September 4, 2017: It’s not a matter of changing history – it is acknowledging history

By Michael Regenstreif

The news recently has been filled with stories about groups and individuals who would take down monuments or change the names of buildings or institutions which honour historical figures who we now know are not quite as honourable as whoever did the naming may have thought.

Here in Ottawa, for example, the federal government recently changed the name of the Langevin Block building, the office building directly across Wellington Street from Parliament Hill which houses the Prime Minister’s Office. The building is now simply known as the Office of the Prime Minister and Privy Council. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took that action because Hector-Louis Langevin, for whom the building was named, was an architect of the residential school system that we now know was an instrument of cultural genocide against Canada’s Indigenous peoples.

In the southern United States there has been a movement to remove monuments honouring leaders of the Confederacy – the group of southern states who fought the American Civil War against the U.S. – their prime issue being the right to own slaves, other human beings, as property.

The issue of the Confederate monuments came to a head on August 12 and 13 when an ugly mob of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and KKK members went to Charlottesville, Virginia to march in defence of a statue of Robert E. Lee – the Confederate general whose surrender ended the Civil War – which the Charlottesville City Council had decided to take down.

(And while the Lee statue was the supposed raison d’être for the Charlottesville marches, the dominant rallying cry was the horrifyingly antisemitic chant, “You will not replace us/Jews will not replace us.”)

In the days and weeks after the events in Charlottesville – including the terrorist incident in which a white supremacist purposefully drove his car at high speed into a crowd of counter-demonstrators murdering Heather Heyer and injuring many others – U.S. President Donald Trump made common cause with the antisemitic and racist mob in his defence of the Confederate statues. “They’re trying to take away our culture. They’re trying to take away our history,” said Trump of those who would remove what are, essentially, monuments to the institution of slavery and to those who led a treasonous war against the United States.

In 2011, I wrote a column in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin arguing that the City of Ottawa should not name its new archives building in honour of Charlotte Whitton, the city’s first female mayor. Why? Because history tells us that the antisemitic Whitton was responsible for ensuring that 500 Jewish refugee orphans ended up in Auschwitz instead of Canada during the Holocaust – an episode documented by historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper in None is Too Many. Despite what they knew about Whitton in 2011, Mayor Jim Watson and most city councillors voted to name the building for her anyway. Thankfully, they eventually relented to pressure from the Jewish community and other groups and the building was not named for her.

Changing the names of buildings, streets, parks and institutions named for people responsible for tremendous wrongs, or whose legacies remain painful, or removing monuments to them, is not changing history – it is acknowledging history. And there remains much work to do in this regard. For example, just a two-minute walk from the Jewish community campus in Montreal is Isabella Avenue, which honours the queen who expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. That’s a street name that should be changed.

June 30, 2014: City Hall exhibit portrayed terrorists as ‘artists, activists, writers and leaders’

By Michael Regenstreif

By now, Invisible, the multi-media exhibit by Palestinian-Canadian artist Rehab Nazzal, has come and gone from the City of Ottawa’s Karsh-Masson Gallery at City Hall.

The exhibit was an installation that included a wall of photographs and several film clips, including one without sound and another that was just a soundtrack with no visuals other than subtitles, all meant to convey the artist’s interpretation of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation or of the brutality faced by Palestinians prisoners in a Negev prison during a military raid.

Most controversially, the exhibit also included “Target,” a slide show of quickly changing names and faces, which the exhibit brochure explains “are portraits of lost artists, activists, writers and leaders.”

While the whole exhibit could easily be interpreted as propaganda art meant to paint all Palestinians as innocent victims, it is the slide show that led Israeli Ambassador Rafael Barak to speak out, and for such organizations as the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs and the Canadian Coalition Against Terror (an alliance that includes a variety of Muslim, Christian, multicultural and other concerned organizations), as well as many individuals, including parliamentarians, to ask the City of Ottawa to remove the exhibit.

Looking at the slide show – I spent a morning at the gallery examining all facets of the exhibit – it seems obvious that Nazzal was portraying these so-called “artists, activists, writers and leaders” as innocent martyrs killed by Israel.

The fact of the matter is that these are portraits of people responsible for some of the most heinous acts of terrorism. Two of them, as Federation Chair Steven Kimmel and President and CEO Andrea Freedman pointed out in a letter published in the Ottawa Citizen on June 19, were Abu Iyad, the leader of Black September, who was responsible for several major terror operations, including the massacre at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich in which 11 Israeli athletes and a German police officer were murdered; and Dalal Mughrabi, who led the Coastal Road massacre in 1978 in which 38 people, including 13 children, were murdered.

Another, Khalid Nazzal, the artist’s brother, a leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was responsible for multiple acts of terrorism, most notoriously the Ma’alot massacre of 1974 in which 25 people, including 22 children, were killed and another 68 injured.

There are many other examples of terrorists who are memorialized in the slide show, too many to name here.

Mayor Jim Watson, in refusing to remove the exhibit from the City Hall gallery, cited the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and said “the artwork and the artist herself benefit from the Charter protection of freedom of expression,” and removing the exhibit “would constitute an infringement on the artist’s right to freedom of expression.”

However, as Kimmel and Freedman pointed out in their letter, the Charter clearly states that the rights and freedoms it delineates are subject to reasonable limits.

The City’s response to the controversy was to post a sign at the galley entrance explaining that its exhibits are “selected by an independent professional arts jury” and that “points of view or comments conveyed … do not represent those of the City of Ottawa.”

Now, while it is entirely appropriate that selections for public galleries be made by juries at arm’s length from government, I know, having sat on arts juries (specifically music juries, not visual arts), that such juries also operate within clearly defined guidelines. There are boundaries that should not be crossed and juries need to be aware of them and to act responsibly in their decisions.

And such boundaries have nothing to do with Charter freedoms.

Freedom of the press, for example, does not mean that anyone is free to say what they want in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin. It means that we have the freedom to set the boundaries of what gets said in our newspaper. Similarly, the City of Ottawa needs to set boundaries as to what may be exhibited in its gallery.