September 21, 2009: The tiff over Tel Aviv at the Toronto International Film Festival

By Michael Regenstreif

This column was written just as the 34th annual Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), scheduled for September 10 to 19, was getting underway. One of the world’s premiere film festivals, TIFF introduced a new series this year, City to City, with a goal of showcasing and celebrating a vital filmmaking scene in a different international city each year.

Given its success as a filmmaking centre, its vibrant and diverse cosmopolitan nature, and the fact that it is now celebrating its centennial year, Tel Aviv was chosen to be the first locale to fall under TIFF’s City to City spotlight and 10 movies made in Tel Aviv were scheduled to be shown during the festival. Reading their descriptions, they all sound interesting. I hope that I get to see them sometime.

Of course, when it comes to anything to do with Israel in a public forum, there just has to be some sort of invented controversy.

On August 27, John Greyson, a well-known director of gay-themed films and a professor of film studies at York University in Toronto, wrote to the TIFF program directors to announce he was withdrawing his documentary short, Covered, from the festival in protest over the choice of Tel Aviv for TIFF’s City to City spotlight.

In his letter, Greyson quoted author Naomi Klein describing Tel Aviv as “a kind of alter-Gaza, the smiling face of Israeli apartheid” and said that celebrating Tel Aviv in 2009 was “akin to celebrating Montgomery buses in 1963, California grapes in 1969, Chilean wines in 1973, Nestlés infant formula in 1984, or South African fruit in 1991.”

Greyson demanded to know why all of the Tel Aviv films were made by Israeli Jews.

“Why are there no voices from the refugee camps and Gaza (or Toronto for that matter), where Tel Aviv’s displaced Palestinians now live?” he asked.

By now, you too may be scratching your head wondering how Greyson knows about Palestinian refugees displaced from Tel Aviv who now live in Gaza and Toronto when Tel Aviv was built on what were empty sand dunes a century ago.

Greyson is a leader of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QAIA), and Covered, the film he pulled from the festival, is about homophobic violence aimed at a gay film festival in Sarajevo.

The whole concept of “queers against Israeli apartheid” strikes me as very strange considering that Israel is the only country in the Middle East in which LGBTQ persons can live openly and freely out of the closet, while Israel is almost certainly the only country in the Middle East in which Greyson could show a film like Covered. There are no gay film festivals in Hamas’ Gaza. But there are in Tel Aviv.

Ironically, one of the Tel Aviv films that Greyson is protesting is The Bubble, a 2006 movie in Hebrew and Arabic about a gay love relationship between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab.

Greyson and an ad hoc committee of likeminded anti-Israel activists, including Naomi Klein, who emerged as their spokesperson in the Globe and Mail and on her blog, published a document called Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation denouncing the TIFF spotlight on Tel Aviv – as if Tel Aviv was under occupation – in which they essentially repeat the same accusations in Greyson’s letter withdrawing his film.

Last issue in this space, I talked about how attempts to suppress the offensive Israel Apartheid Week poster or the keeping of the offensive, fringe British MP George Galloway out of Canada resulted in the exposure of the poster and Galloway to many times more people than there would otherwise have been.

Writing this column just before the film festival’s opening night, I’ll predict that all of the publicity generated by Greyson, Klein and company will only have served to assure full houses of moviegoers for the 10 films from Tel Aviv.

September 7, 2009: The Bulletin – Ottawa’s source for Jewish news and lively columns

By Michael Regenstreif

Shana Tova!

Although Erev Rosh Hashanah falls 11 days after the September 7 publication date for this issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin, this is our community-wide Rosh Hashanah edition of the newspaper.

As the final issue for the Jewish year 5769, we have articles that look back at some of the major news stories in our community, and in Israel. We also have our usual array of news stories, articles from community organizations and agencies about their activities, many centring around the upcoming High Holidays, features on interesting people in the community and lively columns covering a gamut of beats from Canadian politics to world affairs, values and ethical issues, book and music reviews, food and humour.

Two new monthly columns we’ve introduced recently are Did You Know?, in which Benita Baker covers notable achievements, milestones and comings and goings of people in the community, and World Affairs, Oliver Javanpour’s informed critiques of issues on the world stage.

I mentioned this is a “community-wide” issue of the Bulletin. We do two – sometimes three – community-wide issues each year, which are distributed to many more people than the rest of our 19 issues per year. If you’re not one of our regular subscribers, I hope you’ll become one. The Ottawa Jewish Bulletin is the best way to keep up with what’s going on in Ottawa’s vibrant Jewish community.

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Like any newspaper, we strive to stay as current as possible with our content. However, we’re not a daily and need to work with deadlines that are many days ahead of publication; so, occasionally, developing stories change between deadline day and publication. For example, the Israel year in review article that appears on pages 1 and 2 notes that “as the Jewish year drew to a close, there was still no sign of reaching the freeze-for-normalization deal the Americans were seeking as a prelude to serious peacemaking.”

That article, which has, or will, run in many Jewish newspapers around the world, was prepared by JTA, the Jewish news wire service, in early-August. Since then, there have been indications from the Netanyahu government in Jerusalem and the Obama administration in the United States that such a deal may be in the offing. There have even been a couple of signs from the Palestinian Authority that they understand and accept that their road to peace and statehood lies in negotiation and responsible governance.

So, it’s possible that, by the time you read this, or perhaps sometime soon after, some sort of preliminary agreement leading to serious peacemaking will be announced. It would, should it come to pass, be most welcome news.

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Another JTA article, on page 14, analyzes the controversy that erupted after a Swedish newspaper published a pair of totally unsubstantiated and seemingly ridiculous articles claiming Israel returns the bodies of dead Palestinians to their families after harvesting them for body parts.

With absolutely no substantiation, the Swedish newspaper editor should have consigned the articles to the waste basket under his or her desk. But, as explained in the JTA analysis, the reactions of certain Israeli and Swedish politicians have turned what could have been an easy refutation – if, indeed, such absurdity even merits refuting – into an issue of free speech and freedom of the press.

That reminds me of several incidents that unfolded here over the past year. In February, the administrations at both Carleton University and the University of Ottawa banned an offensive Israel Apartheid Week poster that directly suggested Israel targeted Palestinian children during the war in Gaza.

Had the posters not been banned, they would have been seen by few people beyond the campuses. Instead, the banning of the posters became the story and virtually everyone who reads mainstream newspapers or watches television news saw them. And it gave anti-Israel activists yet another platform as they press a free speech complaint forward at the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

Similarly, when the Canadian government denied fringe British MP (and Iranian regime propagandist) George Galloway entry into Canada for four speaking engagements that would have played to, maybe, a couple of thousand people in total, they gave Galloway a platform to spout his views on every newscast and interview program in the country. Instead of a few thousand of his fellow travellers, Galloway was seen and heard by millions.

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Again, Shana Tova from all of us at the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin. May this New Year be one of peace, health and prosperity for all.

August 17, 2009: The Diab affair at Carleton should never have happened

By Michael Regenstreif

It was a shocking act of terrorism, almost three decades ago in Paris, when a powerful bomb, hidden in motorcycle saddlebags, was detonated, allegedly by the Special Operations cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in front of the Rue Copernic Synagogue.

Four people – three French men and one Israeli woman – were killed and about 40 others were injured. It was Erev Simchat Torah and the toll would almost surely have been much worse had the explosion come a few minutes later as congregants exited the shul after services.

Ottawans were shocked last November, when Hassan Diab, a part-time sociology professor at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University, and a dual Lebanese and Canadian citizen, was arrested by the RCMP, accused by French authorities of perpetrating the heinous act.

Diab – who proclaims his innocence – was jailed until bail was granted under strict conditions in late-March. In January, he will face an extradition hearing to determine if he’ll have to return to France to face trial.

No one expected to hear much about Diab until the extradition hearing. But, then, late last month, news broke that Carleton’s department of sociology and anthropology had hired Diab to teach introductory sociology to summer students beginning July 28.

The university should have anticipated the controversy that would result from hiring an alleged terrorist. As the Ottawa Citizen said in an editorial published July 31, “If he stood accused of sexual harassment you can bet no sociology department would ever have anything to do with him, but trying to kill Jews? Hey, it was a long time ago.”

Diab spent one day in the classroom before Carleton cancelled his contract and replaced him with another professor.

Just as predictable as the controversy of hiring Diab was the reaction of some of his colleagues to his firing. Thirty members of Carleton’s department of sociology and anthropology signed an op-ed piece in the Citizen demanding his reinstatement, painting his dismissal as post-9/11 injustice and discrimination.

The French case is strong enough that Canadian authorities arrested Diab, jailed him for several months pending a bail hearing, then released him under the very strict bail conditions until the extradition hearing, which was determined to be justified.

Diab has not been convicted of the crimes to which he stands accused and must be regarded as innocent until proven guilty. And, if he’s cleared of the charges, they should not be held against him. But that doesn’t mean he should be teaching first year undergrads – or PhD students for that matter – while standing accused of terrorism and multiple murders.

Intro to sociology is a course that can be taught by any sociology faculty member, and probably by most grad students in the department. Carleton did not owe this course to Diab. This entire episode, so predictable from start to finish, should not have happened.

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Twice since I’ve been at the Bulletin, I’ve done interviews with highly placed Israelis who spoke about the openness of Israeli society to its gay and lesbian community, of how Israel was unique among all Middle Eastern countries in this regard.

When I interviewed then-ambassador Alan Baker in April last year for our special Israel @ 60 supplement, he talked about that Israeli openness and pointed out that there were even Palestinian gays and lesbians who have sought asylum in Israel from the discrimination they faced in their own society.

Earlier this summer, retired-Admiral Abraham Ben-Shoshan, who now heads the Tel Aviv Foundation, visited the Bulletin office to talk about the city of Tel Aviv and the foundation. Ben-Shoshan mentioned the city’s live-and-let-live attitude, its openness to gay culture and such events as its very popular gay pride parade.

Sadly, that live-and-let-live attitude was put to the test early this month when a disguised gunman in Tel Aviv entered a community centre support group meeting for gay teenagers and sprayed the room with machine gun fire murdering two people and wounding five others.

Israelis were shocked by what is widely believed to be a hate-crime. To his credit, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was unequivocal in his statement that it was a “terrorist act,” that he rejected such “gratuitous hatred” and that the gay community in Israel had special needs that should be met with openness and sensitivity.