Gillian Cosgrove, "National Diary,"

National Post, 7 May 2004, A9

"Leaders like Mary Robinson should be extra vigilant…" Gil Troy, McGill Professor McGill honorary degree rewards cowardice

UN’s Robinson presided at 2001 world conference hijacked by anti-Semites

Late in August, 2001, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson of Ireland, presided at the World Conference Against Racism in South Africa. She allowed these proceedings, just before the terrorist outrage of 9/11, to be hijacked by anti-Semites. They bullied Jewish delegates. They distributed cartoons of hook-nosed Jews. Josef Goebbels himself would have been proud to have been ringmaster of this demented circus. After this conference had gleefully demonized Jews, Mrs. Robinson ended it by gloating: "We ... succeeded!"

Fast Forward to McGill University, 2004. It is awarding an honorary degree to Mary Robinson – for services rendered to the cause of inhumanity, no doubt. That she stood by, supine, in the face of racial hatred in Durban is irrelevant to McGill authorities.

But Gil Troy, a McGill history professor, has the courage to speak out. He says McGill is awarding Robinson a "degree of dishonour." In the Montreal Gazette on Sunday he wrote: In a world of ever-coarsening anti-Semitism and despicable rationalizations for suicide bombings, in a city which has just endured the burning of a Jewish children’s school library, at a university where vandals scratched 'Heil Hitler' into the bathroom of the Bronfman Building and defaced the exterior of the Hillel Jewish Student Centre, honouring Mary Robinson sends a terrible message.

On Monday, his point hit home when another bout of anti-Semitism grabbed headlines. In a cemetery in north-end Montreal, Nazi slogans and swastikas were scrawled on tombstones and graves vandalized.

"Leaders like Mary Robinson – and my McGill colleagues who distribute honorary doctorates – should be extra vigilant to weed out this hatred, rather than standing silently by and watching it grow," Mr. Troy said. He, of course, has been denigrated by his politically correct faculty peers for daring to question the idiotic wisdom of McGill’s administrators.

"In fighting modern anti-Semitism, the moral neutrality of the politically correct – which often masks moral sloppiness or even outright bias – is a particularly insidious problem. We need Winston Churchills, and Mary Robinson is a Neville Chamberlain."

Thus does the history of the 1930s repeat itself as tragic farce. Thus does your correspondent retch in disgust for those who would reward cowardice in the face of evil with an honorary degree. Let’s hope it’s a "doctorate of inhumanities."