Rex Murphy: The woke rot at the heart of Canada's largest school board
Political correctness is toxic; wokeism is an insult to reason. Both seem to have found a home in the Toronto District School Board
Nov 29, 2021
Marie Henein, left, and Nadia Murad. PHOTO BY DAVE ABEL/TORONTO SUN/POSTMEDIA NETWORK; TASOS KATOPODIS/GETTY IMAGES
Sometimes a public backlash is exactly what’s needed to kick some common sense into our increasingly woke school boards.
Such is the case with the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB) insane decisions not to allow students to attend book club events featuring Marie Henein, an outstanding criminal lawyer the board took issue with because of who she chose to defend, and Nadia Murad, a Nobel Prize-winning woman who had been a victim of ISIL, endured torments too ugly to speak, but managed to escape and now champions young women the world over.
The backlash against these determinedly witless and frankly insulting decisions pushed the board into damage control. It was all a “misunderstanding.” Of course kids can read Henein’s book, and Murad will get a chance to speak to students in February.
But it was not a misunderstanding. It was as predictable as the motion of the planets. In the TDSB thought-world, and its dread equity franchise, banning these exceptional women followed as night inevitably trails day — or an outrageously silly pronouncement precedes a feeble, tone-deaf half-apology.
But it does raise a couple of questions. Such as: how could any functioning educational institution reach the conclusion that allowing an articulate, accomplished lawyer to speak to young students would send the wrong message? Or: why did some TDSB bureaucrat think she had the right to bar such a person from speaking in front of a book club?
Similarly, the determination to strike off from Murad, to protect eager young minds from the biographic rendering of this young women’s horrific experiences, was so wrong, so craven, so stupid and so retrogressive, as to leave one gasping.
Murad was a torture victim, a rape slave, whose family was killed by ISIL. Her life story is a dark window into the harrowing cruelties, the unthinkable physical and mental violence that girls, in the desperate regions of this vile world, suffer from sadistic fanatics, of which ISIL is the nightmare incarnation.
It should be considered a privilege and an honour to hear from a young woman who bore unspeakable torments, saw family killed, yet, with an endurance and personal strength beyond all belief, went on to become a Nobel-winning human rights advocate.
Any ordinary person, male or female, who endured what she endured would most likely end up in a dark room weeping till the end of that person’s days. Murad came out of the inferno to offer an example to all young women, and to challenge the indifference of the nations of the world to the wicked persecution of her fellow nationals. She deserves two Nobel prizes and is worth 50 wailing Greta Thunbergs.
Yet some functionary at the Toronto District School Board, vibrating with the right pseudo-thoughts and embedded in woke sensitivities, decided it was improper to expose young readers to what she has to say. How do so many overpaid people get so silly, or is it necessary to be so silly to get hired by the TDSB?
These two case studies are not isolated incidents. They are an index of a kind of insanity, a symptom of ideas so far off the beam of truth and reality, of attitudes both corrupt and shallow, that steep some of the most crucial structures of our society. The elite institutions of the West have bedded down in the cave of nonsense, smashed the lights of rational thought and taken the knee to a third-rate ideology.
It is not enough for the TDSB to talk glibly about a “misunderstanding.” What we need to hear from the great minds of the TDSB is how the pernicious mentality these cases have exposed has situated itself within the board, and how those with such an abridged understanding of life have so high a place in its deliberations. Explain yourselves.
There is such a thing as occasionally being wrong, but this wasn’t merely wrong — this was a vivid illustration of an entire mentality, an ethos that pervades the whole board, and that is far more worrisome than the particular incidents that revealed it.
Political correctness is toxic; wokeism is an insult to reason. Both seem to have found a home in Canada’s largest school board.
National Post
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