Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 211
28 April 2009
For Free Expression on Palestine
Justin Podur
On April 15, 2009, a number of organizations launched a campaign in Toronto to demand the right to free expression on the Israel/Palestine conflict with an event on the University of Toronto (U of T) campus. Some 100-150 people attended. Speakers addressed several recent cases of suppression of free expression on the issue of Israel/Palestine. They argued that there is a concerted attack on free expression on this question underway, and that to protect this right requires all individuals and organizations with an interest in free expression, regardless of their stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict, to speak out now. This article is a report on the April 15 event and a dossier of key incidents and articles on the issue.
A 2002 precedent: Sherene Razack’s case
The moderator of the evening was Sherene Razack, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and author of several books, including Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism and Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. She presented the story of her own experience with free expression on Israel/Palestine. In May 2002, Razack helped launch the Canadian Critical Race Studies Conference as part of the group Canadian Academics of Colour. The conference took place just after Israel’s invasion of Jenin. (Then as now, people speaking out were scrutinized for their choice of words. Just as today referring to Israeli policy as ‘apartheid’ is viewed as outside the bounds of acceptable criticism, in 2002 referring to Israel’s invasion of Jenin as a ‘massacre’ provoked similar reactions. (See my “What Happened in Jenin?” for a review of some of this now largely forgotten debate.)
Given the importance of Israel’s re-invasion of the West Bank in 2002 and the particular importance of the invasion of Jenin, conference organizers were criticized for not scheduling any event on the issue at the Critical Race Studies conference. In response organizers, including Razack, organized a meeting at the conference, where a resolution was drafted condemning Israel’s actions in Jenin. Razack distributed the resolution over email (to do so on this issue continues to be risky business for academics, as the recent case of William Robinson at the University of California Santa Barbara shows).
The reaction to Razack’s email distribution of the resolution was not immediate. Four months later, in August 2002, the campaign began, and Razack started to receive the hate emails. Razack was not the only one targeted. Several others, including a staff member at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore (TWB), received emails. The TWB staffer’s crime was allowing the store to sell pro-Palestine buttons. The CanWest-owned National Post published a series of articles about Razack, always claiming that she “refused to respond,” when in fact they refused to acknowledge or publish her letters of reply. Razack and her Dean received obscene phone messages and threats, with emails from all over containing similar formulations and lines of text, suggesting an organized campaign. The emails were consistent in their sexist and racist tone. A frequent message was “go back where you came from.” Assuming she was an Arab or Muslim, hate-mailers would remind her that she was from a barbaric and patriarchal culture and had no right to criticize a democratic state: to criticize Israel, they said, was to abandon feminism.