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.

May 26, 2014: Fascinating results from a survey of global antisemitism

By Michael Regenstreif

On May 13, the New York-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a comprehensive survey of antisemitism in more than 100 countries and territories around the world.

The ADL survey was based on a reading of 11 classic stereotypes about Jews: Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the country they live in; Jews have too much power in the business world; Jews have too much power in international financial markets; Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust; Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind; Jews have too much control over global affairs; Jews have too much control over the United States government; Jews think they are better than other people; Jews have too much control over the global media; Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars; and people hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.

Someone answering yes to six or more of the stereotypes was deemed to be antisemitic.

The results are fascinating, both in the global scope and in region-by-region, country-by-country, and even by age and religious demographic breakdowns.

Around the world, 26 per cent of adults were deemed to be antisemitic. Unsurprisingly, the highest regional rate was in the Middle East and North Africa where 74 per cent of the population was found to be antisemitic. The lowest regional rate was 14 per cent in Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, etc.).

The Americas had a regional rate of 19 per cent. Western Europe was at 24 per cent, while Eastern Europe was 34 per cent. Asia was 22 per cent, while sub-Saharan Africa was at 23 per cent (in sharp contrast to North Africa).

Sadly, but not surprisingly, the highest rate of antisemitism in the world, 93 per cent, was found among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Rates were high in all of the Arab countries, even in Jordan (81 per cent) and Egypt (75 per cent), where rates of antisemitism did not seem to have been much affected by peace treaties with Israel, and in Morocco (80 per cent), which had a historically important Jewish community and where several thousand Jews still live. In fact, the Moroccan rate was higher than in Lebanon (78 per cent) and Saudi Arabia (74 per cent).

Perhaps the most surprising result in the Middle East and North Africa was that Iran, at 56 per cent, had the lowest rate of antisemitism in that part of the world. Despite all of the deeply antisemitic and anti-Zionist propaganda – including Holocaust denial – of Iran’s Islamist government in recent years, nearly half of the people there are not antisemitic according to the ADL standard.

Things are generally less bleak in the Western world. In the United States, which has the biggest population of Jews in the Diaspora, only nine per cent of the population is antisemitic according to the ADL standard. Here in Canada, the figure is higher at 14 per cent, but still well below the global average.

Western Europe is a study in contrasts. In the United Kingdom, where the movement to delegitimize Israel in academia is particularly noisy, the rate is only eight per cent. Meanwhile, in Greece, a country that has been developing close ties with Israel, the rate is horrendous at 69 per cent.

France, which has the biggest population of Jews in Europe, is particularly concerning with a rate of 37 per cent, well above both the global average and the average for Western Europe.

Among the saddest results of the survey and demographic breakdown are that only 54 per cent of people around the world have even heard of the Holocaust, and that 70 per cent of those considered antisemitic have never even met a Jewish person.

The results of the survey are presented on an excellent interactive website – http://global100.adl.org/ – that allows you to navigate the results in all sorts of ways.

However, as interesting as the results are, questions must be asked about the reliability and interpretation of the methodology. Does the presentation of negative stereotypes lead directly to some degree of negative response? And, is a person really antisemitic, if he or she agrees with six negative stereotypes about Jews, but not antisemitic if he or she agrees with only five?

May 12, 2014: It seems like Abbas wanted to force the peace process to fail

By Michael Regenstreif

“Is it really possible for a faith system to endorse democracy?” was the question posed in the April 12 edition of the Ottawa Citizen to the panel of interfaith religious leaders who respond to the questions raised in the paper’s weekly Ask the Religion Experts column.

I was particularly interested in the response from Rabbi Reuven Bulka of Congregation Machzikei Hadas, who provides the Jewish perspective to the panel.

“We have learned throughout history that the marriage of religion and politics is quite toxic. A country run on strict religious principles does not compromise on those principles, does not allow free choice of alternate religions and will not entertain any voting system that would jeopardize its hold on the population. … Try to think of any theocratic state that has welcomed the free expression of ideas rather than its suppression,” he wrote.

Not many days after that particular column appeared in the Citizen, the latest U.S.-brokered efforts in the Middle East peace process appeared to collapse because Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas – who is now in the 10th year of his four-year term – threw the talks into jeopardy by announcing a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, the theocratic Islamist group that has governed Gaza since violently taking control there away from the PA in 2007.

Hamas – a terrorist organization and recognized as such by Israel, Canada, the United States and the European Union, among others – has governed Gaza with exactly the kind of fundamentalist toxicity that Rabbi Bulka described.

Abbas knew that reconciliation with Hamas – which has since reiterated it would never recognize Israel and which regards all of Israel as occupied Palestinian territory – would make it all but impossible for the talks to continue.

And that would seem to be his strategy with the move: to force the talks into failure.

Of course, there have been three other reconciliation agreements between the PA and Hamas since 2007, and none of them have succeeded. It’s not a stretch to imagine this one meeting the same fate.

Herb Gray

We were deeply saddened when the Right Honourable Herb Gray passed away on April 21, a few days after our last issue went to press. Although he represented a riding in his hometown of Windsor, Ontario, for almost 40 years, he chose to live in Ottawa after his retirement from politics and was a most valued member of Ottawa’s Jewish community.

Herb Gray’s legacy in government service remains one of the most significant of modern times. He was first elected to Parliament in the 1962 election and was re-elected another 12 times. When prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau appointed him to cabinet in 1969 – two years after Canada’s centennial – he became just the first Jewish cabinet minister in our country’s history.

He would go on to a distinguished career in cabinet, holding numerous portfolios in the governments of prime ministers Trudeau, John Turner and Jean Chrétien – finally serving as Chrétien’s deputy prime minister and deputy leader of the Liberal Party from 1997 to 2002. He also served as Opposition leader for most of 1990, following the resignation of Turner and until the selection of Chrétien as Liberal leader.

Quite remarkably, Herb Gray was one of the rare – and increasingly rare, it seems – politicians who, despite fierce partisanship, commanded universal respect from all political quarters. When he retired from Parliament in 2002, then-governor general Adrienne Clarkson granted him the title of Right Honourable – a designation usually reserved for Canadian prime ministers, governors general and chief justices of the Supreme Court.

On behalf of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin, I extend our condolences to his wife, Sharon Sholzberg-Gray, and to their children and grandchildren.

April 28, 2014: New Quebec government should just let go of the secular charter issue

By Michael Regenstreif

In my March 17 column, I argued that the Parti Québécois (PQ) government’s proposed Charter of Quebec Values, which sought to ban public sector workers – from government bureaucrats to police and from daycare workers to doctors – from wearing clothing or symbols that signify their religious beliefs (including headgear such as kippot, hijabs and turbans, and jewelry such as necklaces with a noticeable Magen David or cross) was perhaps the main issue of Quebec’s provincial election on April 7.

The election was “very much about values,” I wrote, “and it remains to be seen which values Quebecers will choose.”

I wrote that column on March 7. A couple of days later – with then-premier Pauline Marois at his side – media baron Pierre Karl Péladeau declared his candidacy for the PQ and, with a now-famously raised fist, he made Quebec separation the ballot box question.

Everything changed in that moment. Clearly, the vast majority of the Quebec electorate had no interest in holding another divisive referendum on separation. While the charter remained an issue – and the PQ tried in vain to re-establish it as the main issue, thinking it was the key to their potential victory – it was Quebec separation that ruled the election. Marois called the election because polls indicated she could use the charter to turn her minority government into a majority. Instead, Quebecers, in their wisdom, handed the PQ a most humiliating defeat.

Watching the election results come in on April 7, one could almost hear all of Canada breathe a collective sigh of relief.

And, with their defeat, the PQ’s Charter of Quebec Values was dead in the water.

But, the day after the election, Philippe Couillard, the Quebec Liberal leader and premier-designate, said his government would bring in its own charter of secular values, affecting a more limited range of public sector officials in “positions of authority.” While the range of those positions was not defined, it would apparently not include most bureaucrats, doctors, nurses, teachers and daycare workers.

But, still, the question must be asked. Why is there a need for a solution to a problem that does not exist? Couillard’s new government should take the same position as the federal government and the other nine provinces and just let the issue go.