Lauren Isaacs of Heirut Canada fought to reinstate her YorkU student group after violent protests by Students Against Israeli Apartheid disrupted a pro-Israel event, requiring 40 police officers. Suspended alongside the protesters, Heirut faced accusations of extremism from fringe groups like Independent Jewish Voices, which equates Zionism with white supremacy. Isaacs blames campus "postmodernism" and "intersectionality" for silencing conservative Jewish voices, citing dietary restrictions and Israeli Apartheid Week as systemic bias. Defending Trump’s pro-Israel policies, they urge listeners to challenge anti-Semitic censorship through legal action and louder advocacy, framing resistance as essential to protecting free speech and Zionist identity on campuses. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm Sheila Gunread, and you're watching a free audio-only recording of my Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
My guest tonight is Lauren Isaacs of Heyroot Canada.
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A Jewish student group was on the receiving end of a riot, but York University banned the Jewish student group along with the rioters.
You won't believe this story.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
This speech on Canada's university campuses is under attack.
I don't think it's even the slightest bit controversial to say any of that.
In a story I very recently covered, the University of Ottawa Student Union retroactively rigged the rules to keep students for life from becoming an officially recognized campus group.
And the University of Alberta pro-life group has recently won a five-year-long legal battle with the school over mob tactics and censorship that they faced on campus.
But it's not just pro-lifers that are under attack.
There's another, what I would call a free speech canary in the coal mine, Jewish student groups.
Campus culture is overwhelmingly left-wing.
Again, that's not a controversial statement.
And the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against the state of Israel is fully integrated with far left-wing culture, which means that Jewish student groups are often targets of boycott, divestment, and sanctions.
Except it's their rights being boycotted and their ability to speak freely being sanctioned, often by the university and even sometimes with a riot, as my guest tonight will explain.
Joining me tonight to talk about her recent free speech victory for her Heyroot Canada campus club is York University student and freedom fighter Lauren Isaacs in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon.
Joining me now is Lauren Isaacs from Hayroot, Canada.
Lauren Isaacs is a university student at York University, and she's been embroiled in quite a bit of controversy, I guess, over the last three months.
Lauren, I know you're on your lunch break.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, first of all, because I think you're a fascinating young lady.
And also tell us about Heirut Canada and what you're trying to do within that organization.
Thank you.
It's great to be here.
So my name is Lauren Isaacs.
I'm the director of Heirut Canada, and I'm also a student at York University.
Heirut Canada is a Zionist organization.
We're an educational organization.
We teach about Israel and the Middle East, and we're a pro-Israel organization, obviously.
And we started a Herut club at the York University campus.
It's a mini version of Heirut Canada.
And since we started it, it has been controversial.
What does the word Heirut mean?
Heirut actually means freedom in Hebrew.
Isn't that great?
Now, yeah, you have been involved in some controversy.
I think it started at the end of November.
You tried to hold a campus event and mob violence broke out.
You were boycotted.
I mean, it was insane, like something we haven't seen on university campuses in Canada in a very long time.
It was the kind of thing you would see at Berkeley when a conservative tries to speak.
And that's what happened to you.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Right.
We brought four former Israeli soldiers to speak at York University.
We wanted them to speak about their experiences about BDS, about anti-Semitism, and engage in dialogue with the audience.
Now, they were former Israeli soldiers, not active duty.
And since conscription is mandatory in Israel, every Israeli civilian is a former soldier.
So really, we were just bringing four Israeli civilians to speak about their experiences on campus.
And that's when everything hit the fan and mobs and riots broke out.
There were huge protests to our event.
Beforehand, there were calls on Facebook and social media to boycott the event, to disrupt it completely, to have protests, to have Palestinian vigils outside our event, all these things.
And on the night of our event, they seriously disrupted us.
The protesters intimidated us.
We had to have 40 cops there just to keep the protesters outside of our room.
They banged on the walls all night, and it was quite something.
I've never seen that with my own eyes at a university.
I've never seen such rowdy, violent protests before.
Yeah, I mean, some of the images coming out of that were really, it was crazy.
It must have been very frightening for you.
Now, one of the groups that was involved in organizing against you was students against Israeli apartheid, which, you know, I almost said students for Israeli apartheid,
which is really the case because I've been to Israel and, you know, when you're there, the only people experiencing apartheid are the Israelis because there are places they can't go as opposed to what the world thinks the other way around where the Palestinians are where the Palestinians can't go places.
It's the other way around.
Now, you've actually, your group has been called the extremist faction within the right-wing Jewish movement, Jewish community.
I laugh every time I say that.
And that was said about you by independent Jewish voices.
So you see independent Jewish voices a lot and you think, oh, okay, well, they're Jewish voices.
They must speak for the Jewish community at large.
But really, they are the pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist Jewish fringe movement.
And they are equating you, I suppose, with white supremacy by saying that you're the extremist faction within the right-wing white Jewish community.
Exactly.
And it's crazy.
Obviously, the whole thing is counterintuitive.
Our group is pro-Israel.
We are pro-Jewish identity.
We believe one of the tenets of our organization is that Israel and Judaism are inalienable.
They're connected.
I myself, I'm an Orthodox Jewish girl.
So to be called a white supremacist or a Nazi or any of these crazy things, it's just absurd.
And it's just, people use these names in order to delegitimize our position.
They use them to label us as something that society will, you know, condemn.
And Independent Jewish Voices, that group, is not actually a Jewish voice in mainstream Jewish thought.
They do not speak for the Jewish community at large.
They are a fringe group with a small number of people who don't believe anything that mainstream Jews believe.
And yes, they are very anti-Israel.
They don't believe we should have a state or be allowed to have a country.
They side with the Palestinians and the terrorists who want to destroy us.
So no, we don't recognize them as a mainstream Jewish group, but we are called a lot of things.
We're called a lot of things.
Yeah.
Now, I wanted to talk to you about the aftermath of really that riot that happened at your event at York University.
Both your group, Hey Root Canada, and students against Israeli apartheid were suspended and stripped of your campus club status in the aftermath of the violence, really, that broke out there.
And you received some criticism because the Jewish Defense League showed up, as they tend to do when they hear about Jews that are being threatened with violence.
And some of the criticism is that the scuffles were induced by the JDL as opposed to the hundreds of violent protesters that showed up to shout everybody down.
And both your campus groups were suspended in the aftermath.
So can you address the criticism you've received because the JDL showed up and also the university suspending both of you, in particular your group, even though you guys were the victims of violent censorship?
Right.
So first of all, the university sends us a letter and says they're going to suspend us and they sent Sire, Asia, the same letter.
And this was disgusting.
This really was a show of blatant anti-Semitism on the university's behalf.
And why?
Why is it just anti-Semitic if both groups were suspended?
Well, because one group was clearly the victim and one was clearly the violent perpetrator.
And this is akin to punishing both the rape victim and her rapist after the fact.
It makes no sense.
It's immoral and unconscionable and horrifying.
We never did anything wrong.
We were provided with no information as to what we did wrong, never a single example of how we broke the student code of conduct or anything like that.
We know we didn't do anything wrong.
There's no evidence of wrongdoing and we followed all the rules very, very carefully.
They know we didn't do anything wrong and yet they suspended us anyway.
So that's why it's an extremely transparently anti-Semitic move.
With regard to the criticism of who showed up for which groups, first of all, I don't have any control over who shows up.
And our event was open to the whole community.
We invited everyone.
We wanted everyone to be there, both friends, supporters, and people who didn't support us to come hear what we had to say.
As for the JDL, we are grateful that members of their organization individually showed up because they protected us.
They really did.
And thank God, because if they hadn't been there and had the 40 policemen and security also not been there, it would have been a disaster because the rioters were very violent.
They were threatening.
They were trying to get into our room all night.
I don't know what would have happened if they hadn't been there.
So while people may complain that certain people were there, I say thank God they were there.
You know, I think a lot of people are complaining just because some Jewish people had the audacity to protect themselves.
Much like how they are critical of Israel for doing the same.
You know, they say, how dare they fire back after they've been pelted with rockets for days and days and days.
And I think it's the same attitude bleeding over into Jewish students trying to have a little bit of a talk on campus.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I wanted to ask you about how you ended up being reinstated because just last week, your group, as well as students against Israeli apartheid, were both reinstated by the university.
How did that happen?
So we have a fantastic legal team that has worked tirelessly to get us reinstated and to kind of hold the university accountable to their anti-Semitic nonsense.
And we were reinstated.
We had to go to some meetings with the university.
And still, even after the meetings, after we were reinstated, up until this moment in time, we still have not been provided a single reason why we were ever suspended in the first place.
But they reinstated us thanks to our lawyers.
And we basically said enough is enough.
Our amazing legal team said, if you don't reinstate us today, which was last week, we said we're going to take further action against the school.
And we were prepared to do that.
We still are.
And they reinstated us.
Now, it's successful in that we've been reinstated.
And now we have free speech like everyone else on campus.
But it's a fight that we never should have had to have in the first place.
We never should have been silenced or discriminated against.
So it was 10 steps back to make one step forward.
We're happy, but we're not going to forget the anti-Semitism and the anti-free speech policies that are very alive and well at the university.
Well, and what would have happened to you if you didn't have legal help?
Like, yes, you did have a lawyer who stepped up to help you.
But if you were, you know, a smaller Heirut branch, let's say in Winnipeg or at the U of A here in Alberta, who knows what would have happened?
Because you at least had the ways and means to do something about this and fight back against the university.
But again, like you say, you never should have had to.
I think they probably underestimated you, is what I think happened here.
I think they're ruined the day that they accepted me as a student to the university.
But no, that's a good point.
We, thank God, have a great community here and a great legal team.
And yes, they've come up against me.
Exposing Controversial Ideas00:10:03
And I have a little bit of a Jewish chutzpah, as we say.
I don't like to let things go.
But for years and years and years, the university has been running over Jewish and pro-Israel and free speech students.
And they've been silencing them and sweeping their complaints under the rug.
And they've been successful at bulldozing over so many students.
But we finally said, no, no more.
It's unacceptable.
We have a right to speak like everyone else.
And they're not going to get away with their stuff without us, you know, being loud about it, publicizing their wrongdoings.
And we will continue to do that.
You know, I think that's a really great point.
You're not asking for special treatment.
You're just asking to be treated the same as everybody else.
As the same as some of the other controversial groups, like things that would be controversial outside of the university.
I think normal people think, yeah, Israel has a right to exist, but on inside the bubble of a university campus, the prevailing attitude is that Israel is an illegitimate state and the Jews, the indigenous people of Israel, don't have a right to be there.
It's very bizarre.
What do you think is causing that?
I agree.
It's insane.
It's almost that universities are now counterintuitive.
They should be the place where exchange of ideas and academic intelligent thought is expressed.
Now it's the opposite.
You get more of that outside, but within university walls, you don't really get to discuss ideas anymore or anything outside of a one specific narrow, one-minded train of thought.
I think in the culture of postmodernism and progressivism and intersectionality and political correctness, I think, well, when it comes to intersectionality, the Jews fall on the bottom of the totem pole, right?
But I think that's true with Israel and with conservative thought as well.
And we're seeing that a lot in the universities.
Groups are being silenced just because they don't have a necessarily leftist progressive idea.
And as you say, it's funny because some stuff that goes on in the university wouldn't even be allowed to go on in greater society.
You know, the Students Against Israeli Apartheid Club, which is recidivistic, they're repeat offenders.
They've been banned several times before.
They're not actually a pro-Palestinian group.
They're just an anti-Israel group, which is funny.
We're not anti-anyone.
We're pro-Israel, right?
So the stuff that goes on in universities nowadays is almost like we've moved back in time to a much more oppressive, dark age where thoughts and ideas are silenced and we can't speak.
And it's almost like, you know, we're cave people again in universities.
It's crazy.
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
As you're saying that, it occurred to me that these progressive left-wing students who everyone is literally Hitler, if you ask them, they're the ones that share Hitler's view on the Jews in the state of Israel.
So it's very peculiar.
And I think you and I were talking the first time we tried to record this.
And that for me, I think pro-life students and pro-Israel students are really the canaries in the coal mine of free speech on campus.
Those two groups are routinely subject to having the rules changed on them retroactively, to have motions passed against them by the students union, yet your mandatory dues are extracted from you only so that your campus club can be banned.
So, I mean, they can't really have it both ways.
They can't take your mandatory dues from you and then not allow you to have a campus club.
It's got to be one or the other.
Exactly.
And they do try to have it both ways.
They try to have it always as long as it's their way.
So this is, we're not playing on an even playing field.
We're facing an uphill battle.
And we have been from the get-go.
But we'll continue to fight for Israel and for free speech.
And it doesn't even matter what we're fighting for.
We continue to fight for the right to fight for our rights.
You know, that's a great, that's a great way to put it.
Now, I wanted to ask you about some of the other things that Jewish students on campus have to face all the time.
I mean, Israeli apartheid week on campus is so normalized that you almost forget it's happening every single year.
And, you know, the anti-Semites on campus have become so emboldened that they are making steps so that Jewish students can't access their dietary needs.
And this would not happen to any other religious group.
Yeah, no.
God forbid it would happen to another group.
But because it's happening to Jews, it's fair game.
And we've been dealing with this for a long time.
And as you mentioned, Israeli apartheid week at York University, it's more like Israel apartheid month.
Their events just seem to go on and on and on.
And yes, again, it's an anti, it's a hateful, it's an anti-Semitic series of events.
There's no, you know, pro-Palestinians celebrating any, it's not celebrating their culture, it's disavowing other people of their culture.
So it's a very hateful, it's a hate fest that goes on every year, and it's normalized.
People accept it.
And I don't know what the outcry would be if someone tried to have, you know, Islamic Terrorist Week.
I mean, just think the world would implode if we tried to make that a week on university campuses.
So it's very one-sided.
And we've been facing this for years.
And unfortunately, I think we'll continue to face it for a long time.
So that leads me to my next question.
How do you change that culture?
How do you change that culture that seems so different from mainstream Canada everywhere else?
How do you change what's going on on university campuses?
Because I think if it continues, it's going to change the outside culture because these people are just going to be barfed out into society.
They're so often arts and education students.
So they are going to have an influence on the hearts and minds of young people.
And whether they want to admit it or not, they are going to bring that ideology into the classroom.
So how do we change what's going on in campus to save the rest of us?
I think we just need to keep exposing people to different ideas.
Whether they like it or not, no matter how much they try to silence us, we can't go away.
We can't be bullied.
We can't be silenced.
We will continue to wave the Israeli flag everywhere we go.
We will continue to state unequivocally that we are Zionist and try and engage people in dialogue, whether they want to or not.
We will continue to challenge the students on campus and the administration themselves for their anti-Semitic actions.
We can't go away.
That's what they want.
They want to silence us, and therefore their ideologies can prevail because there's no counter-ideologies.
We need to be loud and proud on and off campus and continue to do what's right.
We're on the right side of history and we just have to stick to our guns and be proud of ourselves.
Yeah, I don't think you're going to have any problem with that.
Lauren, I wanted to ask you, because it's 2020, it's election year in the United States, I want to ask you about Donald Trump because he gets called, again, literally Hitler, or that he's a white supremacist or a Nazi or whatever.
But I don't think that there has, and I'm going to say, I'm going to include Ronald Reagan in this.
I don't think there's been ever a more pro-Israel president.
He's moved the embassy.
His daughter is an Orthodox Jew.
And he's now targeting anti-Semitism and Israeli boycotts on campus.
What do you have to say about the criticism that President Trump gets leveled all the time from the left and in particular on university campuses for being this alleged anti-Semitic mastermind?
Where's the disconnect here?
Because I think he's the worst Nazi ever.
He's not good at this.
I agree with you.
He's the worst anti-Semite ever.
He just doesn't get the concept.
He does way too many pro-Jewish things.
And yeah, you know, and Jews around the world do recognize that.
Whether you agree with his policies or not, it doesn't change the fact that, you know, they name streets and towns after Trump in Israel because he has been amazing, an amazing friend to Israel.
And yeah, when he gets called, you know, a Nazi or whatever, it's just cognitive dissonance at play.
It's just absolute delusion.
And people generally nowadays hate Trump.
And we can see this through the media and how they spin every story.
Even when he does something positive, he's labeled as a racist or a homophobe or an Islamophobe or something.
You know, so anything he does, people are going to find a reason to hate him.
And whether you agree with him or not, it doesn't matter.
There's facts and there's fiction.
And the facts are he's been great to Israel and he's done some amazing things for the Jewish people and our country's relationship, America and Israel, the allyship between them.
He's done amazing things.
So to call him a Nazi is just crazy.
It's ridiculous.
It's, you know, to call Martin Luther King Jr. a KKK member.
It just doesn't make any sense.
You know, it's funny because I would say that a lot of the criticism of Donald Trump as some sort of white supremac, anti-Jewish monster often comes from the kind of people who would never own a soda stream because the company is Israeli and they just can't put the two together.
Reach Out Directly00:02:29
Lauren, you've been so generous with your time today.
I wanted to give you a chance to let people know where they can find you and how can they find out about some of the work that you're doing on campus?
Because you said you're planning other things.
You're not backing down.
I'm sure our people would love to support you.
So how do they do that?
Great.
Thank you.
So I'm available.
People can find me from Herut Canada, the Heirut North America website.
If you Google Lauren Isaacs, my email readily pops up.
You can contact me directly.
And I want people to get involved.
I want them to join Herut, become members, look into us, see what we do, you know, be supportive.
We're looking for votes right now for the World Zionist Congress.
Go ahead and vote for Herut.
But really reach out.
We'd love to hear from you any way they would like to get involved.
And they can write to me directly and I will answer them.
We can tell them how to be proud Zionists, how to fight for free speech, how to open up Herut chapters on their own campuses.
We'd love to hear from you.
So just keep doing what you're doing.
Be loud and proud.
Don't buckle to the pressures of the universities right now.
And I'd love to hear from everyone.
So if people reach out, I'll be ecstatic to hear from them.
RIP your email inbox because you're going to get inundated.
Lauren, I want to thank you so much.
And I'd love to have you on the show again.
Maybe before you plan something so that you can announce it here and probably after when you get boycotted.
I hope that's okay.
Sure.
I'd love to.
Great.
Thank you so much, Lauren.
Have a great day.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Lauren has exactly the right idea.
When someone tries to censor you, guess what?
That's when you talk louder.
And she's got a great strategy that has worked for us.
When people try to censor you, lawyer up if you can, because the censors know their feelings about what you're saying are not going to hold up in any sort of legal proceedings.
I think these people at York University have made a big mistake.
If they didn't want any more Lauren Isaacs, picking a fight with her is exactly how you get more Lauren Isaacs.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time in the same place next week.