TORONTO – “Antisemitism is no longer in the closet and Jewish students on campus don’t know how to deal with it,” declared Salim Mansur, professor of Political Science at University of Western Ontario (UWO), Toronto Sun columnist and author of the just-published Islam’s Predicament: Perspectives of a Dissident Muslim.

He and Marina Nemat, author of the best selling memoir Prisoner of Tehran, spoke last week on ‘Antisemitism on Campus’ at a business lunch lecture at Heenan Blaikie LLP, sponsored by Speakers Action Group and the Canadian Jewish Civil Rights Association.

Both Mansur and Nemat acknowledged the environment of fear and intimidation on campuses today.

At UWO, Mansur said, “we have, like most campuses, a Social Justice Committee… which could also be called the Social Justice Committee for Hamas…. They run about 12 events during the school year…. They don’t invite a person like me who might want to talk about social justice in Muslim countries. The moon would turn to blue cheese first.”

Nemat, born in 1965, described growing up in Iran, where she had a wonderful childhood until her early teens, when the Islamic Revolution began.

“In history, horror unfolds little by little,” she explained, pointing to the growing atmosphere of hate. “By the time you wake up, it’s too late.

“The main purpose of torture is not to gain information, but to destroy the human spirit,” she said, describing her teenage years of being tormented in prison as “beyond human comprehension…. A part of me is still there in the cell. You can’t escape a place like that.”

“Some of us cheered Ayatollah Khomeini and the revolution,” Mansur said. “I was among them. We grew up, the world changed…and the world has changed dramatically and we haven’t caught up with it….

“The demography [in Canada] has changed. We are no longer the same country that I came to in 1973 and we don’t know how to deal with this shift…. We have a Liberal MP that can ask why [Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism] Jason Kenney has gone to [visit] Auschwitz….

“The situation now is so complex and difficult that we can’t speak about how to address anti-Semitism because leaders are afraid of being accused of Islamophobia.”

Mansur “used to be a Liberal….[but] we finally have a prime minister that’s willing to take a stand,” he said, adding that although he doesn’t agree with Geert Wilders about Islam, the Dutch politician currently on trial and facing charges of Islamophobia is “standing up in a field where most people like Obama are bowing.”

He discussed the importance of getting to know people outside of “our own cocoon, our own bubble,” as a first step towards rectifying the problem of hate. “If you talk only among yourselves, you’re not going to make a dent in how the world has shifted.”

Few people realize that the Arab nations comprise less than 20 per cent of the Muslim world, he explained. Mansur grew up in Calcutta, where he had several Jewish acquaintances, but “the Jew is a complete stranger” to the majority of Muslims, who “never met a Jew.”

According to Mansur, the “largest victims of what is happening in the Middle East today are Muslims,” who suffer from the theologians and the politicians.

He mentioned a recent column by Steven Plaut, a Haifa University professor and writer who frequently appears in the Jewish Tribune, in which he explains that traditional Islam, and the Koran in particular, explicitly acknowledges that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people.

“We have grown accustomed in our 21st century to the bizarre collaboration between Islamist fundamentalists and far-leftists,” Plaut wrote, referring to Tel Aviv University Professor Shlomo Sand¸ author of The Invention of the Jewish People, whom Plaut describes as a “notorious Jewish antisemite.”

Mansur explained that the Muslim prayers end with “salutation and blessings to Mohammed and his progeny…to Abraham and his progeny.

“And the imams get up and say we have to kill the Jews…. You have people with no knowledge, who don’t know what they are praying [for].”

The UWO professor maintains that there are many moderate Muslims, but the media seems to find the terrorists more newsworthy. For instance, Abdurrahman Wahid, a former president of Indonesia who passed away in December 2009, “spoke the language of Steven Plaut, and his organization [Nahdlatul Ulama] has 40 million followers,” Mansur said, adding that “the Jewish leadership has to make a more firm and aggressive stand, like Steven Plaut.”