 12, with a banner reading “Dear Concordia / You repress the students / This is how we respond / Long live the student intifada / National Day of Action.”
Intifada, the Arabic word for rebellion or uprising, is often used to refer to either of the two historical Palestinian uprisings. The first intifada spanned from December 1987 to September 1993, terminating with the no longer active first Oslo Accords. The second intifada, also known as the Al-Aqsa intifada, began in September 2000.
The ‘Student Intifada’ is a term in part popularized to refer to university campus protests in support of Palestine.
“The word intifada means uprising or revolution, so when we say Student Intifada, we mean that it’s a student uprising against their institutions, complicity in the genocide,” said the SPHR representative, who rejected the argument that the term is antisemitic.
On or about Dec. 17, 2023, the Concordia Student Union (CSU) held an antisemitism training session for its council members and executives, where IJV members presented a PowerPoint. The IJV is in favour of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and is anti-Zionist.
The presenters stated in their presentation that the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism is a “tool in the ‘Weaponization’ [sic] of antisemitism,” that “white Jews — to the extent they can pass as white — benefit from white privilege,” and that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. The presentation instead supported the definition provided by the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which explicitly excludes criticizing “Zionism as a form of nationalism” from its examples of antisemitism.
Diana Levitin, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, was a CSU council member last year, and she objected to the IJV giving this antisemitism training. The lawsuit claims that this training was antisemitic.
The CSU’s beliefs and stances can all be found in its website’s bylaws and policies section. According to CSU general coordinator Kareem Rahaman, they aim to follow the policies laid out in the CSU Positions Book. Rahaman declined to comment on the lawsuit.
