October 19, 2009: Interfaith dialogue – Building bridges between our communities

By Michael Regenstreif

Last month, I attended a lecture and panel discussion at Library and Archives Canada that featured Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within and Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.

It was a disturbing, thought-provoking evening.

Bawer is an influential gay American author and cultural critic who left the United States in 1998 because of the increasing influence of fundamentalist Christianity on the public discourse in that country. But, in moving to Europe – he now lives in Norway – he says he found an even more insidious brand of fundamentalism there in the form of radical Islam, which has misappropriated multiculturalism and used it to stifle western liberalism and openness. Bawer warned that the influence of radical Islam has also been growing here in North America in recent years.

Bawer pointed out that the stifling of western liberalism is being accomplished in various ways from overt terrorism and violence – for example, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh after he made a short documentary, Submission, detailing the abuse of Muslim women – to abusing human rights tribunals. Recent examples of that in Canada have included complaints against Ezra Levant at the Alberta Human Rights Commission for publishing the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad, and against columnist Mark Steyn and Maclean’s magazine at the Ontario Human Rights Commission for Steyn’s article, ‘The Future Belongs to Islam.’

Bawer also pointed to the new book, The Cartoons That Shook the World by Jytte Klausen, about the Danish cartoons controversy, mentioning that the publisher, Yale University Press, was intimidated into removing the cartoons from the book, thus depriving readers of actually seeing what the book was talking about.

Brigitte Gabriel – an Arab Christian who grew up in Lebanon and is now an American – is another speaker with a message similar to Bawer’s. As noted in the article on page 4 of this issue of the Bulletin, Gabriel will be in Ottawa on November 5 as keynote speaker at this year’s Choices event presented by the Federation’s Women’s Division.

But, while the threats from radical Islam that Bawer and Gabriel warn us about are real, and we must remain vigilant against them, we must not lose sight of the fact that extremists do not represent the Muslim mainstream and that there are people and organizations dedicated to building bridges between our communities.

Two such people from Jerusalem, Rabbi Ron Kronish and Mohamad Sibdeh, a kadi (Sharia court judge), will be in Ottawa on Sunday, October 25 to talk about how Muslims and Jews, as communities and individuals, can, and do, talk and work together. As noted in the articles on page 13, there will be Rabbi & Kadi events in the morning at Temple Israel and in the evening at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre.

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Last month, I wrote about the tiff at TIFF – the Toronto International Film Festival – over the selection of Tel Aviv as this year’s featured city in its new City to City program spotlighting the cinema of a different international city each year. A group led by John Greyson and Naomi Klein protested the selection of Tel Aviv with a declaration painting Israel as a brutal, repressive apartheid regime.

A number of major film artists lined up behind the protesters and a number of others lined up in support of Tel Aviv.

Surprisingly, given her long record of pro-Palestinian activism, one of the major film artists supporting Tel Aviv is Vanessa Redgrave. In a letter she co-authored for publication in the October 22 issue of The New York Review of Books, Redgrave opposes the TIFF protest saying the “citizens of Tel Aviv and their organizations and their cultural outlets should be applauded and encouraged.”

Redgrave and co-authors Julian Schnabel and Martin Sherman, all noted leftists, slam the protesters for referring to Israel as an apartheid regime. “We oppose the current Israeli government,” they write, “but it is a government. Freely elected. Not a regime. Words matter.”

Redgrave further parts company with leftists like Klein who seek to delegitimize Israel. “If attitudes are hardened on both sides, if those who are fighting within their own communities for peace are insulted, where then is the hope? The point finally is not to grandstand but to inch toward a two-state solution and a world in which both nations can exist, perhaps not lovingly, but at least in peace.”

The same crowd that protested Tel Aviv at TIFF also tried to intimidate the masterful singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen into cancelling his September 24 concert in Tel Aviv. Cohen, whose grandfather, Lyon Cohen, was the founding president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, stood up to the negativity of the anti-Israel boycotters and turned his concert into a benefit that raised $2 million for groups promoting peace and dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians.