Do not say we have free speech in Canada
It’s been more than a week since MPP Sarah Jama was booted from the Ontario NDP caucus and censured by the Ontario government for daring to name Israel as an Apartheid state.
It’s been more than a week since CUPE Ontario President Fred Hahn agreed to apologize for daring to support Palestine.
It’s been more than a week since York University threatened its student groups for stating their solidarity with Palestinians. It’s been more than a week since law students at TMU correctly identified Israel as a settler-colonial project, which they condemned.
And it’s been more than a week since Global News journalist Zahraa Al-Akhrass was fired after posting on social media using hashtags like #FreePalestine.
And in those weeks, Israel has ramped up its campaign to annihilate Gaza. There is no electricity. No water. Very little humanitarian aid allowed into the country. Churches, bakeries, schools, UN buildings, refugee camps — bombed, bombed bombed. 36 journalists have been murdered.
The death toll in Gaza is north of 9000 people. That puts Israel’s campaign against Gaza in the same category of the 1947 campaign against protesters in Taiwan that killed as few as 8000 but as many as 28,000 people, the 1948 Jeju Island massacre against Communists and communist sympathisers in South Korea (14,000-60,000 dead), the Bodo massacre also against Communists and communist sympathisers in South Korea (officially 4,934 deaths but scholars say as many as 200,000), the slaughter of between 400,000 and 3 million communist Indonesians, 17,000+ pro-Jianmin supporters killed in China in 1968-69, the battle of Jolo which killed many of the Muslim Tausug inhabitants in the Philippines (20,000-50,000 in 1974), the Hama massacre in Syria (7,000-35,000 people), the Algerian village massacres of 1994 (10,000). It is more than the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995.
It’s been more than one week since union and political leaders have made reasonable statements and Israel’s aggression and violence has continued to climb. And yet, it there has been remarkable silence from among the folks who would normally claim to defend free speech and care about protecting the right of people to say things that contradict the official line of our government.
In the labour movement, there have been statements, including the staff union for the Canadian Union of Public Employees promising to defend any staff person who risks reprisals for taking a Palestinian solidarity position. Faculty unions have also defended the right of students to speak out, safe of reprisals from university administrators.
But from Canada’s cultural industries —the ones for whom free speech is supposed to be fundamental — it’s been pretty much radio silence.
Rather than mentioning the attack on free speech, the Toronto Star’s chief white male opinionator Martin Regg Cohn actually blamed Jama on “depriving herself and her constituents a voice.” Fellow Star columnist Andrew Phillips argued that it was good that Jama was kicked out of the ONDP but bad that she was censured by Doug Ford (try to be consistent, Andrew, it makes for a more compelling argument). At the Globe and Mail, Marcus Gee defended the free speech that students have on campus but decried what they said, calling it “appalling” that students dared to name settler-colonialism in Israel. But fine, at least he said something because otherwise it’s been a range between silence and justifying Israel’s right to do war crimes.
At least, there’s the Toronto Star’s Shree Paradkar, who summed up what happened to Jama like this: “Brave, principled leadership is such a rarity that not only is it difficult to recognize, in some quarters it is attacked with contempt and reviled.”
But these kinds of comments are few and far between. That’s especially true within organizations who claim to exist to defend free speech in Canada. From this milieu, the responses have been similarly pathetic Israel’s war on Gaza isn’t just targeting civilians; it’s targeting journalists. 36 journalists have died already — 4 were killed by Hamas, and 32 people have been killed by Israel (31 Palestinians and one Lebanese). The Canadian Association of Journalists has said nothing, presumably because on the balance of being seen as criticising Zionism versus defending journalism and free speech, they just can’t take the risk of being seen as criticising Zionism.
PEN Canada issued a limp statement that makes it sound as if free speech is being attacked equally by all sides, failing to remind their members that for every Israeli journalist who has been killed since Oct. 7, eight Palestinian journalists have been killed. And the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression? They too have said nothing.
There’s no question that among Canada’s elites, Zionism is right and anti-Zionism is wrong. Zionism —the right for Israel to defend its settler-colonial project even through ethnic cleansing and genocide — is right. Anyone to suggest otherwise — by naming the very clear and objective apartheid conditions within Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, by participating in Palestinian solidarity actions or by suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Isreal is massively fucking up here, is too much. The statements are too much for almost anyone with any access to power to defend (forget actually agreeing with them).
If you believe that Canada’s cultural and media institutions are fair, balanced and objective, the uniformed refusal to condemn Isreal is confounding. But these people and groups don’t actually believe in free speech and they make money off confusing readers into thinking that oppression is actually justice and war, actually peace.
Free speech in Canada is a disaster thanks to the same reason why every sector in Canada is increasingly a disaster: corporate capture of industries, extreme concentration of ownership, a lack of public funding for writers and thinkers collude to make exercising free speech very difficult. Add to that all the things that stop someone from saying what they think (whether by threat of losing a job or not being able to afford rent) and a true image of how deep the crisis of free speech is in Canada emerges. But that isn’t what concerns the Andrew Coynes or Matt Gurneys or Steve Paikins or Robyn Urbacks of the word. They collect their pay cheques, write barely coherent pieces and exist in a perpetual state of being publicly smug.
For them, free speech is freedom for them to collect a paycheque while saying the most boring, obvious, cliché, bootlicking shit they can come up with. That is free speech — the right to do these things with minimal government involvement. But of course, government doesn’t need to be involved because class collaborators collaborate. They celebrate personal events together, they’re related to the same people and they defend the same interests: the corporate drive to make as much money as possible off us all. They serve power and if power says jump, they celebrate when someone’s head rolls for refusing to jump.
Luckily, they are the vast minority in Canada but unluckily, cowards abound. For Jama’s former caucus colleagues — the ones who claim to be progressive while not a single one of them resigned over the outrageous attack that Marit Stiles cooked up on Jama — they expose that not one of them has the courage to say what is right and refuse what is unacceptable, even if they disagree with Jama.
For Al-Akhrass’ colleagues at Global News — they expose that they are more committed to themselves than they are to doing journalism. The folks who are not part of Canada’s upper crust but put their bare hands into the maintenance of the crust to be as crusty and thick and full of maggots as possible — their lack of courage and convictions is noted.
Canada. Where true patriot love is actually a fidelity to cowardice.
And on the other side of the world, a place where weapons manufactured by Canadian hands are being used in a campaign to exterminate an entire population, is a land where average people use their bare hands to dig through the rubble to pull out a child, an uncle, an heirloom, a memory.
Thank you, thank you. If nothing else, Israel’s crimes have laid bare the cowardice, the criminal conspiracy, the hypocrisy of so many, especially including politicians, journalists, and pretend progressives. The facts you lay out and your analysis are brilliant.
I completely agree, but will add that regulatory capture, concentration of media ownership, and the conflicts of interest that exist in academia, and elsewhere, were at the root of the silencing of dissenting opinion during the pandemic as well. Of course, if one happened to agree with the official narrative, they would not have cared that people raising legitimate questions about the lab leak hypothesis to the efficacy of the public health measures to the safety of the vaccines, were being silenced, censored, and sometimes vilified. Fear and propaganda convinced people that these dissenting voices not only needed to be silenced, in some cases they needed to lose their jobs. What we're seeing now (and what we saw with Ukraine, and with the pandemic) are all part of this same playbook.