Globe editorial: Cheap excuses for betraying free speech, Lederman

2025/08/16 Leave a comment

Agreed:

…The other disturbing commonality is that officials are failing to reflexively protect the invaluable right to freedom of artistic and political expression in Canada.

We have no doubt that if noisy protesters demanded the withdrawal of a TIFF movie because of its glorification of violence, TIFF officials would be the first to stand up for the filmmaker’s right to artistic expression. 

But when it comes to telling stories or singing songs that some deem offensive, that reflex has been replaced by a knee-jerk run for cover.

This is an alarming development in Canada. In difficult times, we need people in positions of authority to stand up for freedom of expression – not look for excuses to abandon it. That never ends well for anyone.

Source: Cheap excuses for betraying free speech

And Marsha Lederman’s take, TIFF’s latest censorship controversy is more than just a tiff. It’s existential:

…All of this has created not just chasms in the arts community and a chill on artistic expression, but a disincentive for organizations considering ponying up to support the arts. You want your brand associated with something positive and meaningful: a literary prize, a film festival, maybe a theatre festival that claims to push the boundaries. (Vancouver’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival also caved to dissenters, cancelling the Canadian play The Runner last year.) But shell out money to get embroiled in this? In this economy?

The arts are in trouble and need corporate support. The world is in trouble and needs art to guide and inform, and artists who help us understand the issues and inspire us to be brave and fight for what’s right.

Which is something TIFF should be doing.



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Éditorial | Qui doit fixer les limites de la liberté d’expression?

2025/08/01 Leave a comment

Sensible approach rather than simply cancelling:

…Il n’y a pas de place pour le discours haineux dans le début public. Quiconque incite à la haine contre un groupe identifiable est passible d’accusations criminelles. Il existe une exception — et non la moindre — protégeant de poursuites une personne qui a exprimé de bonne foi une opinion sur un sujet religieux ou en se fondant sur un texte religieux auquel il croit. Cette exemption a suscité de vives critiques du chef du Bloc québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, qui n’a pas été en mesure de convaincre Ottawa d’agir pour refermer cette « brèche complaisante ».

Le cadre juridique canadien résiste à la tentation de faire une hiérarchie des droits constitutionnels ; ils sont plutôt en concurrence permanente les uns par rapport aux autres. En matière de liberté d’expression, les tribunaux ont reconnu à maintes reprises que ce droit englobait les idées impopulaires ou offensantes, et les propos qui choquent ou qui dérangent. La barre est très haute pour entrer dans la catégorie du discours haineux.

Peut-être que Sean Feucht a dépassé les limites. Si c’est le cas, il faudra agir aussi contre les rappeurs et les influenceurs masculinistes qui véhiculent les pires clichés misogynes. Il faudra sans doute inspecter les églises, les mosquées et les synagogues pour y débusquer les prêcheurs outranciers qui pourraient cracher contre le vent de la modernité. Il nous faudra une police de la pensée, bien rodée et bien financée, car l’ouvrage ne manquera pas.

Il y avait une autre façon de gérer le dossier de Sean Feucht, en utilisant les outils en place : porter plainte à la police, faire une enquête en bonne et due forme, s’en remettre à la norme du contrôle judiciaire pour séparer ce qui relève de la liberté d’expression et du discours haineux. En se faisant à la fois juges et parties de la situation, les autorités municipales et policières ont foulé ces principes d’une façon dérangeante, qui a plus à voir avec la culture de l’annulation qu’avec la protection des libertés civiles.

Source: Éditorial | Qui doit fixer les limites de la liberté d’expression?

… There is no place for hate speech in the public opening. Anyone who incites hatred against an identifiable group is liable to criminal charges. There is an exception – and not the least – protecting from prosecution a person who has expressed a good faith opinion on a religious subject or based on a religious text in which he believes. This exemption was strongly criticized by the leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, who was unable to convince Ottawa to take action to close this “complacent breach”.

The Canadian legal framework resists the temptation to make a hierarchy of constitutional rights; rather, they are in permanent competition with each other. In terms of freedom of expression, the courts have repeatedly recognized that this right encompasses unpopular or offensive ideas, and remarks that shock or disturb. The bar is very high to enter the category of hate speech.

Maybe Sean Feucht has crossed the line. If this is the case, it will also be necessary to act against rappers and masculinist influencers who convey the worst misogynistic clichés. It will probably be necessary to inspect churches, mosques and synagogues to flush out the outrageous preachers who could spit against the wind of modernity. We will need a police of thought, well-honed and well-funded, because the work will not be lacking.

There was another way to manage Sean Feucht’s case, using the tools in place: file a complaint with the police, make a proper investigation, rely on the norm of judicial control to separate what is freedom of expression and hate speech. By making themselves both judges and parties to the situation, the municipal and police authorities have trampled on these principles in a disturbing way, which has more to do with the culture of annulment than with the protection of civil liberties.

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French: Christian Cancel Culture Strikes Again

2025/07/25 Leave a comment

Good take:

…Yes, there is hypocrisy here. It’s a bit much to hear that it’s vitally important for Chip and Joanna Gaines to reject two gay dads (and their children!) from Christians who are also all in on Donald Trump. A gay couple on reality television is a bridge too far, but supporting a thrice-married man who was featured on the cover of Playboy magazine and was once good friends with Jeffrey Epstein is not?

But in another way, they’re not hypocrites at all: They’re budding authoritarians, and for authoritarians, a principle like “tolerance for me and not for thee” is entirely consistent. Authoritarians, after all, are supposed to rule.

When you possess a burning sense of certainty in your moral vision, intolerance is always a temptation. If you give your opponents a platform, won’t that lead some people astray? If error creates injustice (or worse, leads people to the gates of hell), why should error have any rights?

Think of the sense of entitlement here. On one hand, evangelicals say, “How dare you discriminate against us in the workplace,” and then turn around and tell a fellow evangelical couple, “You’re betraying us unless you discriminate against gay men at your job.” Evangelicals aren’t a superior class of citizen. We don’t get to enjoy protection from discrimination and the right to discriminate at the same time.

In times of religious and political conflict, I turn to two very different historic figures — the Apostle Paul and James Madison. In what might be some of the most ignored verses in the New Testament, Paul warned early Christians against imposing the same moral standards on those outside the church as those inside.

“I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people,” Paul said in 1 Corinthians, “not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.”

“What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church?” Paul asks. “Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked person from among you.’”

One of the fundamental problems with the American evangelical church is that it so often gets that equation exactly backward. It is remarkably permissive of abusive Christian individuals and institutions — especially if those individuals or institutions are powerful or influential — even as it can be remarkably hostile toward those people outside the church.

Evangelicals then compound the problem by viewing with deep suspicion and mistrust those people who blow the whistle on church misconduct while revering those people who are “bold” and “brave” enough to focus their fire on everyone else.

Paul’s words represent basic Christianity. Jesus himself admonished his disciples to remove the planks from their own eyes before trying to remove the “speck of sawdust” from someone else’s, and he warned that “you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others.”

This doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t make moral judgments, but rather that we should do so with extreme humility, focusing on addressing our own flaws first.

But that’s a command to believing Christians. How should we all deal with disagreement on fundamental matters?

In Federalist No. 10, Madison wrestled with the question of how to create a lasting republic that would invariably include a broad range of competing factions. It’s easy for us to look back at the founding and dismiss its diversity by comparison to our own. After all, the founders were mainly a collection of relatively privileged Protestant white men.

That statement is true, but incomplete. Early America was remarkably diverse by the standards of the day. The religious complexity of early America was its own small miracle. When Europe encountered similar divisions, it descended into the Wars of Religion and drenched itself in blood.

The Wars of Religion are ancient history to us, but they were much more present in the Colonial era. The Wars of Religion were as recent to James Madison as World War I is to us, and they were destructive on a vast scale. The challenge of genuine religious diversity was very much on the founders’ minds.

How do you live in a pluralistic republic without abandoning your core convictions? Madison admonished us not to yield to two related temptations. Don’t try to diminish liberty and don’t try to establish uniformity of opinion.

Instead, he said, the answer was to “extend the sphere” of the republic, to “take in a greater variety of parties and interests.” In this circumstance, “you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”

The sphere of the American republic extends to conservative evangelicals and to gay dads. It includes people who believe every word of the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit and those who think it’s no more credible than a comic book. One of the beauties of our culture at its best is that no side of the American divide has to abandon any of its core convictions to enter the public square or to engage in the stream of American commerce….

Source: Christian Cancel Culture Strikes Again

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Chris Selley: Toronto’s Dundas debacle proves education matters, even in a pandemic

2024/06/22 Leave a comment

Valid points:

…On the latter point, especially with a world of information a mouse click away, I am very sympathetic. You can know history’s names and dates and understand nothing about it, for example, or you can draw a blank on the names and dates but have a very firm grasp of history’s overall arc and its relevance for today.

And on that point, this week, Ontario offered up a case study to show where crappy education, especially in history, can lead us. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow’s executive committee, the last step before city council, approved plans to rename the city’s Yonge-Dundas Square — think Times Square but even more antiseptic and soulless — as Sankofa Square.

Sankofa is a Ghanaian term referring “to the act of reflecting on and reclaiming teachings from the past, enabling us to move forward together,” CBC reports. The rebranding is framed as a sort of recompense for the city having named it previously after Henry Dundas, an 18th-century abolitionist politician who, among other feats, managed to invalidate all slave contracts on Scottish soil.

But Dundas disagreed with other abolitionists on whether it was best as a practical, political matter to try to abolish slavery immediately or incrementally. And that was enough to get him cancelled in Toronto, just as Egerton Ryerson was cancelled before him on the spurious charge that he helped design an abusive residential-school system for Indigenous children.

Councillors exhibited sub-zero levels of Sankofa in debating the matter, it must be said. Coun. Chris Moisie accused one anti-renaming deputant of being a racist. Non-Black councillor Gord Perks complained that the opponents just don’t understand anti-Black racism.

Well nor does Toronto City Council, if it’s stripping an abolitionist’s name from a public square as an apology for slavery.

Education matters. It separates us from the apes and grounds us in a basic shared understanding of how the world works, and worked in the past, and it informs debate on how it should work in the future. By rights, the COVID nightmare should have produced a call to arms: Let’s get serious about education again. Some, however, seem prepared to use it to speed up a race to the bottom.

Source: Chris Selley: Toronto’s Dundas debacle proves education matters, even in a pandemic

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The Economist: Book reviews on ‘How to cancel “cancel culture”’

2023/11/08 Leave a comment

Helpful summaries:

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. By Yascha Mounk. Penguin; 416 pages; $32. Allen Lane; £25.
The Cancelling of the American Mind: How Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, Destroys Institutions, and Threatens Us All. By Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott. Simon & Schuster; 464 pages; $29.99. Allen Lane; £25

Yascha mounk’s book contains several jolting stories, which encapsulate the extreme thinking of some on the American left. When covid-19 vaccines became available, most countries dispensed them first to health workers and the elderly (who are much more vulnerable to the disease than young people). Yet America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention urged states to offer priority to 87m “essential workers”, which included package-delivery drivers and film crews. Its rationale was “racial equity”, because old people were more likely to be white, even though such a policy would probably cause thousands more deaths.

In another story, an African-American mother tried to get her seven-year-old into a class at school. The principal said no: “That’s not the black class.” This was not a scene from the Jim Crow South of the 1950s, but from present-day America, where a growing number of “progressive” schools group children by race and teach them to think of themselves as “racial beings”, all in the name of “antiracism”.

Mr Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, is a man of the left. (“Barack Obama is the American politician I most admire.”) He grew up believing that “humans matter equally irrespective of the group to which they belong.” His book, “The Identity Trap”, explains why many on the left abandoned “universalism”. He summarises the “woke” left’s logic as follows: “to ensure that each ethnic, religious or sexual community enjoys a proportionate share of income and wealth…both private actors and public institutions must make the way they treat people depend on the groups to which they belong.”

Most of the people who espouse this view aspire to improve the world, and many of the injustices they rail against are real. But the policies they advocate “are likely to create a society…of warring tribes rather than co-operating compatriots”. The word “liberal” has long been used in America to mean “left-wing”, but many on the left now reject basic liberal notions such as universal values and free speech. Across the English-speaking world and beyond, they have become intolerant of those who do not accept their dogma or their identity politics. 

Dismissing “wokeness” as just well-meaning millennials pushing for social justice is therefore a mistake, Mr Mounk argues. Not enough people understand that the far left is “moving beyond—or outright discarding—the traditional rules and norms of democracies”. He has long been concerned about the authoritarian right but says it is reasonably well understood (democracy-deniers and all), whereas the intellectual history of the authoritarian left is “oddly unexplored territory”.

How did views that are unpopular with the general public become so influential? In Mr Mounk’s telling, it starts with group psychology. When like-minded people debate political or moral questions, their conclusions become “more radical than the beliefs of their individual members”, he writes. This tendency is compounded when the group feels under threat, as progressives did during Donald Trump’s presidency. Dissent is suddenly seen as betrayal: hence the fury unleashed on anybody who violates the group’s unwritten and shifting norms. More than three out of five Americans now say they avoid airing their political views for fear of suffering adverse consequences; only a quarter of college students say they are comfortable discussing controversial topics with their peers.

Students who imbibed what Mr Mounk rather clunkily calls “the identity synthesis” on campus went on “a short march through the institutions” after they graduated. Since about 2010 they have carried their new ideology into the workplace and, thanks to the power of social media to create hurricanes of outrage, intimidated bosses like no previous generation. Young activists-cum-employees pushed the American Civil Liberties Union to scrap its iron commitment to free speech and risk-averse corporate managers to sign off on some counter-productive “diversity, equity and inclusion” training. A slide in a presentation at Coca-Cola, for example, exhorted employees to “try to be less white”.

Far from solving the real injustices that persist, this way of thinking and talking threatens to exacerbate them. And instead of bracing the country to withstand Mr Trump’s influence, it helps him, as Middle America leans right in response to the far left’s excesses. Mr Mounk’s answer is a return to classical liberalism: a rediscovery of universal values and neutral rules, allowing people to make common cause with others of different beliefs and origins. People should live up to the ideals on which liberal democracy is based rather than abandoning them because they are so difficult to achieve, he says.

While Mr Mounk’s message is global, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott focus on America. “The Cancelling of the American Mind” is a cri de coeur for both sides to reclaim “free-speech culture”. (The authors work for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech group.) When two sides cannot even agree on facts, “it undermines faith in all of the institutions we rely on to understand the world,” they write.

Mr Lukianoff and Ms Schlott offer a critique of the left, pointing out how cancel culture has eroded academic freedom at universities. But they are equally critical of the right. They note that some of Florida’s new education laws (including one that bans certain subjects from being taught) are “without question unconstitutional”.

Both books are bold, timely and buttressed by data. They also offer plausible remedies. The far right can be defeated only by the right and the far left by the left. So left-of-centre people who can see what is happening should speak up but not vilify those who disagree. (Political disagreement is not moral failure, Mr Mounk reminds readers.) People should appeal to the reasonable majority, he argues, since most people are neither “woke” nor Trumpist. They should not let their indignation turn them into reactionaries.

The advice from Mr Lukianoff and Ms Schlott is more personal: raise kids who are not cancellers. Teach them that life is not a battle between wholly good and bad people. Not every “harm” that someone, somewhere calls out is really harmful. Educating children about differences, rather than coddling and insulating them, is essential.

“The Cancelling of the American Mind” advises companies to foster an intellectually diverse workforce. Bosses should make clear that a commitment to free speech is a condition of employment. And universities should scrap political litmus tests for tenure and get back to teaching students how to debate ideas.

The post-liberal right and post-liberal left are much closer to each other than many people realise. Both are intolerant; both prioritise the power of the state over individual liberty. They “see each other as mortal enemies”, but “feed on each other”, Mr Mounk warns. That is why “everyone who cares about the survival of free societies should vow to fight both.”

Source: How to cancel “cancel culture”

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Goldberg: With War in Israel, the Cancel Culture Debate Comes Full Circle

2023/10/25 Leave a comment

On the need for dialogue:

Nathan Thrall’s searing new book, “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” struck me as important even before the obscene massacres and mass kidnappings committed by Hamas this month lit the Middle East on fire. Today, with people still struggling to understand the contours of this deeply complicated conflict, the book seems essential.

An expanded version of Thrall’s widely praised 2021 New York Review of Books article of the same name, the book follows a Palestinian man named Abed Salama as he searches for his 5-year-old son after a deadly school bus crash in the West Bank, a search hindered by Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian movement. Thrall, the former director of the Arab-Israeli project at the International Crisis Group, uses his reported account of the Salama family’s tragedy to offer a panoramic look at life under Israel’s occupation. He is deeply concerned with Palestinian grief, but also writes rich portraits of Israelis, including Beber Vanunu, founder of a settlement in the West Bank, and Dany Tirza, architect of the separation wall that cuts through the territory.

The day before Hamas’s attack on Israel, DAWN, an organization founded by the slain Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi to promote democracy in the Middle East, published an interview with Thrall. In it, Thrall was asked about his depictions of Israelis, and whether he had qualms about “humanizing the occupation.”

“I was very glad to be asked that question,” Thrall told me. “Because that was absolutely the ambition of the book, to depict real people” rather than villains and saints.

Because I admire “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” so much, I agreed to moderate a talk with Thrall this Thursday in Brooklyn. But I’ve been shocked to learn that several of his other events, both in the United States and in Britain, have been canceled, either because of security fears or because it’s considered insensitive, right after the killings and abductions in Israel, to dwell on the plight of Palestinians.

“How does one promote a program on this subject to a largely Jewish audience when people on all sides are being bombed, killed and buried?” Andrea Grossman, whose Los Angeles nonprofit called off an event with Thrall, said in The Guardian. American Public Media, which distributes content for public radio stations nationwide, even pulled ads for the book. “We aim to avoid any perception of endorsing a specific perspective,” an APM spokesman said in an email, insisting that airing sponsorship spots for Thrall’s book would be “insensitive in light of the human tragedies unfolding.”

Thrall is not alone; in recent weeks several literary and cultural events by pro-Palestinian speakers or groups have been either scrapped or relocated. On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen was supposed to speak at 92NY, a major literary venue in Manhattan formerly known as the 92nd Street Y. That afternoon, however, the talk was abruptly called off, apparently because of an open letter Nguyen had signed about the “violence and destruction in Palestine,” as well as because of his past support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. (The talk ended up happening instead at a downtown bookstore.) The Boston Palestine Film Festival moved online, nixing its live screenings. A Hilton hotel in Houston canceled a conference of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, citing “security concerns.”

Part of me shudders to view the unfolding catastrophe in Israel and Gaza through the provincial lens of America’s cancel culture debate. In some ways, that debate has now come full circle, because pro-Palestinian voices were being censored long before the phrase “cancel culture” existed, one reason the left was unwise in recent years to prevaricate about the value of free speech. But if someone as evenhanded as Thrall now finds his talks being dropped, we’re in an especially repressive period. And in a time of war, particularly a war shrouded in fiercely competing narratives, free speech is more important than ever.

I don’t like the fact that the statement Nguyen signed gestured only vaguely at Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians. In calling off his Friday evening appearance, 92NY, a Jewish organization, was playing by rules much of the left established, privileging sensitivity to traumatized communities ahead of the robust exchange of ideas. And supporters of Israel are hardly alone in creating a censorious atmosphere; particularly on college campuses, it is Zionists who feel silenced and intimidated. A professor at the University of California, Davis, is facing investigation by the university for a social media post calling for the targeting of “Zionist journalists,” which said, “They have houses with addresses, kids in school,” and included emojis of a knife, an ax and three drops of blood.

Nevertheless, a commitment to free speech, like a commitment to human rights, shouldn’t depend on others reciprocating; such commitments are worth trying to maintain even in the face of unfairness. “Art is one of the things that can keep our minds and hearts open, that can help us see beyond the hatred of war, that can make us understand that we cannot be divided into the human versus the inhuman because we are, all of us, human and inhuman at the same time,” Nguyen wrote on Instagram.

If the statement he signed didn’t live up to his own words’ generous spirit, 92NY would have been a good place to ask him why. The moments when dialogue is most fraught and bitter is when leaders most need to model it.

Source: With War in Israel, the Cancel Culture Debate Comes Full Circle

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Israel-Hamas War Has Scrambled ‘Cancel Culture’ Tribes – The Daily Beast

2023/10/23 Leave a comment

Consistency is hard in practice…

After the tragedy, the farce.

While Israelis and Palestinians are burying their dead, pundits and activists in America are busy contradicting their principles to further their political claims.

Take America’s self-styled free speech warriors on the Right and the so-called intellectual dark web—you know, the ones who rail against cancel culture and woke censorship, making millions of dollars while complaining that they’ve been shut out of the institutions of journalism.

All of a sudden, now that it’s far-left voices being canceled, the response has been… mixed.

Meanwhile, the tactics and rhetoric of the left have contradicted everything progressives say they stand for in terms of solidarity and safety, at times spilling over into overt antisemitism.

Case in point: Harvard University, where a bunch of left-wing students issued (to my mind) an outrageous, shortsighted, and offensive statementholding Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ massacre of more than 1,400 Israeli civilians, including the elderly, babies, and, as it happens, numerous peace activists as well.

There is much about this statement that is repellant: conflating legitimate resistance with kidnapping toddlers and grandmothers, denying moral agency to Hamas (after all, they can’t be expected to engage in moral reasoning), and not even mentioning the slaughtering innocent civilians part.

But even if the statement is wrong-headed, offensive, and even, in its gross insensitivity to the mass slaughter of Jews, borderline antisemitic, it is political speech, after all.

Yet in response, students have had job offers withdrawn, been doxxed by hard-right trolls (which has exposed them to death threats and harassment), and have faced calls from CEOs to have them blacklisted.

Meanwhile, Harvard, for the sin of not condemning the students (the president of Harvard did condemn the attacks and rightly noted that student organizations do not speak for the university), has itself been widely condemned, with donors and at least one Jewish foundation withdrawing their support. (Remarkably, in my online cohort of mostly liberal American Jews, there has been widespread support for this BDS-in-reverse decision.)

This is cancel culture writ large: unpopular political opinions being met with reprisals, firings, harassment, and worse. And it’s not just Harvard—similar controversies are also brewing at Columbia, Penn, and elsewhere.

And yet, “classical liberal” YouTube host Dave Rubin has called for pro-Palestine protesters to be deported, retweeting an asinine post analogizing the Jewish Voice for Peace protest this week at the Capitol to the Jan. 6 insurrection. (Another supposed free speech absolutist, Ben Shapiro, retweeted Rubin’s remark.) Newsweek senior editor-at-large Josh Hammertweeted a video of a protest outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., with the text, “Every single person here who is seen supporting Hamas and who is not a U.S. citizen should be deported posthaste.” (Meghan McCain gave it a retweet.)

To be fair, there have also been voices applying free speech principles even to objectionable speech acts. “Let the Activists Have Their Loathsome Rallies,” advised Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Atlantic. FIRE, the civil libertarian, heavily-Koch-funded free speech organization, has defended the right to free speech for pro-Palestinian voices and “recommended a pause” to the businesses seeking to punish students for exercising their free speech rights.

And Bari Weiss’ Free Press site ran a piece by Nadine Strossen (formerly of the ACLU) and Pamela Paresky entitled, “Even Antisemites Deserve Free Speech.” (Weiss herself seized on the latest extreme remark by Columbia professor Joseph Massad to continue her 20-year-long feud with him, and does not appear to have condemned the widespread canceling of left-wing voices.)

And because irony is truly not dead, the Center/Right has even tried to take a rhetorical trope from the Left, complaining that pro-Palestinian professors create a hostile, “unsafe” environment for Jewish students.

To be sure, this is sometimes true, as when a Stanford University instructor reportedly made Jewish students stand in a corner, alleging that this is what Israel does to Palestinians. Meanwhile, leftist students, who last month were focused on making sure every campus is a safe space for all, have harassed and targeted Jewish students in hideous ways. So much for “your opinions make me feel unsafe.”

It’s also true that some statements are not mere political speech, but are (potentially criminal) incitements to violence. For example, one UC Davis professor called for harassment or violence against “zionist journalists,” saying “they have houses w addresses, kids in school. They can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.” That is chilling, and well outside the bounds of civil discourse.

But it is not the case that a professor’s support of Palestine is ipso facto hostile to Jewish students, who are depicted as snowflakes that melt at any exposure to anti-Israel opinions. Part of the problem is the efforts by some Jewish organizations (often catering to their right-wing donors) to define any speech that “demonizes” or “delegitimizes” Israel as antisemitic. But that is simply not true, no matter how often it is repeated.

Jewish Voice for Peace is an anti-Zionist Jewish organization. Are they all self-haters, trapped in some neurosis of internalized antisemitism? Or are they, in fact, sincere Jewish people with a hard-left political opinion?

To repeat, I found the Harvard student letter not only wrong-headed but personally painful to read, especially as it came out as I was doomscrolling through videos of murder and kidnapping at a festival site I attended a few years ago. But should all those students be canceled? Doxxed? Pilloried?

And conversely, is it not possible for left-wing activists to express solidarity with Palestine without equating all Jews with right-wing Zionists, harassing us, and taunting us while we are still reeling from the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust? The Left has done more to alienate progressive Jews in the last two weeks than in the last 20 years.

To be sure, neither left-wing activists nor American Jews are the real victims here. The victims are thousands of dead, kidnapped, orphaned, or traumatized Palestinians and Israelis who are caught between two extremist governments who reject the very notion of coexistence, and do everything to undermine it.

Seems like a lot of Americans are acting the same way.

Source: Israel-Hamas War Has Scrambled ‘Cancel Culture’ Tribes – The Daily Beast

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Paul: A Chill Has Been Cast Over the Book World

2023/10/19 Leave a comment

Agree, dangers of cancel culture with respect to literature and the arts in general:

Last week the literary association Litprom canceled a celebrationfor the Palestinian author Adania Shibli’s book “Minor Detail” at the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the publishing world’s biggest international book fairs. The novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, was to be honored for having won the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, a German literary prize awarded annually to a woman from the developing world. A panel that Shibli, who splits her time between Jerusalem and Berlin, was to be on with her German translator, Günther Orth, was likewise canceled.

In a statement defending the decision, Juergen Boos, the director of the book fair, distanced the organization from the award, saying the prize came from another group, which was now looking for “a suitable format and setting” to honor Shibli elsewhere. He also said that “we strongly condemn Hamas’s barbaric terror war against Israel” and that the fair “has always been about humanity; its focus has always been on peaceful and democratic discourse.” Furthermore, Boos said, the Frankfurt Book Fair “stands with complete solidarity on the side of Israel.”

Some readers, like the festival organizers, may also side entirely with Israel, which was brutally attacked by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. Others may side with Hamas or with the Palestinian people, now under fire by Israeli forces. Still others may have more complicated positions, condemning the actions of Hamas while supporting the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state or supporting Israel while disapproving of the tactics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government or its military.

But taking a side in a war does not require taking positions on a work of fiction — no matter the subject matter or the author’s nationality — and that is the effect of the fair organizers’ decision. Canceling a celebration of an author may not be the same thing as banning a book, but the organizers’ decision amounts to demonizing a fiction writer and stifling her viewpoint.

The move sends an unfortunate message to both authors and readers, advancing the false notion that there is a wrong time for certain authors or novels and that now is not the time for Palestinian literature. As if novelists were somehow responsible to or for global conflicts and must be judged in accordance with whatever political events take place at the time of publication.

Even if one chooses a side in this war, literature and the views of fiction writers shouldn’t become collateral damage. It is no more wrong to read the latest novel by the Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad at this moment than it is to read the comic short stories of the Israeli author Etgar Keret. Now may, indeed, be the very moment when it makes sense to consider a creative work that comes from the other side.

Shibli told me she doesn’t fear the effects of Litprom’s and the book fair’s actions so much as she fears what they reflect in terms of political shifts. “It’s alarming to witness this populism attempting to take its hold on literature,” she wrote me in an email. “But literature cannot be in the grip of one group, not when it forges an intimate link with every reader.”

Shibli has not been canceled. Her works are still available in translation from the Arabic. But a chill has been cast. The idea has been thrust out there by the organizers of one of the world’s most prominent annual literary events that her fiction and, by extension, the work of other Palestinian writers are somehow not OK for our moment. And that the work of literary institutions is to reinforce borders rather than enable literature to transcend them.

“Minor Detail” undoubtedly offers sympathies to the Palestinian cause — a perspective that surely won’t be embraced by all readers. It includes the story of a Bedouin girl who was gang raped and murdered by an Israeli Army unit in 1949, an atrocity that has been well documented. One German judge of the prize, Ulrich Noller, resigned from the jury that determined the award last summer, saying the novel serves “anti-Israel and antisemitic narratives” and claiming it not only allowed such readings but also opened up space for them.

This is 2023’s second controversy in which political passions over a war prevailed over the fate of an author’s work. A month after a dispute between Ukrainian and Russian writers over a panel at the PEN World Voices Festival this year, the novelist Elizabeth Gilbert delayed her historical novel set in Siberia in response to online outcry from readers she said were Ukrainian. Gilbert said she made this decision on her own — we don’t know for sure — but in the end, this is another example of a work of fiction’s subject matter being deemed inappropriate for political reasons.

“It is not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert said in a video she posted online at the time. “And I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”

Let’s be clear: Wars cause harm. Novels do not. Literature may raise uncomfortable questions or explore unpopular viewpoints or establish reasons to empathize with a character a reader might otherwise find repugnant. A novel’s story, characters, politics and theme may not appeal to a particular reader. That reader does not have to like those books or read them to begin with. One need not like or agree with the author, either, to appreciate the person’s work.

But novels need not appeal to or appease a political constituency. Those works of fiction written purely as political dogma in disguise tend to suffer the consequences with critics and readers. That said, even overtly political fiction and the novelists who write them should not subjected to the passions incited by global conflicts.

These are just two examples, but the effects ripple out, generating tension and fear in the wider literary world. Already, there is fallout from the decision in Frankfurt. The Indonesian Publishers Association, the Arab Publishers’ Association, the Emirates Publishers Association and the United Arab Emirates Sharjah Book Authority have pulled out of the festival, which opened on Wednesday.

As the Sharjah Book Authority put it, “We champion the role of culture and books to encourage dialogue and understanding between people. We believe that this role is more important now than ever.” In withdrawing on Tuesday, the Malaysian Education Ministry noted its decision is “in line with the government’s stand to be in solidarity and offer full support for Palestine.”

More than 600 publishers, editors, translators, writers and others in the industry, including Ian McEwan, Colm Toibin, Anne Enright and the Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah, have signed an open letter on the ArabLit website.

“The Frankfurt Book Fair has a responsibility,” the letter explains, “to be creating spaces for Palestinian writers to share their thoughts, feelings, reflections on literature through these terrible, cruel times, not shutting them down.”

In the statement Boos emphasized “peaceful and democratic discourse.” He and the fair’s organizers should then reflect on this: When you shut people out (be it through censorship, bans, social media campaigns, a canceled book celebration or the machinations of an autocratic regime), when people feel judged by or deprived of a voice that expresses their — and our common — humanity, we wall off our minds.

The moment people line up on opposing sides, when their eyes and hearts shut tight accordingly, is precisely when we need literature that challenges our presumed allegiances most.

“‘Adab’ in Arabic means ‘literature’ but also ‘ethics,’” Shibli told me. “Literature as ethics would perhaps open up more possibilities in our imagination on how we could live our lives together, in relation to each other.”

Source: A Chill Has Been Cast Over the Book World

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He’s known as Chile’s greatest poet, but feminists say Pablo Neruda is canceled

2022/10/17 Leave a comment

Sigh… I wonder who will be cancelled 50 years from now:

There’s a steady stream of fans visiting the museum that once was the home of Pablo Neruda, widely considered Chile’s greatest poet. It’s located on massive black cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It’s also the spot where Neruda is buried.

The poet died 49 years ago, yet his reputation remains a work in progress.

Neruda has always been a polarizing figure in Chile, mainly for his left-wing politics. But now he is being called out by Chile’s growing feminist movement as a male chauvinist and sexual predator.

“He’s been canceled,” says Lieta Vivaldi, a human rights activist and member of Chile’s Feminist Lawyers Association.

The latest controversy over Neruda, who in 1971 became the second Chilean awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, sprang up in 2018 with the rise of Chile’s #MeToo movement against sexual abuse. Activists singled out some of Neruda’s verses as sexist and focused new attention on several disturbing episodes from the poet’s past.

Neruda abandoned his only child, Malva Marina, and her mother. His daughter was born with hydrocephalus — an accumulation of fluid within the brain that can lead to swelling of the head — and died at age 8.

What’s more, Neruda wrote about his rape of a cleaning woman in his hotel room in 1930, in what is now Sri Lanka.

“I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist. … The encounter was of a man with a statue,” Neruda wrote in his memoir, published in 1974, a year after his death from cancer. “She was right to despise me.”

Initially, his admission went almost unnoticed. But Chile’s feminist movement — newly energized by a series of sexual abuse scandals at the country’s universities and by the global #MeToo movement — has called attention to the episode, and disdain for Neruda is spreading.

Salvador Young, who buys online books for Chile’s National Digital Library, says that for the past several years, he was instructed by his supervisors not to purchase Neruda’s books. Otherwise, he says, “Readers would demand to know: ‘Why are you promoting a rapist?'”

Some Chilean universities and high schools are steering clear of Neruda. One high school teacher, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized by his school to speak to NPR, says many of his female students despise Neruda. He now teaches him less than he did a few years ago.

By contrast, he says, “When I was in school, we had to learn Neruda and recite his poetry. There are verses that students of my generation still recite and analyze.”

Among them, he says, is “From the Heights of Machu Picchu,” which Neruda wrote following an inspirational trip to the ancient Incan mountaintop site. The poem has been put to music by the Chilean group Los Jaivas.

Rejection of the poet by feminists is so strong that in 2018, Chile’s Congress scrapped a proposal to rename the country’s main international airport after Neruda. Meanwhile, anti-Neruda slogans were spray-painted on several walls during #MeToo marches in Santiago, Chile’s capital.

It’s easy to misread Neruda’s works, warns Kemy Oyarzun, a poet and professor of gender studies at the University of Chile. Yet even she is less enthusiastic about Neruda these days.

Kemy Oyarzun, a poet and professor of gender studies at the University of Chile, says this was a response to one of Neruda most famous verses, an ode to silence called “Poem XV.”

It begins: “I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent.”

Oyarzun says some feminists interpreted this as Neruda telling his lover in the poem to keep her mouth shut. They responded with graffiti proclaiming, “Neruda, now you shut up!”

At a #MeToo demonstration in Santiago in August, high school student Laura Brodsky, 18, said her instructors are not teaching Neruda. Referring to the rape confession in his memoir, Brodsky emphasized that she and her fellow students “have no interest in learning about him.”

All this is a startling reversal for one of the world’s most famous, prolific and bestselling poets, who has often been compared to Walt Whitman. Neruda’s masterwork, Canto General (General Song), is an epic history of Latin America, recounted by way of 231 poems.

In a country where poetry had long been composed by and for the well-to-do, Neruda was known as the poet of the people, often writing about the working class and Indigenous groups, as well as Chile’s natural wonders.

In addition, Neruda won praise around the world for his humanitarian work in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, following his diplomatic service as consul, he helped bring more than 2,000 Spaniards — who were fleeing Gen. Francisco Franco’s newly installed military regime — to Chile.

“Many working people and progressive activists — not just in Chile, not just in Latin America, but all over the world — adopted him as their hero, proclaimed him as their own,” wrote Mark Eisner, author of Neruda: The biography of a poet.

Still, Neruda has fallen from grace before.

In 1947, Chile’s government outlawed the Communist Party — of which Neruda was a member — and accused him of treason. To avoid arrest, he went underground; then, in 1949, he escaped by horseback across the snow-capped Andes Mountains to Argentina.

Neruda eventually returned. But in 1973, Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power and his right-wing military regime burned Neruda’s books while promoting poet Gabriela Mistral, another Nobel Prize winner, who was viewed at the time as apolitical.

As during those past anti-Neruda crusades, many writers and academics say the current campaign has gone too far.

Fernando Saez, executive director of the Pablo Neruda Foundation that oversees the late poet’s estate, points out that many writers, painters and musicians have had stormy personal lives, and says reproachable behavior should not negate their artistic contributions.

Doing so, he says “is tremendously dangerous.”

Author Isabel Allende has also defended Neruda’s literary legacy. “Like many young feminists in Chile I am disgusted by some aspects of Neruda’s life and personality,” she told the Guardian in 2018. “Unfortunately, Neruda was a flawed person, as we all are in one way or another, and Canto General is still a masterpiece.”

Neruda “is a very, very important poet and you cannot just cancel him because of his personal life,” Vivaldi says. “In that case, we would be judging everyone.”

It’s also easy to misread Neruda, says Oyarzun. Take “Poem XV,” the one some interpret as a plea for his lover to shut up.

“That’s not what he meant,” Oyarzun says. “He meant to learn from women. He says: ‘I love it when you’re in silence because silence is my favorite dimension and I learn from your silence.'”

Yet even Oyarzun is less enthusiastic about Neruda these days. She says so much fuss over Neruda for so long has ended up overshadowing the work of female poets in Chile, where many of them remain largely unknown.

“I myself have chosen to teach young women’s poetry that was denied for so many decades,” she says. “So if you tell me — ‘Will you teach a course only on Neruda?” — I will not do that.”

At the Neruda museum on Isla Negra, many fans brush off criticism about the poet. Among them is Santiago storekeeper Jorge Díaz, who says many Chilean men of Neruda’s generation behaved the same way.

“Neruda had a dark side,” he says. “But everyone has a dark side.”

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Yakabuski: Quebec and France join forces against cancel culture

2021/11/01 Leave a comment

Yakabuski points out the irony given the cancel culture aspects of their policies and the intolerance of Bill 21:

When France’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, learned that a francophone Ontario school board had held a book-burning ceremony involving titles banned because of their negative portrayal of Indigenous people, he contacted his Quebec counterpart to commiserate.

Mr. Blanquer, who has been on a mission to turn back the tide of “cancel culture” on French university campuses, was incredulous at the news – which made the pages of the prestigious Paris-based Le Monde – of the Providence school board’s “flame purification” ceremony.

Included among the books incinerated during the ceremony – held in 2019, but which only came to light last month in a Radio-Canada report – were titles from the cartoon collections Tintin, Lucky Luke and Asterix, beloved by generations of young francophones on both sides of the Atlantic.

The result of Mr. Blanquer’s commiserating with Quebec Education Minister Jean-François Roberge was a joint op-ed, published last week in Quebec and France, denouncing the “pernicious influence of a culture of intolerance and erasure” embodied by the book-burning.

“We have a duty to prepare our youth to exercise active, respectful and enlightened citizenship. A citizenship that allows for debate, the opinions of others, the confrontation of ideas and the questioning of all our beliefs,” Mr. Blanquer and Mr. Roberge wrote. “That is why we affirm with force and conviction that public schools, the first line of defence against ignorance and darkness, must be the preferred location for the construction of a common civic project.”

The op-ed was just Mr. Roberge’s opening salvo in his own crusade against wokeism in Quebec public schools. Two days later, the Coalition Avenir Québec minister announced his government would introduce a new “Quebec culture and citizenship” (QCC) course to replace the “ethics and religious culture” (ERC) curriculum now taught in public schools.

The current ERC course was adopted by former premier Jean Charest’s Liberal government in 2008, a decade after Quebec replaced its Catholic and Protestant school boards with linguistic ones. The ERC, which replaced the catechism courses that had long been taught in French Catholic schools, aimed to familiarize primary and secondary school students with the panoply of religions practised in Quebec. But critics have long argued that the course is an affront to modern Quebec’s secularist values.

That is an exaggeration. Even the children of non-believers should understand the influence of religion in the lives of most people, and the role the Catholic faith played in shaping modern Quebec. But the anti-clericalism espoused by francophone intellectuals since the Quiet Revolution has hardened attitudes toward the separation of church and state in Quebec.

The Mouvement laïque québécois (MLQ), an organization dedicated to the “total secularization of the state and public institutions in Quebec,” called the abolition of the ERC course “a breath of fresh air.” The ERC, the MLQ said, has been “an aberration and a disaster on the social level.”

Given its populist leanings, the CAQ government to which Mr. Roberge belongs is not particularly popular in Quebec intellectual circles. But Quebec nationalists and intellectuals have found common ground when it comes to secularism.

Both support Bill 21, though for different reasons. Nationalists see the law that prohibits some public-sector employees from wearing religious symbols as an assertion of Quebeckers’ distinct identity in the face of the multicultural ethos that prevails elsewhere in Canada. Intellectuals see it as protection against the incursion of religion in the public square, which they argue should be a faith-free zone.

The CAQ government’s move to replace the ERC with a new Quebec culture and citizenship course is similarly welcomed by nationalists as a blow to multiculturalism and an affirmation of Quebec’s dominant francophone identity. In a video promoting the new curriculum, Premier François Legault says the new course will lead to “a prouder Quebec.”

Mr. Legault’s re-election in 2022 is about as close as you can get to a sure thing in Canadian politics. And his plan to push ahead with the new course will certainly not hurt his chances.

Still, there is something deeply disturbing about the CAQ’s exploitation of Quebeckers’ cultural insecurity for political gain. It is one thing to express concern about the pernicious effects of cancel culture on democratic debate or the excesses of a multiculturalism that denies the existence of a core national identity. But it is quite another to depict critics of Bill 21 and the new citizenship course as an existential threat to the survival of the Quebec way of life, as Mr. Legault and his ministers do.

It almost makes you wonder whether Mr. Roberge even read his own op-ed.

Source: Opinion: Quebec and France join forces against cancel culture

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