Sidney Shapiro had finished his Israel Defense Forces service just weeks before he arrived on campus at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont.
“I walked into the door of the school and there is a huge poster of a kid, a Palestinian kid, in the shadow of a field box and some Israel apartheid whatever,” he said, referring to a familiar cartoon employed by Canada’s anti-Israel movement. “So I wrote an email to the professor who put up the poster, saying I just served in Gaza for two years, I know a lot about it, I’ve seen from my firsthand experience. I’d like to talk to you about it. Not debate or try to convince you, just tell you what my experiences were. And he [replied], ‘I don’t talk to baby killers.’ That basically set the tone for the rest of my university experience.”
Shapiro, whose family made aliya from Canada when he was 10 years old, joined the Jewish Students Association at Laurentian and now, while working on his PhD, is president of the club. Over the years, he told the Independent, his club has had tremendous support from the Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA). In August, Shapiro was a guest speaker at the organization’s largest-ever campus advocacy conference.
While primarily an American organization, CAMERA has been a powerful resource whenever the Zionist students at Laurentian have called on them, Shapiro said.
“We started working with them four years ago,” he said. “We went to various U.S.-based organizations, as well as Canadian ones, and the most responsive one was CAMERA.”
CAMERA differs from other advocacy groups in that it focuses attention specifically on promoting more accurate, balanced and complete media coverage of Israel and the Middle East…
Click here to read Pat Johson’s full article in the Jewish Independent.
