The Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) is an organization with branches at most major Canadian campuses, including the University of Western Ontario (UWO).
Strangely, SPHR-UWO has entirely disappeared.
The URL (http://www.usc.uwo.ca/clubs/sphr/) for the website no longer links to a valid page.
It used to, as recorded by the Way Back Machine.
A technical problem? I doubt it because the SPHR is missing from the official list of UWO campus clubs. It used to be there.
So what happened?
According to this poster at rabble.ca, it was the Jews!
Meanwhile, the Israeli lobby has been active in universities silencing speech:
http://www.usc.uwo.ca/clubs/sphr/
Just like other supremacist groups, the Zionists claim freedoms (and judgements) exclusively for themselves.
The SPHR has had plenty of run-ins in the past. The most nototrious involved the so-called Apartheid Wall event from November 2004:
On Monday, November 29th 2004, many students felt that their safe environment was violated. A USC [University Student Council] ratified club called Solidarity for Paelstinian Human Rights (SPHR) had their scheduled atrium day.
The SPHR erected a mock wall covered with anti-Israel material. Needless to say, things turned ugly:
This was after the Israel Action Committee was forced to apolgize for this:Students walking into University of Western Ontario's community centre last week found a mock wall pulled across the atrium.
The banner, which remained on campus for the entire day, was erected by Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) for Palestine Day, and displayed grafitti that included, "Stop Killing Children," "Stop the Genocide" and "Another South Africa."
The University Community Centre houses campus food outlets, shops, recreation facilities and student-related services. According to the university's calendar, 20,000 people pass through the centre daily.
"It was a pretty uncomfortable situation," said Hailey Eisen, a UWO journalism graduate student.
"The banner claimed to be about human rights, but there was no neutrality and no mention of terrorism against Israeli civilians," she said.
"While there is definitely a need for dialogue between the two groups, this wasn't the way to initiate discussion. I watched people screaming at each other all day. Everybody was on the defensive right from the beginning," Eisen said.
Efforts to punish the SPHR-UWO have been less than successful:
The entire display, erected in the main student centre, the University Community Centre (UCC), was fully approved by the University Students Council IN ADVANCE, and the London Police Hate Crimes Division, UWO's Equity Services, and the UWO President's Office after being erected.
Despite all of this clearance, on 16 December 2004, the Clubs Policy Committee (CPC) - a sub-committee of the USC - tried and convicted SPHR without giving SPHR an opportunity to defend itself, and without even telling the club what the accusations were. After a thorough investigation by the university Ombudsperson, the decision was deemed unfair and overturned. This academic year, instead of issuing an apology for the USC's unfair treatment, the USC reinforced last year's illegal and unfair decision. On November 7, 2005, the CPC issued yet another decision "prohibit[ing] SPHR UWO from public space for the duration of 365 days".
So did the forces of worldwide Zionism have their revenge?
As crazy as it sounds, the most recent news concerning the SPHR-UWO is focused on one of those Jews getting a look at the books of the SPHR-UWO:
The University of Western Ontario's student council election was marred by controversy after an e-mail from a Palestinian group claimed a Jewish candidate had a conflict of interest.
Executive members of Western's Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights Club (SPHR) expressed concern that Noah Farber, a candidate for the 2006-07 position of vice-president of finance and clubs, has a history of working against Palestinian human rights.
The e-mail was sent to the University Student Council (USC) on March 17, the day before it voted for the position of vice-president of finance.
It stated: "Mr. Farber is the president of the Israel Action Committee (IAC) and has a blatant conflict of interest with the SPHR goals of basic human rights for Palestinians. It would be unfair and deleterious to SPHR to grant Mr. Farber access to SPHR financial records and planned activities."
The problem goes back to that wall event:
At that point, Farber said he felt the need to address the issue.
In an e-mail, he stated that the conflict of interest SPHR was referring to was his membership on the Clubs Policy Committee, which filed a complaint when SPHR celebrated the United Nations International Day of Solidarity, on Nov. 29, 2004, by erecting a mock Apartheid Wall at Western.
"Apparently, my candidacy is not as a result of hard work and desire to serve the students of Western, but rather the result of a massive conspiracy," Farber wrote.
"My only saving grace is that they [SPHR complaints] are so bizarre, at least they make clear the scary extremes to which these people have decided to try to skew the elections."
Farber lost the election.
Still, the SPHR-UWO has disappeared from both the web and the list of sanctioned UWO clubs. DId the Clubs Policy Committee succeed in shutting down the SPHR-UWO after all? Does the website count as a "public site"? Or were darker forces involved?
Maybe a reader from the UWO can fill us in.
Update: I found a site that has described what happened. The CPC has had the SPHR deratified:
The University of Western Ontario is a medium-sized University campus at which typical campus activism takes place. Like many North American campuses, activism on Israel/Palestine is a feature of campus life. Also like many North American campuses, suppressing such activism seems to be a priority for the establishment. The deratification Tuesday, and treatment throughout of the campus group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) fits well into this North American context, though it seems a particularly farcical example. In the interest that there be a public record of all such events, great and small, tragic and farcical, I conducted a short interview with Tarek Lubani, a campus activist in SPHR, who described the strange situation for the record.
OK, so it's not a neutral news source, but it's the best I could find:
On December 17, 2004, we got an email from the Clubs Policy Committee, a subcommittee of the student council, telling us there was a complaint against us. We weren't allowed to see the complaint or hear a summary. We were not allowed to respond or defend ourselves. But we were told 24 hours later that we had been banned from all student council facilities for two years.
We asked the Ombudsperson to write a report on the matter, on due process grounds. The Ombudsperson recommended that the student council overturn the decision and it did.
The person responsible for interpreting the legal positions of ourselves and the CPC was David Forestell, who also happens to have backed the Israel Action Committee (IAC) student council candidate, former Israel Action Committee (IAC) president Matt Abramsky. He invited Irshad Manji to speak about her book "The Trouble with Islam" last year under the auspices of the university gay-rights group and the IAC. We asked him to declare a conflict of interest in this case, but he refused.
In the fall of 2005, we consulted with our membership and decided to post all the information we had online. We finally received the complaint with no stipulations, so we published that as well. We wanted to show people what was going on: if we were to be banned, we wanted the ban to see the light of day and those who banned us to have to make their case publicly, with our response alongside the complaint.
Not long after posting, during the 2005 Christmas exams, we got an email saying that unless we removed the complaint from our website, we would be up for 'review'. The CPC claimed the complaints were confidential. We replied that their case ought to be able to withstand public scrutiny and we were given the complaint without any stipulation that it would be confidential.
Apparently unconvinced, the student council shut down our website and we were brought before the CPC again - remember this is in the midst of the Christmas exams. We were given 2 days to prepare a defense, but it looked so obviously terrible that we eventually were allowed an extension into the new year. Of course the CPC voted against us, and we were banned from keeping a website on the university server.
One-sided, like I said. But whatever the details, the SPHR is off the campus server. They have a new website. The new site includes a page with the complaints and decisions, but they consist mostly of cover letters refering to attachments that are not on the site.
