May 22, 2024
Dr. Robert Gordon,
President
University of Windsor
Dear President Gordon,
We write to you as concerned faculty members of the University of Windsor. We are aware that a University of Windsor student, a Palestinian woman, attempted to gain access to the St. Clair Centre for the Arts on May 15, 2024. She did so in order to check on her friend who had entered the building to access the washroom facilities. Upon opening the door to the building, she was denied entry by a Paladin security guard because she was wearing a keffiyeh. He was explicit that he was denying her entry because she wore the keffiyeh; the facts are not open to interpretation and the event was captured on video.
While the incident did not take place on University of Windsor campus, it is a glaring, direct, and shameful example of anti-Palestinian racism that is typical of the kind of extreme mistreatment that Palestinian people and racialized people advocating for justice in Palestine experience on a daily basis; this treatment is implicitly supported by the silence and complicity of institutions including the University of Windsor that fail to protect and support students, faculty/staff, and community.
The rudeness, disrespect and hostility of the security guard at the St. Clair Centre for the Arts suggest that he made an assumption that the keffiyeh is a symbol of terrorism and that anyone who dons it must be associated with violence and extremism. The keffiyeh is a Palestinian cultural symbol that in some contexts has come to signify resistance; resistance to 75 years of settler-colonial rule, Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the current genocide in Gaza. The impacted student not only had to endure the racist violence perpetrated on her by the guard’s words, words that operate to silence and vilify Palestinians, she had to endure this attack on Nakba day. The Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’, refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that started in 1947, was escalated on May 15, 1948, when Israel declared war on Palestinians, and continues to this day. It is a day that commemorates the thousands of Palestinians who have been murdered by the Israeli state, have had their land and homes confiscated, have been kidnapped and imprisoned and continue to be held in Israeli jails. The regime of Israeli apartheid, the decades of military occupation that governs the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and the current and relentless genocidal campaign levied against Palestinians relies on the dehumanization of Palestinians as undeserving of humanity. “They” are “terrorists” and therefore deserving of the violence directed at them – this dehumanizing trope has deadly material consequences in the lives of Palestinian people in Canada, Palestine, and elsewhere.
We witness in horror the genocide that continues to unfold in Gaza while governments and institutions, including the University of Windsor, remain silent in the face of one of the most horrendously violent atrocities of our times. Institutional silence and indifference to anti-Palestinian racism normalizes genocide. We refuse to allow genocidal violence to become a quotidian and unremarkable part of daily life and we implore the University of Windsor to take leadership in vocalizing opposition to Israeli state violence animated by anti-Palestinian racism.
We owe a duty of care to the student impacted and to all students who are impacted by anti-Palestinian racism. We know that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students at the University of Windsor have been demanding acknowledgment of anti-Palestinian racism, an acknowledgment of the racism that animates the Israeli state in its dehumanization of Palestinian people as it attempts to justify genocide. Decisions made by the University impact the lives of its students as they try to go about their daily lives in Windsor. The University of Windsor is part of the fabric of the City of Windsor and ought to take leadership in the face of racism and injustice. To be silent about anti-Palestinian racism is to be complicit in genocide.
We write to you now to join in the demands made by students who are engaging in protest at the University of Windsor encampment and who have created a “liberation zone”. They are demanding an end to silence, an end to genocide, and an end to anti-Palestinian racism that is fuelling a genocide. The focus on divestment from arms companies that are complicit in genocide is a call for an end to militarization and securitization, two phenomena that target Indigenous and racialized people. The fact that the student who was denied entry to the St. Clair Centre for the Arts was confronted with the racism of a security guard patrolling ‘private property’ is not coincidental. Securitization, militarization, and police apparatuses are created and maintained in order to control, contain, and justify violence against racialized and Indigenous people.
It has never been more urgent for the University of Windsor to recognize anti-Palestinian racism and end its complicity in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, as it will play a crucial symbolic role in protecting our students and faculty throughout the Windsor-Essex region and it will serve to protect our students and faculty/staff from facing similar dehumanizing, racist incidents inside and outside of campus.
We therefore demand that:
- The University make a public statement condemning the racism endured by a University of Windsor student on May 15, 2024, and urge St. Clair College to take immediate action to redress the harm caused including acceding to any demands the impacted student might have;
- The University immediately acknowledge and include anti-Palestinian racism as a form of discrimination that is condemned and prohibited;
- Affirm that suppressing the rights of students, faculty, staff and community to protest against the ongoing occupation, genocide and scholasticide is a form of anti-Palestinian racism that must be condemned and prohibited;
- The University enthusiastically affirm the rights of students, staff, and faculty to freely speak out, assemble, and protest Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and its continuing occupation, assassinations, land dispossessions, and arrests in the West Bank, including student/staff/faculty rights (if they so choose) to erect tents and encampments;
- Accept the demands from faculty, staff and students that the University immediately cease its material and ideological support for entities aiding the genocide and associated mass human rights violations;
- Refrain from any disciplinary action against students, staff, faculty, and community members exercising their right to freedom of peaceful protest, expression, and assembly and take active measure to support them in the exercise of their rights;
- Prohibit the entry of law enforcement on campus grounds to surveil and control students, staff, community, and faculty engaged in peaceful support of Palestinian liberation.
Sincerely,
Faculty for Palestine – Southwest ON chapter (F4P SWON)
Jewish Faculty Network – Southwest ON chapter (JFN Southwest ON)
RAACES (Researchers, Academics & Advocates Centering Equity & Solidarity)
CC.
University of Windsor Board of Governors
Dr. Shetina Jones, Associate VP Student Experience, University of Windsor
Dr. Clinton Beckford, VP PEI, University of Windsor
UWIN RAACES 