Quebec’s Minister of Education, Pascale Déry, has admitted that she intervened to ask two CEGEP classes not to talk about Palestine.
The CAQ government, which a few years ago posed as the champion of “academic freedom”, is now trampling on that freedom to please its Zionist friends.
After the crackdown on pro-Palestine encampments last summer – which Déry said had “no place” – she arranged a meeting with the directors of four Montreal colleges to discuss political “tensions” on campus.
In this meeting she pointed to this particular course on Palestinian history and culture and demanded that Dawson College investigate to prove that it did not violate any laws or regulations. It has since come to light that she also attempted to intervene in the content of an English course on Palestinian literature at Vanier College.
This kind of direct interference by the Minister in the content of a specific course is unprecedented. “It’s very, very exceptional. We’ve never seen anything like this,” says Antonia Fikkert, secretary of the Dawson Teachers’ Union. The Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs d’université denounced these interventions as “a threat to all institutions of higher education”.
Déry claims to be acting as a neutral arbiter in the face of “tensions” on campus, but she has in fact acted directly under pressure from Zionist lobbies. Zionist groups Federation CJA and CIJA (Center for Israeli and Jewish Affairs) even boasted that Déry’s investigation had been “initiated thanks to [their] ongoing advocacy”.
Federation CJA and CIJA are wealthy Zionist lobbies which, since October 7, 2023, have been using their resources to “encourage those who have experienced harassment, intimidation, violence, to report their complaints to the authorities” – in other words, they find Zionist students willing to play the role of poor victims of dangerous pro-Palestinian activists, and armed with lawyers and public relations experts, use them to put pressure on college and university administrations and give the impression of a climate of anti-Semitic violence on campus.
And they’ve certainly found a sympathetic ear in the Minister of Education, since Déry herself is a staunch Zionist who sat on CIJA’s Board of Directors from 2016 until 2022, when she became Minister!
This is a thinly disguised attempt to silence all discussion of Palestine on campuses. It is part of what we have seen over the last 16 months: a wave of repression against support for Palestine, through trumped up accusations of anti-Semitism, censorship, dismissals and even arrests.
One teacher at Dawson explained, “teachers are afraid to say certain things, to teach certain things. Things that are considered legitimate knowledge but which, because they are linked to certain groups, are described as anti-semitic.” This is what the ruling class all over the world is looking to do: silencing anyone defending Palestine or talking about it the “wrong way”.
Déry defended herself, saying: “I did intervene on the content of the course for one simple reason: the context was really explosive. What I asked was: to avoid adding fuel to the fire, in this French course [in Dawson], […] could we have avoided talking about the most sensitive and divisive issues?”
Coming from the CAQ, this is supreme irony. Three years ago, they adopted a law to protect “academic freedom”. The government had jumped to the barricades to fight against “censorship” after anecdotal reports of teachers who said they were avoiding to use the “N-word”, amid a big debate fabricated by the media and right-wing pundits. The Minister of Higher Education at the time, Danielle McCann, had justified this law by arguing that professors should be able to address “ideas and subjects that are likely to shock”. Of course, these hypocrites have no problem with political meddling when it comes to censoring professors who talk about Palestine.
To the capitalist class and their representatives, “freedom of speech” only applies wherever it suits their own material interests. When it can be used to sew division among workers and youth, they come to its defence and declare it an inalienable human right. However, when the workers and youth call out the horrors created by their system, and especially when our protests threaten their interests directly, this so-called “inalienable right” is tossed aside without a second thought. So long as our society is divided into exploiters and exploited, capitalists and workers, there is no such thing as genuine academic freedom or freedom of speech.
