Received today, on which a brief remark only, at the end:
Dear members of the McGill community,
You have likely already heard of a troubling incident that took place on our downtown campus yesterday. I write today to provide further information.
Protesters forced their way into the James administration building on the downtown campus of McGill University and occupied it.
The Montreal police (SPVM) mobilized and made multiple arrests to remove the protesters. McGill thanks the police for their expertise in handling the situation.
During the occupation, protesters blockaded several entry doors, using chains or furniture, and attempted to remove inner doors to access offices. They vandalized parts of the exterior and interior of the building and locked themselves in one room and damaged furniture.
Protesters also attempted to build a barricade outside the building, but police quickly dismantled it. Some staff were forced to shelter in place while those occupying the building banged on the doors and yelled threats. Staff working in the building reported that they heard chants of “violence now.”
McGill supports the right to freedom of expression within the limits recognized by law. We strongly condemn the use of intimidating, aggressive, harassing or illegal tactics such as those seen yesterday.
This troubling event is the latest escalation in a series of incidents that have occurred since April 27, when the encampment first appeared on McGill’s lower field.
* Protesters hung with a noose an effigy of an Israeli politician on the Roddick Gates of McGill’s downtown campus. The figure was wearing a striped garment reminiscent of the uniforms worn by the millions of Jews and other marginalized people who suffered and died in concentration camps during World War II.
* Masked protesters targeted the personal residences of senior management on more than one occasion.
* The offices of a university team were also targeted. A table was set up containing rotten food with plates labelled with each team member’s name and red handprints, suggesting blood.
* There were also verbal altercations between protesters and students and their families who came to take pictures on campus after the convocation ceremony.
* Graffiti has been repeatedly spray-painted on the exterior and interior walls of university buildings.
None of this is peaceful protesting; it is designed to threaten, coerce and scare people. It is completely unacceptable.
The McGill administration has repeatedly tried to engage in dialogue with McGill students in the encampment. Last week, it reached out to re-open discussions after encampment leaders walked away from the table.
In many other institutions, we’ve seen encampment leaders work with campus administration to find some common ground that represents positive change, despite disagreements. Yet, McGill’s offer, which is comparable to that made by other universities who have reached resolutions, has been rejected by the encampment on our campus.
As the building is cleaned, and as police conduct their investigations, I ask that all James Building staff work from home today.
I want to add that I am deeply disappointed to have to write this message to you today. We are seeing tactics that go far beyond the right to protest, and that infringe squarely – and worryingly – on the rights of our community members to a peaceful environment, free from intimidation and from harassment. We remain fully committed to ensuring the full application of our policies and the law on our campuses, and we will continue to use all available means to ensure this happens.
Sincerely,
Deep Saini
President and Vice-Chancellor
My remark, Mr President: This is what you can expect when you mistake a rogue bear for an ordinary bear, and so fail to treat it accordingly. Even an ordinary bear should not be fed pizza, or fed at all.
I am grateful to encounter in these erudite words and arguments several similar nuance to those which I have, elsewhere, explored and expressed myself, in relation, respectively, to the Shoah and the modern State of Israel and its representation of hope AND in relation to God's perspective on these things. Neither architect nor enforcer, only redeemer.
I am not going to entertain (that is, host) comments like this either, and have taken the appropriate actions. I will leave this one stand, however, as an opportunity to explain to my readers my own approach, though not as an opportunity for the commentator to explain his approach, which he is of course free to do on his own site.
What is wrong with a remark like this, in my view?
First, it makes extremely serious charges that it does not support and in such a context cannot support. That these charges are common charges makes matters worse, rather than better, because instead of offering us expertise or insight, they offer us only anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic tropes, asserted as fact. This is no more acceptable against a nation than against an individual.
Second, a sober analysis of history, with more nuanced critiques of Israel, would catch up a great many other nations by way of analogy. Why single out Israel? And why do so without so much as questioning those with which they are once again engaged in deadly hostilities? I do not mean Palestinians as a people or as an aspiring nation, but in the dreadful form given them by Hamas and its supporters.
Third, because this type of response puts Israel right where I put Hamas, or where Cato put Carthage, or where Moses put the Canaanites. Which moral equivalence, or rather moral inversion, I think perverse, despite the legitimate criticisms that can and must be brought against Israel and certain of its leaders. The prophets of old were unafraid to point out that Israel sometimes inverted itself, morally speaking. That it sometimes does so today as well, I have no doubt. But whereas it is right, in my judgment, to say of Hamas, which is neither a people nor a state, delendum est!, it is wicked to say or imply the same of the people and state of Israel.
Fourth, because this kind of thinking is often bound up with Marcionism and militant supersessionism; that is, with a rejection of Israel as the people of God or even of the God of Israel himself—the God of the Old Testament, who is equally the God of the New. I stand, with Solovyov, Berdyaev, Barth, Bonhoeffer, John Paul II and many others, utterly opposed to anti-Semitism and especially to 'Christian' anti-semitism, which is not Christian at all. I will be saying more about this soon.
I deleted earlier a post by another commentator who went so far as to deny the Holocaust. I did so without hesitation and without comment of my own. What evil! The above post does not do that; nor, alas, does it guard against it. Rather it accuses me of denying or ignoring a holocaust of Palestinians, some of whom do not belong to Hamas or support it. I have not written about that, just as I have not written on the (proxy) war in Ukraine. That does not mean I am not paying attention to either, or to alleged atrocities on either side of either, ad bellum atrocities as well as in bello atrocities. It does mean that I am not ready to write about these things, not having a sufficient command of the facts to say well what I might want to say. I only know that I will not offer my site, even in the comment boxes, to people who are all too certain what they want to say, when they say it like this.
Thank you for the clarity you bring to questions immediately before us -- I am thinking of the fact that religion cannot help but be political, along with attendant dangers and responsibilities-- and those issues and events which we we must increasingly seek to perceive, understand, and resist, such as the motives and means of the spirit of antichrist. Your writing is a gift to the Church and, so far as it may still listen, the world.
Thank you for the compliment above, and thank you also for this essay, which I enjoyed very much. 'In the “regimevangelical” phenomenon, we are seeing the coming together of these two forces, the protection-obedience axiom and the natural adaptation of ideas to power.' Yes, and in regime Catholicism too. 'What would real opposition look like? It would threaten the power-protection binary.' Yes, again, though I would not understand the church, or construe the triplex munus that it shares with Christ, as it does. Hence I would not draw the practical conclusion to which it seems to be tending, though I am mindful of Solovyov's brief remark in the Short Tale to the effect that Christian armament can and sometimes should be both bodily and spiritual.
[NB: this reply has been edited, in correction of its misattribution of the essay in question.]
Thanks! A lot to digest and ponder here, notably in what you offer in relation to “the Jewish State of Israel.”
My sense, now more than (perhaps) ever, we need to reclaim and ponder afresh what “the Revolution of God” may mean for our time. In an essay (link below), I use Barth’s invitation and challenge as fresh impetus to reflect on this phrase, and others related to freedom and the face of fascism confronting us again…globally.
Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom in the Face of Fascism: Explorations in Barth’s Neo-orthodoxy and the Revolution of God
Barth: 'the red parson of Safenwil,' as they called him in those early days. You may be interested in what I say about some of these things in chapter six of Ascension Theology, including this: 'Barmen mounted no defence of the Jews, however. Though Barth and others, to their credit, would not remain silent on that score – Barth eventually going so far as to say that any attack on the Jews was an attack on Jesus – they confessed that they did not connect “the Jewish problem” as closely as they should have to the whole phenomenon they were trying to identify and overcome.' From the looks of your site, you may also be interested in Theological Negotiations (Baker 2018). Thanks for sharing your poetry.
Received today, on which a brief remark only, at the end:
Dear members of the McGill community,
You have likely already heard of a troubling incident that took place on our downtown campus yesterday. I write today to provide further information.
Protesters forced their way into the James administration building on the downtown campus of McGill University and occupied it.
The Montreal police (SPVM) mobilized and made multiple arrests to remove the protesters. McGill thanks the police for their expertise in handling the situation.
During the occupation, protesters blockaded several entry doors, using chains or furniture, and attempted to remove inner doors to access offices. They vandalized parts of the exterior and interior of the building and locked themselves in one room and damaged furniture.
Protesters also attempted to build a barricade outside the building, but police quickly dismantled it. Some staff were forced to shelter in place while those occupying the building banged on the doors and yelled threats. Staff working in the building reported that they heard chants of “violence now.”
McGill supports the right to freedom of expression within the limits recognized by law. We strongly condemn the use of intimidating, aggressive, harassing or illegal tactics such as those seen yesterday.
This troubling event is the latest escalation in a series of incidents that have occurred since April 27, when the encampment first appeared on McGill’s lower field.
* Protesters hung with a noose an effigy of an Israeli politician on the Roddick Gates of McGill’s downtown campus. The figure was wearing a striped garment reminiscent of the uniforms worn by the millions of Jews and other marginalized people who suffered and died in concentration camps during World War II.
* Masked protesters targeted the personal residences of senior management on more than one occasion.
* The offices of a university team were also targeted. A table was set up containing rotten food with plates labelled with each team member’s name and red handprints, suggesting blood.
* There were also verbal altercations between protesters and students and their families who came to take pictures on campus after the convocation ceremony.
* Graffiti has been repeatedly spray-painted on the exterior and interior walls of university buildings.
None of this is peaceful protesting; it is designed to threaten, coerce and scare people. It is completely unacceptable.
The McGill administration has repeatedly tried to engage in dialogue with McGill students in the encampment. Last week, it reached out to re-open discussions after encampment leaders walked away from the table.
In many other institutions, we’ve seen encampment leaders work with campus administration to find some common ground that represents positive change, despite disagreements. Yet, McGill’s offer, which is comparable to that made by other universities who have reached resolutions, has been rejected by the encampment on our campus.
As the building is cleaned, and as police conduct their investigations, I ask that all James Building staff work from home today.
I want to add that I am deeply disappointed to have to write this message to you today. We are seeing tactics that go far beyond the right to protest, and that infringe squarely – and worryingly – on the rights of our community members to a peaceful environment, free from intimidation and from harassment. We remain fully committed to ensuring the full application of our policies and the law on our campuses, and we will continue to use all available means to ensure this happens.
Sincerely,
Deep Saini
President and Vice-Chancellor
My remark, Mr President: This is what you can expect when you mistake a rogue bear for an ordinary bear, and so fail to treat it accordingly. Even an ordinary bear should not be fed pizza, or fed at all.
Sure hope all these essays will eventually be published in book form.
I am grateful to encounter in these erudite words and arguments several similar nuance to those which I have, elsewhere, explored and expressed myself, in relation, respectively, to the Shoah and the modern State of Israel and its representation of hope AND in relation to God's perspective on these things. Neither architect nor enforcer, only redeemer.
So rare; very welcome.
I am not going to entertain (that is, host) comments like this either, and have taken the appropriate actions. I will leave this one stand, however, as an opportunity to explain to my readers my own approach, though not as an opportunity for the commentator to explain his approach, which he is of course free to do on his own site.
What is wrong with a remark like this, in my view?
First, it makes extremely serious charges that it does not support and in such a context cannot support. That these charges are common charges makes matters worse, rather than better, because instead of offering us expertise or insight, they offer us only anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic tropes, asserted as fact. This is no more acceptable against a nation than against an individual.
Second, a sober analysis of history, with more nuanced critiques of Israel, would catch up a great many other nations by way of analogy. Why single out Israel? And why do so without so much as questioning those with which they are once again engaged in deadly hostilities? I do not mean Palestinians as a people or as an aspiring nation, but in the dreadful form given them by Hamas and its supporters.
Third, because this type of response puts Israel right where I put Hamas, or where Cato put Carthage, or where Moses put the Canaanites. Which moral equivalence, or rather moral inversion, I think perverse, despite the legitimate criticisms that can and must be brought against Israel and certain of its leaders. The prophets of old were unafraid to point out that Israel sometimes inverted itself, morally speaking. That it sometimes does so today as well, I have no doubt. But whereas it is right, in my judgment, to say of Hamas, which is neither a people nor a state, delendum est!, it is wicked to say or imply the same of the people and state of Israel.
Fourth, because this kind of thinking is often bound up with Marcionism and militant supersessionism; that is, with a rejection of Israel as the people of God or even of the God of Israel himself—the God of the Old Testament, who is equally the God of the New. I stand, with Solovyov, Berdyaev, Barth, Bonhoeffer, John Paul II and many others, utterly opposed to anti-Semitism and especially to 'Christian' anti-semitism, which is not Christian at all. I will be saying more about this soon.
I deleted earlier a post by another commentator who went so far as to deny the Holocaust. I did so without hesitation and without comment of my own. What evil! The above post does not do that; nor, alas, does it guard against it. Rather it accuses me of denying or ignoring a holocaust of Palestinians, some of whom do not belong to Hamas or support it. I have not written about that, just as I have not written on the (proxy) war in Ukraine. That does not mean I am not paying attention to either, or to alleged atrocities on either side of either, ad bellum atrocities as well as in bello atrocities. It does mean that I am not ready to write about these things, not having a sufficient command of the facts to say well what I might want to say. I only know that I will not offer my site, even in the comment boxes, to people who are all too certain what they want to say, when they say it like this.
Thank you for the clarity you bring to questions immediately before us -- I am thinking of the fact that religion cannot help but be political, along with attendant dangers and responsibilities-- and those issues and events which we we must increasingly seek to perceive, understand, and resist, such as the motives and means of the spirit of antichrist. Your writing is a gift to the Church and, so far as it may still listen, the world.
https://open.substack.com/pub/seekingthehiddenthing/p/understanding-the-regimevangelical — explores related concerns from a US perspective.
Thank you for the compliment above, and thank you also for this essay, which I enjoyed very much. 'In the “regimevangelical” phenomenon, we are seeing the coming together of these two forces, the protection-obedience axiom and the natural adaptation of ideas to power.' Yes, and in regime Catholicism too. 'What would real opposition look like? It would threaten the power-protection binary.' Yes, again, though I would not understand the church, or construe the triplex munus that it shares with Christ, as it does. Hence I would not draw the practical conclusion to which it seems to be tending, though I am mindful of Solovyov's brief remark in the Short Tale to the effect that Christian armament can and sometimes should be both bodily and spiritual.
[NB: this reply has been edited, in correction of its misattribution of the essay in question.]
Douglas: the linked essay is by @Kryptos, not myself!
Thanks! A lot to digest and ponder here, notably in what you offer in relation to “the Jewish State of Israel.”
My sense, now more than (perhaps) ever, we need to reclaim and ponder afresh what “the Revolution of God” may mean for our time. In an essay (link below), I use Barth’s invitation and challenge as fresh impetus to reflect on this phrase, and others related to freedom and the face of fascism confronting us again…globally.
Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom in the Face of Fascism: Explorations in Barth’s Neo-orthodoxy and the Revolution of God
DEC 14, 2023
https://rogerarendse.substack.com/p/karl-barth-theologian-of-freedom
And if you’d allow me, some poetic thoughts on Freedom, in an attempt to wrestle with what “true liberty” may mean.
ODE TO FREEDOM
Freedom!?
You are the mocking wall,
For the scribbling of the crazy myths,
I held so deep within my soul,
The yearnings and the longings to be whole,
Tumbling and collapsing in the fall,
Beneath the weight of overspun untruths;
Freedom!?
You are the elusive call,
Beckoning to the brightness of a new dawn,
I grasp for the vaporising life,
The struggle to escape the senseless strife,
Sinking and drowning of a suffocating soul,
Imprisoned in this decaying forlorn;
Freedom!
You are the ceaseless beat!
Pumping with resilient and illuminating light,
I open to your pulsating song,
The effervescence of the deafening throng,
Resisting and reaching beyond all defeat,
Ever reaching up and rising in determined flight.
Freedom!!
You are now the imploring voice,
Awakening us to vigilance against media barrage,
I participate in your prophetic feud,
The warning not to bend in servitude,
Standing up to imperial poise,
Join in the revolution with circumspect courage.
True Freedom!
We hear and heed your call!
(c) Roger Arendse 20200427
Barth: 'the red parson of Safenwil,' as they called him in those early days. You may be interested in what I say about some of these things in chapter six of Ascension Theology, including this: 'Barmen mounted no defence of the Jews, however. Though Barth and others, to their credit, would not remain silent on that score – Barth eventually going so far as to say that any attack on the Jews was an attack on Jesus – they confessed that they did not connect “the Jewish problem” as closely as they should have to the whole phenomenon they were trying to identify and overcome.' From the looks of your site, you may also be interested in Theological Negotiations (Baker 2018). Thanks for sharing your poetry.
Thank you. I will do my best to access the suggested readings.