February 9, 2015: It’s time for the media to refer to terrorists as terrorists

By Michael Regenstreif

For years, I’ve been bothered whenever I’ve seen mainstream media reporters or anchors use the word “militant” rather than “terrorist.” Boko Haram can massacre thousands of innocent civilians in a single day in Nigeria and be described as a “militant” group on The National because CBC policy apparently forbids using the word “terrorist.”

Canada is a bilingual country and, with our leaders often switching back and forth between French and English, it’s not unusual to hear them use words from one language while speaking the other – particularly when they are speaking their second language.

Case in point is the word “militant.” While an anglophone might understand that it has become a media code word for “terrorist,” to a francophone, a militant is simply an activist. It’s common to hear Quebec politicians – at the federal, provincial and municipal levels – whether speaking in French or in English, describe their party activists as “militants,” or to hear references to “union militants” or “environmental militants.” And, in a country where many francophones work in English-language media, I’ve heard organizations like Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada referred to as “a militant group.”

Yes, in Canada, you can hear the same word used to describe both mass murderers and doctors who want to prevent the many thousands of deaths per year in this country that result from tobacco use.

I’m writing this on January 30, just as this issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin is about to go to press. Earlier today, as I drank my morning coffee, I read an article, “The language of terrorism,” by Dylan Robertson in the Ottawa Citizen, which discussed how politicians and other policy-makers use terms such as “jihad,” “Islamist” and “war” to manipulate debate around terrorism policy.

In the article, Robertson – a young journalist on a year-long fellowship that has him assigned to the Citizen’s parliamentary bureau for six months before moving on to the Calgary Herald for another six months – offered a description of what Hamas is all about.

“Hamas is a powerful Palestinian political party with a militant wing that Canada and other countries deem a terrorist group,” he explained.

It sounds so benign to see Hamas described as “a political party with a militant wing.”

But it’s not benign at all, and it bothers me to see the same word used to describe a Hamas suicide bomber out to kill as many children on as possible on a school bus in Israel and an NDP campaigner knocking on doors in Outremont trying to get Tom Mulcair re-elected.

To be clear, Hamas – which seized control of Gaza in 2007 in what was essentially a Palestinian civil war with Fatah – is, despite the vagueness of the Citizen article, a terrorist organization and has long been recognized as such by Canada.

And it was not Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government that designated Hamas a terrorist organization. It was then-prime minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government back in 2002 – five years before Hamas seized power in Gaza – which made that designation.

Hamas is not about electoral politics. It is about suicide bombings, kidnappings and seemingly endless rocket barrages aimed at civilian communities. It’s not a political party. It’s a terrorist organization whose covenant calls for an Islamic state encompassing all of Gaza, the West Bank and Israel. It’s a terrorist organization whose covenant both denies the Holocaust and advocates genocide against Jews.

Words matter, and in these times, when terrorist attacks – whether against children in Sderot; cartoonists, Jews and police in Paris; villagers in Nigeria; stockbrokers and firemen in New York City; or whomever wherever – have become much too commonplace, it is time for the mainstream media to start referring to terrorists as terrorists.

April 21, 2008: Rabin and Peres – Bitter rivals who shared a dream

By Michael Regenstreif

On April 10, I was at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre’s screening of Rabin-Peres: Everything is Personal, a fascinating documentary film that examines the lifelong, often bitter, rivalry between two great Israeli leaders: Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated while prime minister in 1995, and Shimon Peres, also a former prime minister, who is now Israel’s president.

Rabin, born in 1922, was a sabra. He grew up in Tel Aviv, attended the Kadoori Agricultural High School and joined the Palmach in 1941. By 1947, Rabin was chief operations officer. He was in charge of army operations in Jerusalem in the 1948 War of Independence.

By 1964, Rabin was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). It was under his command that Israel achieved what was probably its greatest military victory by swiftly winning the Six Day War in 1967.

In 1968, Rabin began his post-IDF career as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. He was first elected to the Knesset in 1973 and became minister of labour. In 1974, he became leader of the Alignment Party and succeeded Golda Meir as prime minister.

Peres was born in Poland in 1923 as Szymon Perski. His family immigrated to Palestine when he was nine. A kibbutz leader, Peres joined the Haganah in 1947 and was given the responsibility, by David Ben-Gurion, for arms purchases and personnel. By 1953, he was director-general of the Ministry of Defense.

Peres was first elected to the Knesset in 1959 and held a number of cabinet positions. Eventually, Peres became leader of Alignment after Rabin stepped down in the wake of a currency scandal in 1977. Peres lost the 1977 election to Menachem Begin and Likud.

Rabin, the military hero, was Israel’s native-born, fair-haired boy. In comparison, Peres, the bureaucrat, was an outsider, a newcomer with a Polish accent. And even though Peres performed vital functions in Israel’s defence, he was never seen as the war hero Rabin was.

Rabin and Peres were rivals in the Alignment and Labor parties. Both served when the other was prime minister and they were in the cabinet, and they faced off against each other in several leadership campaigns marked by personal bitterness toward the other.

Only in a robust democracy would you see such a personal rivalry within the same political party among competing personalities with similar goals for their country. Watching the film, I was reminded of some other bitter intraparty rivalries, some of which also lasted for years. Perhaps the most obvious example from recent Canadian politics was the long rivalry between former Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.

South of the border, we’re currently witnessing what has turned into a very bitter battle for the Democratic Party presidential nomination between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, two politicians whose platforms and points of view on almost all issues – including their support for Israel – are remarkably similar.

Like the long rivalries between Rabin and Peres, and Chrétien and Martin, the Clinton-Obama fight is mostly about differing personalities and personal egos rather than differing visions for their society.

Despite their personal enmity, Rabin and Peres were on the same side and shared the vision of Israel at peace with the Palestinians. When Rabin was assassinated – not by an Arab terrorist, but by Yigal Amir, a right-wing, religious Jew out to destroy the peace process they had worked so hard to further – you could see in the film that Peres, too, was figuratively shattered by Amir’s bullet.

Rabin, one of Israel’s greatest warriors, did not lose his life on the battlefield fighting an enemy. He was murdered by one of his own people, one of our own people, who did not share the dream of peace that we all should be reminded of every time we say, or hear, the word shalom.

Hopefully, that dream, shared by Rabin and Peres, by the residents of Sderot who visited us in Ottawa recently, and by so many others, will sooner than later become a reality.