free speech

Claims of speech suppression

Independent Jewish Voices Canada recently released the report Unveiling the Chilly Climate: The Suppression of Speech on Palestine. It was compiled by Dr. Sheryl Nestel and Rowan Gaudet for IJV Canada.

Nestel is a retired sociology professor from OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), University of Toronto, and Gaudet is a master’s student at the University of Bologna in the global cultures program; he has done research for IJV in the past. The text below is from their report’s executive summary.

Focused on the Canadian context, the report seeks to shed light on the wave of suppression of speech regarding Palestine that is sweeping North America and parts of Europe. It documents the impact of reprisals, harassment and intimidation faced by Canadian activists, faculty, students and organizations in relation to scholarship and activism in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian human rights. There is a connection to be made here between these attacks and efforts by pro-Israel advocacy groups to market the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism (IHRA), a document that has come under vigorous attack by defenders of academic freedom and Palestinian human rights. While its proponents argue that this definition will not threaten freedom of expression or inhibit criticism of Israeli policies, the findings of this report demonstrate that these basic rights are already under threat and could be further imperiled if the IHRA were to be widely adopted.

The contribution of this report is two-fold: 1) the amount and quality of information gathered here is unprecedented and speaks to the worrisome prevalence of harassment and suppression of speech on Palestine on campuses and in Canadian civil society and 2) it surpasses a simple documentation of instances of repression by employing an ethnographic methodology to analyze the so-called “chilling effect” and its impact on governmental, institutional and individual decision-making. This research project situates itself firmly within the realm of critical qualitative inquiry, which seeks to employ qualitative research for social justice purposes, including making such research available for public education, social policy formulation and the transformation of public discourse. The inquiry is also shaped by decolonizing methodologies of social science research, which seek to challenge institutions, academic and otherwise, which prioritize colonial forms of knowledge production and maintain institutional commitments that impede indigenous self-determination. Finally, Nestel and Gaudet follow the directives proposed by queer, feminist and antiracist research methodologies, which entreat people to consider how their positions in social hierarchies of race, class, sexuality and citizenship mediate their experiences.

In all, the researchers collected 77 testimonies from 40 faculty members, 23 students, seven activists and seven representatives of organizations. Testimonies were collected from participants in Ontario, Manitoba, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Quebec and Alberta. Among the academics responding were representatives of 11 disciplines from 21 Canadian universities.

Interviewees recounted that their experiences included political intervention into hiring; attempts to prevent access to event venues; and the attempted cancellation of public events on Palestine, as well as targeting and doxing, including the inclusion of 128 Canadian academics and activists on the website of Canary Mission, an organization that purports to document “individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the U.S., Israel and Jews on North American college campuses.” Threats of violence and genuine acts of violence were experienced by student activists and these often contained racial and sexual slurs including threats of sexual violence. Students were subject to warnings and disciplinary measures by university administrators whom respondents often described as being hostile to Palestine solidarity activism on campus. Faculty respondents reported restrictions on academic freedom, self-censoring of expression on Palestinian human rights, discriminatory treatment by academic publishing platforms, harassment by pro-Israel advocacy groups and media outlets, attacks from colleagues, political interference by university administration, classroom surveillance by pro-Israel student groups, and anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism. Indeed, the suppression of speech on Palestine has significant consequences in academia, where it threatens principles of academic freedom and encourages surveillance of critical intellectuals and activists and of the oppositional knowledge that they produce.

As the research by Nestel and Gaudet reveals, the precarious employment conditions of more than half of Canada’s university teachers mean that, because of the “chilly climate” around speech on Palestine, untenured or pre-tenure faculty are reluctant to pursue academic or activist work in this area for fear of endangering contract renewals or future career prospects including access to publishing platforms so central to the academic tenure and promotion process.

Unsubstantiated allegations of antisemitic intent and support for terrorism are commonly leveled against pro-Palestine academics and activists. Significantly, Palestinians, Muslims and non-Arab racialized participants appear to have borne the brunt of direct attacks on their scholarship and activism. The emotional impact of harassment and suppression was felt most acutely by Palestinian students and faculty interviewed. Jewish activists were not immune to attack and were often characterized by opponents as “kapos” or “self-hating Jews.”

The report also documents how both on- and off-campus Israel-advocacy organizations have been at the forefront of efforts to suppress speech and activism on Palestine. As University of Pennsylvania political scientist Ian Lustick has argued, the pro-Israel organizations have constituted a “vigilante” force, which has made it “increasingly difficult to criticize Israel without fear of lawsuits, accusations of antisemitism, demands for political balance in staging of events, blacklisting of participants, or other forms of personal or institutional harassment.”

This report signals that an atmosphere of repression and recrimination related to discourse and activism around Israel/Palestine is ubiquitous and insidious and should be unacceptable in a democratic society.

To download a copy of the full report, visit ijvcanada.org/unveilingthechillyclimate.

– Courtesy Independent Jewish Voices Vancouver

Free expression in workplace

I heard once about an executive who explained in an interview: we debate a lot behind the scenes, but when we present our opinion or policy, it is a united front. We expect all employees to avoid saying or writing anything that would contradict this in public, they continued. Further, it’s spelled out in the work contract what you can and cannot say, and employees must stand behind the policy decisions of the organization.

If you find this kind of approach unsettling, you wouldn’t be alone. Yet, it’s not an uncommon requirement of employees. I wondered, after hearing this, how much money employees have to earn to make it worthwhile to give up their opinions or their right to free speech. Also, what happens if, during the debate behind the scenes, a younger or less powerful employee has a viewpoint that is starkly different than the party line? How does that go? Must an employee then give up her income or change jobs in order to have freedom of expression on those topics? If mainstream, moderate opinions and moderate disagreements are swept under the rug, what else isn’t allowed?

After hearing of this model, which shuts down dissent or situations that might conflict with the policy, I felt nervous. I ended up joking around. This felt like the Mafia. Disagree with the boss? What happens if nobody likes what you have to say? You too could end up in the river wearing some concrete overshoes!

These issues around employment and freedom of expression loom large in democracies and rightly so. If we look back to Judaism’s most foundational texts, written and oral Torah, we see that, consistently, Judaism values hearing all the opinions. Minority voices or rejected outcasts also have their views included and written down. We’re still reading and hearing about rabbis and even outsiders to the community who expressed minority opinions 2,000 years ago that didn’t go forward. In other words, their views did not become “policy.”

For instance, in the Talmud, we learn about Hillel versus Shammai, but mostly Hillel, who is more lenient. The rabbis and, therefore, Jewish law, tend to follow Hillel’s lead. That said, nobody got rid of Shammai’s point of view. He didn’t get fired from the rabbis’ club for having an unpopular opinion.

I recently had a couple of informational interviews. Well, they were really just Zoom chats, which came about because a friend reposted something from a small advocacy group on Instagram. Beware of social media if you are a novice like me. I prodded my friend with an off-the-cuff comment, saying, “So, don’t you think this is just a PR scam?!” Oops … I wasn’t just writing my online friend.

To my surprise, both the chief executive officer and the education and programming lead of the group got in touch with me. They wanted to tell me all about their efforts to make positive change – it wasn’t a publicity stunt. They explained what they hoped to achieve. I was pretty embarrassed by my post. By the end of the first chat, I was impressed with the information they had offered me and how they had engaged. They welcomed all opinions. They asked me if I wanted to contribute in an open and friendly way.

Our second meeting resulted in them recruiting me to serve on a volunteer advisory panel because of what they saw as my expertise. I agreed willingly because our exchange had been such a positive experience.

There’s a meme offered this time of year, that, while how we behave between Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah matters, it’s how we behave the rest of the year that counts.

Choosing to be open to differing opinions and innovation keeps us learning and growing. It also aligns us with the model of the rabbis, who discussed and debated and recorded it all in plain view, with minority views counting, too. Also, admitting one’s mistakes – wow, how embarrassing was I on social media? – helps us grow and become better people.

The least Jewish model, I think, is the example with which I led off this article, where everyone is allowed to debate, in theory, but all opinions aside from the official party line are discarded or silenced. We’re speaking here of relatively mainstream opinions, not radical ones. Want the kicker? From what I understood, this is a model used by some nonprofit Jewish organizations.

The smaller advocacy group isn’t a Jewish organization, but one of their employees is. Part of our chat involved a bit of Canadian Jewish geography regarding their Winnipeg relatives. Also, they suggested that I perhaps write up a Jewish topic for their group one day. They were open and excited about diverse voices.

Work life and individual identity can sometimes be entirely separate things. Yet, in others’ lives, Jewish identity, values and models and careers go hand in hand. I want to address my Jewish identity through making the world a better place, including at work. Watching these two different models emerge on my radar recently reminded me that, in fact, non-Jewish organizations can model Jewish ways of questioning and validating ideas, while some Jewish groups choose not to do so.

In a perfect world, we’d all do meaningful, life-changing work. In real life, we know that compromises and the bottom line matter. Sometimes, work isn’t that place of deep meaning or free expression, and we can’t always say everything we think in the workplace, either. However, perhaps there’s a way to avoid stifling creativity – having multiple voices valued in the workplace, while still communicating the basic mission of the organization. Perhaps we can all learn and grow better this way, making educated debate matter, just as the rabbis did 2,000 years ago.

Joanne Seiff has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com.

Every person has a voice

Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media behemoth Twitter, which appears probable, is raising questions about what the new management could mean to users and society at large. For Jewish tweeters and others, there are red flags.

The growth of social media of all varieties over the past 15 years has resulted in a massive change in the public dialogue. People have some ability to amplify or diminish the voices they do or do not want to hear, resulting in an unprecedented ability to self-select the information (or misinformation) to which we are exposed. The relative anonymity of the media has had additional harmful impacts, with racist, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic and other hateful statements being posted in volumes too massive to effectively police. The spike in antisemitic hate crimes we have seen in recent years is almost certainly a result, in part, of online antisemitism moving into the “real” world.

Since 2016, when Russian and other bad actors influenced the U.S. presidential election in favour of Donald Trump, some platforms, including Twitter, have been driven to address some of the most egregious content on their sites and abuse of the medium. Their efforts, however imperfect and inadequate, reflect an assumption that hate speech should not be accepted.

Musk’s planned purchase of Twitter (which has a number of hurdles yet to overcome) raises fears among some that his self-identification as a “free speech absolutist” may reverse the small strides Twitter has made in addressing hate speech.

If Musk, who is presumed to be the richest person on earth and who is known to be a micromanager, chooses to imprint on Twitter his vision of absolute free speech, we should expect the limited efforts to police the worst content will be diminished or eliminated.

Of course, Musk would not be the final arbiter of what is acceptable. He may be the richest person on earth and Twitter may be among the most powerful communications platforms ever known, but they are still subject to government oversight.

Among the challenges, of course, is that Twitter, like the rest of the internet, effectively knows no national boundaries. So, while the United States is lenient toward extreme speech, different countries take a different approach.

For example, Canada’s Parliament is considering two proposals to make it illegal to deny or diminish the historical facts of the Holocaust. Legislation like this – as well as existing hate crimes laws that prohibit the targeting of identifiable groups – will inevitably come up against transnational norms set by platforms like Twitter. Will social media platforms face endless legal challenges? Or will the sheer volume of offences make it impossible to challenge any but the most outrageous affronts?

Canadians have always had a different approach to free speech than our American cousins. Our Parliament, like many in Europe, recognizes limitations in the interest of national harmony. These often lead to contentious debates over where lines should be drawn. Introduce an anarchic, foreign-owned social media platform into the equation and these discussions become far more complicated.

These are difficult issues. In a perfect world, absolute free speech would be ideal, because, again in a perfect world, individuals themselves would balance their right to expression with their responsibilities as citizens of a pluralistic society. But, we do not live in a perfect world and some compulsion sadly seems necessary to prevent, say, outright incitement to murder or genocide.

Here, though, is something not difficult or complicated at all – we do not need legislation or philosophical debates around freedom in order to counter hate speech right now. In this space, over many years, we have argued that the best way to confront bad, or hateful, speech is not stifling that speech, but countering it with truth, compassion and decency. Silencing hatred (even if it were possible in the wired world) will not eliminate hatred. We are in a war of words, and more words, not fewer, should be our approach.

A magnificent case-in-point occurred in the past month.

After the student society of the University of British Columbia passed a resolution endorsing the boycott movement against Israel, Santa Ono, the president of the university, responded with a thoughtful statement condemning BDS.

Too often, destructive, hateful messages like anti-Israel boycott resolutions are met with silence, usually with the excuse that such resolutions or protests are legitimate expressions of free speech. Of course, they may well be. But this argument, which was used by UBC administrators and others in the past, misses the point. Free speech does not mean the right to have one’s opinions uncontested. As Ono’s statement makes clear, both sides have a right to have their voices heard. That is free speech.

At a time when too many campuses across North America are roiling with anti-Israel spectacles, the significance of a statement like Ono’s did not go unnoticed. In fact, the university president received a letter from another president. Isaac Herzog, the president of Israel, wrote a “Dear Santa” letter, thanking Ono for his unequivocal statement.

That Israel’s head of state would intervene to express gratitude for Ono’s statement is itself a statement of how serious the threats are from uncontested hate speech. But it also reminds us that we do not need legislation or courts to stand up – as individuals and as a community – against egregious attacks. Every person has a voice. Some use it to spread misinformation and hatred. Others use it for good.

Criminalize Holocaust denial?

Criminalizing Holocaust denial would draw a moral line in the sand, say two advocates for legal action, but a lawyer and Canadian-Israeli former member of the Knesset has reservations.

Michal Cotler-Wunsh, head of the Nefesh B’Nefesh Institute for Aliyah Policy and Strategy and a former Israeli parliamentarian, acknowledged free speech concerns but focused more on the need for evidence-based decision-making before criminalizing those who question historical facts around the Shoah. She also noted that the countries that have adopted criminal sanctions against those who spread historical fabrications – Germany and France, for example – are among the very places where antisemitism is at its worst.

Sacha Ghozlan, a French legal expert and former president of the Union des étudiants juifs de France (Union of French Jewish Students), dismissed free speech concerns and warned against confusing cause and correlation between antisemitism and legal proscriptions.

“I don’t think you can draw a line between rising antisemitism in its new forms and the fact that a country has developed legislation to address rising Holocaust denial,” Ghozlan said.

Dr. Carson Phillips, managing director of the Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, in Toronto, generally agreed with Ghozlan. Holocaust denial and expressions of hatred should not be protected grounds based on free speech arguments, he said.

“I don’t see this so much as a freedom of speech,” he said. “This is really an abuse of speech.… Does the listener have to be exposed to hate speech and an abuse of free speech?”

He argued that “putting a fence around free speech” is legitimate in cases where historical revisionism can lead to expressions of hatred.

The three speakers were panelists in an event presented by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) March 29, titled Perspectives on Criminalizing Holocaust Denial.

A private member’s bill introduced in Parliament by Saskatchewan Conservative MP Kevin Waugh would amend the Criminal Code section that prohibits inciting hatred “against an identifiable group” to include “communication of statements, other than in private conversation, that wilfully promote antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust.”

Phillips contextualized Holocaust denial as a threat to Canadian society.

“The Holocaust is often [viewed] as being one of the foundational cornerstones of modern human rights and an attack on the Holocaust is certainly an attack on Canadian values and Canadian democracy and it needs to be taken very seriously,” he said.

While he supports criminalization, he acknowledged that this is only a part of the solution.

“I am an educator,” he said, adding that education has to exist alongside legal prohibitions.

“To me, it’s not an either/or situation, it’s a combination,” he said. “I see this as really strengthening and working together.”

Legislating against Holocaust denial would send a societal message, Phillips argued.

“It’s really important to draw a moral line,” he said. “In Canada, where we are a pluralistic society with strong democratic values, I think this is one example of a way of being able to draw a moral line in the sand and being able to say there are certain abuses of free speech that will not be tolerated and for very good reasons because we know where this can lead – obviously, to the Holocaust. But also looking at it from the perspective that Holocaust denial is a form [of], and leads to, antisemitism but it is also an attack on democratic values, which we value so much within the Canadian context.”

Ghozlan said that social media companies have faced calls to pull down expressions of hatred and Holocaust denial, but have often demurred based on the free speech assurances of the U.S. Constitution.

“But it’s not freedom of speech, it’s fake news,” he said. Advocates need to “level up pressure on social media, explaining to them that Holocaust denial is not about freedom of speech but it’s about an abuse of freedom of speech,” he said.

Cotler-Wunsh, former Blue and White party member of the Knesset and Canadian-raised step-daughter of legal scholar and former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler, said she has always been a fighter against antisemitism. But she raised red flags around the issue of free expression and focused more narrowly on whether a prohibition on Holocaust denial would have the desired outcome.

“Does the criminalization of Holocaust denial in fact meet the goal of combating antisemitism?” she asked. Banning Holocaust denial – which is easily debunked – may simply be a feel-good act that is “low-hanging fruit” in the battle against anti-Jewish hate and might detract from the bigger responsibility to remain vigilant, contest mistruths in the marketplace of ideas and educate, rather than merely seek to silence, she said.

Canada already has fairly robust legal consequences for hate expressions and Cotler-Wunsh warned that new laws that are difficult to administer, or that sit on the books without being enforced, could have the opposite of the intended effect.

By example, she said, a recent controversy around the Holocaust represents a missed opportunity. After Whoopi Goldberg said on the TV show The View that the Holocaust “was not about race,” she was suspended from the show for a period.

“I would have argued, if anybody would have asked me, that that was a great, great missed opportunity,” said Cotler-Wunsh. It was “exactly the moment to educate the millions of viewers of that show and be able to utilize that opportunity to engage in what the Holocaust was about.”

Education, while slow, is the only answer, she contended.

“At the end of the day, education is the key and that is one of the hardest things to say because it actually is the longest process,” said Cotler-Wunsh. “There is no quick fix in education.”

Where compulsion should be exercised, she said, is on social media platforms, which she said should adopt and implement the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism.

She worries that passing legislation against Holocaust denial might let elected officials off the hook. She imagines legislators thinking, “Oh we’ve done something. We confronted antisemitism, when in fact data and empirics may show that criminalizing Holocaust denial hasn’t actually made a dent in the rising antisemitism in Europe 30 years [after some countries criminalized it].”

Cotler-Wunsh, Ghozlan and Phillips were in discussion with Emmanuelle Amar, director of policy and research in CIJA’s Quebec office. The event was opened and closed by Jeff Rosenthal, co-chair of the national board of CIJA.

“Rainbow Maccabees” talk

Participants in the Jan. 19 event Rainbow Maccabees: The LGBTQ+ Jews Leading the Fight Against Jew-Hate, included, clockwise from top left, Blake Flayton, moderator David Sachs, Eve Barlow and Ben M. Freeman. (screenshot)

Blake Flayton arrived at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., four years ago, from a progressive home where ideas were fodder for passionate debate and disagreement. He anticipated vibrant engagement and free- flowing discussion on campus. Instead, he came head-on with a progressive culture that viewed free thinking as apostasy.

It took Flayton some time to assimilate the cognitive dissonance he experienced when he realized his political cohort had an ideology that rejected dissent – and an almost universal antipathy to Israel.

“I believed them, because how could I not?” he recalled. “I figured to myself, if I agree with these people on A through Y, I must also agree with them on Z. They plant these pervasive lies into the heads of young Jews that your community lied to you, your community betrayed you, your community brainwashed you into believing something horrible and we are here to save you from it. Sounds awfully like Christianity, right? We are here to redeem you from that so that we can all walk into a more blessed future. It has such ancient themes.”

Flayton was one of three young Jews, all members of the LGBTQ+ community, who participated virtually in a Canada-wide panel discussion on Jan. 19 called Rainbow Maccabees: The LGBTQ+ Jews Leading the Fight Against Jew-Hate. They speculated on why an apparently disproportionate number of the rising young stars in the pro-Israel movement come from the queer community.

Flayton, co-founder of the New Zionist Congress and recently appointed director of new media for the Jewish Journal, was joined by Eve Barlow, a Scottish-born, Los Angeles-based music journalist, and Ben M. Freeman, an educator and the author of Jewish Pride, who is also Scottish and is now based in Hong Kong. They met in conversation with Ottawa-area writer David Sachs, in an event funded by Congregation Beth Shalom of Ottawa Legacy Fund and a Jewish Federation of Ottawa micro-grant. It was supported by 11 national, regional and local Jewish organizations across Canada.

Left-leaning social and political spaces are where gays and lesbians first found widespread social acceptance. For queer Jews, this longtime safe harbour has become less welcoming – and this might account for why a seemingly disproportionate number of the new, young activists standing up to anti-Jewish hatred come from the LGBTQ+ community, Flayton speculates.

“I think it might be because we are naturally more likely to be exposed to progressive spaces and, therefore, we are more likely to find fault and to see the flaws of said progressive spaces,” he explained.

Freeman said being an openly gay man may give him an advantage in standing up to Jew-hate. LGBTQ+ people have been forced to advocate for themselves, he said, while the prevailing tendency, in some Jewish circles, is to keep one’s head down and not make trouble.

The hypocrisy progressive activists often display in their treatment of Jewish people versus LGBTQ+ or other minority communities is something Freeman has faced.

“When I tell people that I’m gay, the first thing they say to me is, what are your pronouns? Are you gay, are you queer, are you LGBTQ+? They want me to define my own identity,” he said. “But when I tell people that, as a Jew, I don’t identify as white, although I understand that I benefit from the advantage of being perceived as white, I am immediately told, no that’s incorrect. That hypocrisy you just can’t ignore.”

Barlow became politically engaged based on her own experiences in progressive British spaces – particularly seeing non-Jewish friends enthusiastically embrace the antisemitic Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

“I saw the hypocrisy with people who claim to be about morally righteous causes and liberalism and who have this screaming a blind spot when it comes to anti-Jewish bias,” Barlow said.

As Jews and as queer individuals, Barlow and her co-panelists embody characteristics that are not always welcome in today’s progressive environment, she said.

“Intellectualism and individual thought is discouraged,” said Barlow. “We are doing what so many people in social justice spaces have been actively discouraged from doing, which is having our own ideas about what we think is right and wrong.”

Barlow stressed that she has had to pick her battles, in part because she realizes that tormenting Jews online, rather than good-faith debate or actual persuasion, is the goal for many.

“The more that you are on the other side of antisemitism, the more you understand the love that people who hate Jews have for picking on the Jew and tripping the Jew up and making the Jew feel small and bad,” she said. “It’s this pleasure that they get out of their antisemitic rhetoric.”

In the antisemitic mind, “the Jew” takes the shape of whatever the perpetrator fears most, said Freeman.

“It’s not about us as Jews, it’s about the ideas of Jews,” he said. “If you are a society which is positioning itself as capitalist, the Jew can represent communism. If you are a society that is communist, you can frame the Jew as the capitalist. If you’re a society which views white people as the apex predators, then Jews are white. If you’re a society that views non-white people as conspiring to bring down Western society, white society, then the Jew is not white.… All these different forms share a common core. They are saying basically the same things about us, expressed in a slightly different language.”

As a people who have maintained a particular identity across millennia and continents, Jews exemplify a stubbornness that resists assimilation, which can enflame some people. Similarly, because Jewish security and social flourishing has been most assured in liberal, democratic societies, Jews have a vested interest in perpetuating stable societies, so are often targeted by those who seek to subvert them.

“There is a very strong association between antisemitism and illiberal ideologies, ideologies that hold contempt and disdain for institutions of liberal democracy and that hold contempt for the ideas that come from liberal democracy, like meritocracy, like freedom of speech, like academic freedom, like gender equality, etc., etc.,” said Flayton. “Jews have often been portrayed, or at least been treated, as a proxy for these institutions.… Today, there is illiberalism bursting out of every corner, from the farthest you can go left on the spectrum to the farthest you can go right and everywhere in between. There is a rise in populism, there is a rise in anti-intellectualism, there is a rise in anti-establishmentism and it’s been replaced with conspiracy thinking and grievance politics.”

Throughout Jewish history, Flayton continued, there have been repeated attempts by various ideologies to convince Jews that they will be better off if they abandon their uniqueness and assimilate into the new orthodoxy – or, conversely, that the Jews’ refusal to do so is the primary inhibitor of progress or the impediment to utopia.

“Of course, that’s never the case,” he said, citing instances from the Hellenizing ancient Greeks in the Hanukkah story, to the Christians who are convinced that Jews are holding humanity back from salvation by refusing to accept Jesus, to the Soviets, who camouflaged antisemitism in the guise of anti-Zionism.

Today, said Flayton, this takes the form of Jews being told that, if they only reject Israel or check their Zionism at the door, they will “be granted a seat at this table of diversity, equity and inclusion and that everything will be grand and the Jews will be protected, if only they give up their birthright to the land of Israel.”

He concluded: “It never works and, in fact, the Jews who were so vehement are not spared from antisemitism at all, because once the ideology has succeeded there is no longer any use for them.”

The event opened with greetings from Idan Roll, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, who is himself a young, gay Jew.

Who stops the hate?

Taylor Owen speaks at the third annual Simces and Rabkin Family Dialogue on Human Rights, Nov. 9. (screenshot)

Canada, like most of the world, is behind in addressing the issue of hate and violence-inciting content online. In attempting to confront this challenge, as the federal government will do with a new bill in this session of Parliament, it will be faced with conundrums around where individual freedom of expression ends and the right of individuals and groups to be free from hateful and threatening content begins.

The ethical riddles presented by the topic were the subject of the third annual Simces and Rabkin Family Dialogue on Human Rights, Nov. 9, in an event titled Is Facebook a Threat to Democracy? A Conversation about Rights in the Digital Age.

The annual dialogue was created by Jewish Vancouverites Zena Simces and her husband Dr. Simon Rabkin. It was presented virtually for the second year in a row, in partnership with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

The featured presenter was Taylor Owen, who is the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications, the founding director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, and an associate professor in the Max Bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. He presented in conversation with Jessica Johnson, editor-in-chief of The Walrus magazine.

The advent of the internet was seen as a means to upend the control of a society’s narrative from established media, governments and other centralized powers and disperse it into the hands of anyone with access to a computer and the web. Instead, as the technology has matured, online power has been “re-concentrating” into a small number of online platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which now have more global reach and cultural power than any preexisting entity.

“Understanding them and how they work, how they function, what their incentives are, what their benefits are, what their risks are, is really important to democratic society,” said Owen.

These are platforms that make money by selling ads, so it is in their interest to keep the largest number of people on the platform for the longest time possible, all while collecting data about users’ behaviours and interests, Owen said. These demands prioritize content that is among the most divisive and extreme and, therefore, likely to draw and keep audiences engaged.

The sheer volume of posts – in every language on earth – almost defies policing, he said. For example, in response to public and governmental demands that the company address proliferating hate content and other problematic materials, Facebook has increased resources aimed at moderating what people post. However, he said, 90% of the resources dedicated to content moderation on Facebook are focused on the United States, even though 90% of Facebook users are in countries outside of the United States.

A serious problem is that limitations on speech are governed by every country differently, while social media, for the most part, knows no borders.

Canada has a long precedent of speech laws, and Parliament is set to consider a controversial new bill intended to address some of the dangers discussed in the dialogue. But, just as the issues confounded easy answers in the discussion between Owen and Johnson, attempts to codify solutions into law will undoubtedly result in fundamental disagreements over the balancing of various rights.

“Unlike in some countries, hate speech is illegal here,” said Owen. “We have a process for adjudicating and deciding what is hate speech and holding people who spread it liable.”

The United States, on the other hand, has a far more libertarian approach to free expression.

An example of a country attempting to find a middle path is the approach taken by Germany, he said, but that is likely to have unintended consequences. Germany has decreed, and Owen thinks Canada is likely to emulate, a scenario where social media companies are liable for statements that represent already illegal speech – terrorist content, content that incites violence, child exploitative content, nonconsensual sharing of images and incitement to violence.

Beyond these overtly illegal categories is a spectrum of subjectively inappropriate content. A single media platform trying to accommodate different national criteria for acceptability faces a juggling act.

“The United States, for example, prioritizes free speech,” he said. “Germany, clearly, and for understandable historical reasons, prioritizes the right to not be harmed by speech, therefore, this takedown regime. Canada kind of sits in the middle. Our Charter [of Rights and Freedoms] protects both. The concern is that by leaning into this takedown regime model, like Germany, you lead platforms down a path of over-censoring.”

If Facebook or YouTube is threatened with fines as high as, say, five percent of their global revenue if they don’t remove illegal speech within 24 hours, their incentive is to massively over-censor, he said.

Owen said this will have an effect on the bottom line of these companies, just as mandatory seatbelts in cars, legislation to prevent petrochemical companies from polluting waterways and approval regimes governing the pharmaceutical industry added costs to those sectors. Unfortunately, the nuances of free speech and the complexities of legislating it across international boundaries make this an added burden that will probably require vast resources to oversee.

“It’s not like banning smoking … where you either ban it or you allow it and you solve the problem,” said Owen. There are potentially billions of morally ambiguous statements posted online. Who is to adjudicate, even if it is feasible to referee that kind of volume?

Rabkin opened the dialogue, explaining what he and Simces envisioned with the series.

“Our aim is to enhance the understanding and create an opportunity for dialogue on critical human rights issues, with the hope of generating positive actions,” he said.

This year’s presentation, he said, lies at a crucial intersection of competing rights.

“Do we, as a society, through our government, curtail freedom of expression, recognizing that some of today’s unsubstantiated ideas may be tomorrow’s accepted concepts?” he asked. “Unregulated freedom of speech, however, may lead to the promulgation of hate towards vulnerable elements and components of our society, especially our children. Do we constrain surveillance capitalism or do we constrain the capture of our personal data for commercial purposes? Do we allow big tech platforms such as Facebook to regulate themselves and, in so doing, does this threaten our democratic societies? If or when we regulate big tech platforms, who is to do it? And what will be the criteria? And what should be the penalties for violation of the legislation?”

Speaking at the conclusion of the event, Simces acknowledged the difficulty of balancing online harms and safeguarding freedom of expression.

“The issue is, how do we mitigate harm and maximize benefits?” she asked. “While there is no silver bullet, we do need to focus on how technology platforms themselves are structured. Facebook and other platforms often put profits ahead of the safety of people and the public good.… There is a growing recognition that big tech cannot be left to monitor itself.”

The full program can be viewed at humanrights.ca/is-facebook-a-threat-to-democracy.

Lean into our identity

Left to right: Eve Barlow, Noa Tishby and Bari Weiss participate in a Nov. 3 panel hosted by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies. (screenshot)

In a time of burgeoning antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Jews need to lean into their identities, says a leading voice in the fight against anti-Jewish racism.

“In other instances in Jewish history, we believed, wrongly, that the way to get acceptance, the way to get along, was to self-abnegate and erase who we are,” said Bari Weiss. “If there has been one lesson in thousands of years of Jewish history, it’s that that is a terrible strategy.”

Weiss is a former writer at the New York Times. She resigned her position there, citing a hostile work environment, and is the author of the book How to Fight Antisemitism. She was speaking as part of a panel convened Nov. 3 by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies (FSWC). She was joined by Eve Barlow, a pop-culture writer who grew up in the United Kingdom and has worked in music journalism as deputy editor for NME New Musical Express but who, most recently, is using her voice to stand up against antisemitism. Also on the panel was Noa Tishby, an Israeli-American actor, producer and author of the book Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth.

The three women have become prominent voices, online and off, in the fight against the latest upsurge of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The Nov. 3 discussion took place in Los Angeles, where all three women are now based. They were joined by Michael Levitt, president and chief executive officer of FCSW, and the panel was moderated by journalist Jamie Gutfreund, both of whom traveled from Toronto for the event, titled State of the Union: Fighting Back Against Hate.

Weiss said the first step in confronting the problem must be vocal and unequivocal pride in Judaism and Zionism.

“The mere act of doing that is radical and contagious and changes the whole conversation,” she said. Doing grassroots work building alliances is another overlooked key to confronting the issue, she added.

“Let’s take a page from the book of our political opponents,” she said. “How have they done what they have done? Deep work inside communities on a grassroots level.”

The Black Lives Matter organization – not the wider movement, Weiss stressed, but the leadership of the organization – has exhibited problematic approaches to Jews and Israel. But no one should concede that there are not plenty of African-Americans (and Canadians) who are allies, she said.

“There are huge parts of the Black community that the Jewish community in America can still be allied with; there are other parts of it that we would be extremely foolish to try and ally ourselves with,” Weiss said. “There are other communities though. I’m thinking about Hispanics, I’m thinking about Hindus, I’m thinking about all kinds of other groups that I don’t see our community actively and affirmatively reaching out to and trying to build relationships with based on our mutual interests.”

Weiss warned that the polarization of politics in the United States and across the West does not bode well for Jews.

“That puts Jews in a deeply uncomfortable position because, I believe, where the political centre thrives, Jews thrive because, if the political centre is thriving, it means that there is room for nuance, that there is room for disagreement, that it’s not a kind of Manichaean, black-and-white, pure-impure, red-blue thinking. Right now, that is the world we are living in and – guess what? – we Jews don’t easily slot into either of those categories. We are both hyper-successful and also we are the victims of more hate crimes than any other group in this country. We are white-passing and yet white supremacists hate us because we are the greatest trick the devil has ever played. We predate the newfangled notions of ethnicity, of race, of religion. We are before all of that. I think that there is a dovetailing between fighting antisemitism and fighting Jew-hate, and standing up for liberalism, broadly defined, because, where liberalism thrives … Jews thrive too.”

Much of the panel’s discussion was about flourishing anti-Jewish hatred online, but Barlow warned that no one should assume there is a substantive difference between what happens online and what happens offline.

“We have seen how [online hatred] has contributed vastly to the amount of physical violence that happens offline and you would have to be extremely ignorant to … say right now that what happens online does not have offline ramifications,” said Barlow.

Tishby agreed, but suggested that offline violence may not be inspired by online hate but rather is part of a broader battle.

“Social media is just the tip of the iceberg of a well-funded political campaign that has been waged against Israel in the past 20 years,” Tishby said. “This is not by accident. This happened by design. The language, everything that we are seeing right now, originated in the Durban conference against racism in Durban in 2001 that was so antisemitic that the U.S. and Israel pulled out of it…. They have been putting a lot of money, a lot of effort and a lot of groundwork in going into these social justice causes, going to Black Lives Matter, going to the Women’s March, going to gay and lesbian marches in San Francisco, going to unions and actually slowly changing their minds and poisoning them basically with lies to make them shift against Israel. These are nefarious powers and nefarious countries that want to dismantle the Jewish state, period, end of story.”

screenshot - At a panel discussion hosted by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, journalist Bari Weiss warned of the potential dangers in pressuring social media giants like Facebook to censor certain messages — At a panel discussion hosted by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, journalist Bari Weiss warned of the potential dangers in pressuring social media giants like Facebook to censor certain messages. *(screenshot)*

Acknowledging that some of the most prominent anti-Zionists are themselves Jews, Barlow called the phenomenon “koshering antisemitism.” However, she advocates a compassionate response.

“I believe that how we deal with them has to be different than how we deal with non-Jewish antisemites because they are part of our people, we love them regardless and they are part of our tribe and I think we have to really understand the nuances of why people become anti-Zionist,” Barlow said. “I think a lot of what I see is trauma from the Jewish community and a rejection of the Jewish community that presents itself in this anti-Israel fashion.”

She offered up what she acknowledged as a controversial joke: “Don’t blame Israel for your daddy issues.”

Tishby laid much of the blame for anti-Zionist Jews on the Jewish education system.

“We need to take a good look at ourselves and what we did in order to allow for this,” she said. “We took our kids, put them through … this beautiful Jewish education, we give them all the values and we tell them Israel is the most amazing people and place in the world and we send them off to college without ever acknowledging the concepts of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ‘apartheid.’ We let college talk to them about this for the first time.… Nobody ever [said], let’s talk about why people call Israel an apartheid state. Let’s have a conversation about this, not when they get to college, [but] when the kid is 12, 13, 14, bring it up. Say, here’s the argument, here is where it’s completely false, here are the facts. Let’s talk about what’s happening in the West Bank.”

Weiss, who has spent her career in mainstream media, said those media outlets are “the most intellectually homogenous environment I’ve ever been in in my entire life.” But she warned against swallowing conspiracy theories.

“I think sometimes people in the Jewish community who are frustrated by this bias imagine some kind of secret conspiratorial meetings where they’re cooking up how to screw the Jews and the Jewish state,” Weiss said. “It’s just a reflection of the consistent bias among all the people that work there.”

The power of social media giants like Facebook and their haphazard responses to hate speech are a problem, Weiss said, but Jews and Zionists may be hastening their own defeat by pressuring them to censor certain messages.

“I think it is a genuinely knotty and complicated question whether or not the Jewish community should be going to these big tech companies and saying, in the same way that you’re censoring x, y and z, also censor the people who hate us,” she said. “My fear is that, in asking these companies [to] do more censorship on our behalf, then, in a way, we are actually feeding the fuel that will come to burn all of us. The ideology that is currently dictating the choices at many of these companies is an ideology that says Zionism is racism. That is part of that broader worldview.… What happens six months from now when … they want to go and censor Zionists because now they have decided that Zionism, to follow the Soviet lie, is a form of racism? Would we be happy with that? I don’t think so.”

The full video can be viewed by registering at friendsofsimonwiesenthalcenter.com.

Taming online world

Two bills recently introduced by the federal government are aimed at reducing online hate and putting some controls on the anarchic world of online commentary. Some, like Jewish community organizations, have been calling for stronger rules to deal with rampant online vitriol. Others, like civil liberties groups, balk at any incursions into unfettered expression. It might not matter anyway.

Bill C-36 is intended to crack down on online hate, something Jewish community advocates and many others have been supporting since a similar section of the Canadian Human Rights Act was repealed in 2013 over concerns around free expression. Groups like the Canadian Civil Liberties Association have expressed apprehensions over the new bill, as they had over the repealed section.

The bill would make it an offence to make statements on the internet that are “likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.” It would target commentary that is “motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other similar factor.”

The bill defines hate as “the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than dislike or disdain,” and is not merely language that “discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends.”

A different piece of legislation, Bill C-10, is also aimed at online content. In this case, the government would require platforms, such as social media and video streaming sites, to enforce guidelines that extend Canadian content rules, which have long governed radio and TV, to the internet. Again, critics say this is an infringement on the freedom of expression.

Both bills attempt to walk a line between free speech and the government’s attempts to encourage particular outcomes. They are likely to please some and they are likely to offend many. Both are probably founded on the best intentions, but, as critics have pointed out, Canada already has hate-speech laws that apply online and off.

Given the chaotic efforts of social media companies themselves to enforce guidelines for conduct and to curtail hate speech, it is difficult to imagine how legislation would provide a clearer guide to online etiquette. More worrying is the possible chaos that human rights tribunals and courts might have thrust upon them if Canadians begin reporting thousands or millions of problematic online statements.

We should be wary of heavy-handedness not only because the proposed laws hand a lot of arbitrary decision-making power to government or judicial overseers, but also because it is unwise to bury hateful ideas. The best way to confront hate and extremism is to shine a light on it, not to force it onto emerging platforms created specifically to give shelter to the most extreme people and ideas.

However, this all might be moot because Parliament has recessed for the summer. If, as many speculate, a federal election is called before Parliament resumes, these pieces of legislation would die. If the Liberals were to be reelected, they could reintroduce the bills. Conservatives have charged that the two proposed laws are “virtue signaling,” as much about campaign fodder as substantive change. The NDP and Bloc voted in favour of Bill C-10, with the NDP asserting that the “modernization of the law is necessary for [the] cultural ecosystem.”

Whatever the fate of these two bills, the fight against hate (online and off) will continue. We have long contended that the most powerful response to hateful words is more words – words that heal and educate. The online world is a jungle of facts and fictions, wonder and woe, insights and insanity. It is, perhaps, like the larger world, only condensed onto a small screen that amplifies the most fringe and sensational voices. Criminalizing those voices may or may not bring the result most of us seek, which is a kinder world. That said, contesting the worst of the online world is a Sisyphean task that we cannot abandon.

The medium is the message, said Marshall McLuhan, who died long before ordinary people heard the word “internet.” The anonymity and unruliness of the internet has no doubt helped to create a toxicity in our culture. But, while we should take seriously dangerous ideas online, we should remember that these are symptoms of strains in society and not solely products of the technology. Addressing online hate demands returning to first things and addressing all forms of hatred and division in our society. Fixing the online dialogue demands changing minds – and that has been the challenge since long before the advent of the internet.

Bias in Mideast reporting

Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh knows firsthand that foreign correspondents routinely send back reports that are wildly prejudicial against Israel. He spoke to HonestReporting Canada cofounder and chairman Jonas Prince in an April 25 webinar. (screenshot)

Western reporters “parachute” into Israel and routinely send back reports that are wildly biased against Israel, while ignoring panoramic human rights violations and corruption in the Palestinian territories. This is the firsthand observation of an Arab Israeli journalist with decades of experience shepherding foreign reporters around the region.

Khaled Abu Toameh is a senior distinguished fellow at the Gatestone Institute. For almost two decades, he has been a reporter on Palestinian affairs for the Jerusalem Post. He spoke to a Canadian audience April 25, in a webinar presented by HonestReporting Canada, an organization promoting fairness and accuracy in Canadian media coverage of Israel and the Middle East. He was interviewed by the organization’s cofounder and chairman, Jonas Prince.

“It’s not about being pro-Israel or pro-Palestine,” Toameh said. “It’s about telling the truth. Being able to … portray a balanced picture to your readers.”

Toameh has worked with hundreds of international reporters and journalists, helping guide them around the complexities of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. But, he said, complexity is not something for which many journalists are looking.

“I would say that most of them, the majority, they look at this conflict as a conflict between good guys and bad guys,” he said. “The good guys are the poor Palestinians and the bad guys are Israel…. Some of them come to this part of the world already with this perception and it’s like, Khaled, please don’t confuse us with the facts.”

Many of these journalists wake up in the morning and search for any story that reflects negatively on Israel, he said.

“Why is it that many of these journalists turn a blind eye to corruption in the Palestinian Authority, to lack of freedom of speech under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and under Hamas in Gaza? These are questions that we need to ask,” he said.

If, during the Oslo process, Western media had more broadly reported the misuse of billions in foreign aid to Palestine, Toameh said, Western governments might have been pressured to hold Yasser Arafat and other leaders to account.

“Only a few journalists did,” he said. “Yasser Arafat got away with the corruption. He deprived his people of the international aid. That played into the hands of Hamas and look where we are now. It’s a total mess.”

Toameh said some foreign reporters tell him that they are afraid.

“We can’t report [about Palestinian corruption] because we need to go back to Ramallah, we need to go back to Gaza, it’s dangerous,” Toameh paraphrased. “I tell them, excuse me, if anyone should be afraid, it’s me, the local Arab journalist who is living here. You guys have embassies, you have consulates, you have your own governments that will protect you. Secondly, why are you going to cover a conflict if you’re going to allow yourselves to be intimidated by one party? You will never be able to do your job. You need to quit journalism and go find yourself another job.”

He added: “Ironically, some of these journalists sometimes tell me, we can’t report anything that reflects negatively on the PLO, Hamas, because it’s not like Israel, it’s not a democracy.”

Other, less physical, fears also inhibit balanced reporting, Toameh said.

“Some of the foreign journalists are afraid that, if they report positive stories about Israel, they will be accused of working for the Jewish lobby or they will be accused of being Zionist agents or they will be accused of being anti-Palestinian or propagandists,” he said. “That’s how it is. That’s the last thing they want. But there are many good stories out here. There is no shortage of good stories. The question we always need to ask ourselves is, who wakes up in the morning and decides what the story is? Who sets the agenda?”

Some of the reporters, whom Toameh calls “parachute journalists,” arrive preprogrammed with false information.

“I’ve met other journalists who have asked me to take them to see the mass graves in Jenin where Jews massacred thousands of Palestinians in 2002,” he said, referring to a false report of a mass killing, a lie that remains today, unaltered, on the website of the BBC. “You can’t send someone who is covering sports in France to do stories over here. It doesn’t work like that.”

Palestinian society does not have the tradition of press freedom or civil criticism that democracies enjoy, he said. Journalists in Palestine operate under very different constraints than those in Israel or the West.

“I don’t think there’s anything unusual about reporting about corruption, for example, in the Palestinian Authority,” he said. “Why is that considered a taboo? Why is it that, when an Arab writes about Arab corruption, he becomes a Zionist agent? While, if a Jew writes about the corruption of the Israeli government, he’s praised as a liberal, as progressive and things like that? I can understand where it comes from, because I come from a culture – the Arab culture, the Muslim culture, the Palestinian culture, if you want – where criticism of the government and the president and the prime minister, or of your people, is considered an act of treason.”

While Palestinian and overseas media may shy away from reporting Palestinian corruption, ordinary Palestinians are fully aware of the situation, Toameh said. Protests during a short-lived “Palestinian Spring” were crushed by Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. And Palestinians know there could be repercussions for any complaints.

“Not only are people afraid of being arrested or killed or harassed by these two governments – the Palestinian Authority and Hamas – they’re also afraid of losing their jobs,” he said. “The Palestinian Authority is the largest employer in the West Bank and people are worried. They don’t want to lose their jobs. They don’t want their relatives to be deprived of jobs, so that’s one of the reasons you don’t see this intifada or uprising against bad government.”

Toameh has been lionized as a hero for the work he does. But he dismisses the accolades.

“There is nothing heroic about telling the truth,” he said. “I don’t understand. Since when are people awarded for telling the truth, for not lying?”

Not everyone admires Toameh’s work, of course. Since he began uncovering Palestinian corruption for the Post, in 2002, foreign outlets that used to employ his expertise have abandoned him.

“I lost 95% of my work with the international media,” he said. “Why? Because I dared to challenge the narrative that says, in this conflict, the Israelis are the bad guys and the Palestinians are the good people and we don’t want to hear anything [different]…. I don’t fit into the category of journalists who are known for their severe criticism of Israel and who are ready to give the Palestinians a pass on everything. In that sense, I consider myself to be more pro-Palestinian than many of them. Being pro-Palestinian does not mean that you spew hatred against Israel. Being pro-Palestinian, for me, is when you demand reform, democracy, good government for the Palestinians … when you criticize Palestinian leaders for arresting journalists, for arresting social media users, for skimming the money of their own people. That’s what is really pro-Palestinian.”

Toameh was speaking before the latest conflagration between Hamas and Israel. But the long-range possibility of people remains dependent on the whims of two Palestinian factions.

“The Palestinian Authority, in public, say we support the two-state solution,” Toameh summarized. “But they are also saying, Israel must give us 100% of what Israel took in 1967, which means give me all of East Jerusalem, give me all of the West Bank, give me all of Gaza and then we will talk about the right of return for the Palestinian refugees and other issues. But give me 100% and there will be a deal.

“Hamas, on the other hand, have their own vision. They haven’t changed. I’ve been following Hamas from Day One. I was actually sitting in Gaza at the press conference when Hamas was established in 1988 and I give them credit for being very honest, very consistent and very clear about their strategy and it’s very simple. They say: listen folks, this land, all of it, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River is wakf land, land that belongs to the Muslim trust. No non-Muslim is entitled to any part of it. We want to replace Israel with an Islamic state and, if there are some Jews who would like to live as a minority under our new Islamic state, they are welcome. Otherwise, all of you get out of here or we will kill you and destroy you. These are the two visions that we have so far.”

Mike Fegelman, executive director of HonestReporting Canada, told the audience that, since its founding 17 years ago, the organization has inspired 2,500 corrections, retractions and apologies in different Canadian media outlets and has an overall success rate of 80%.

Court verdict on Grabowski

Jan Grabowski (photo from facebook.com/TheCJN)

A Polish court’s ruling that a Canadian Holocaust scholar must apologize for tarnishing the memory of a wartime mayor in Poland continues to reverberate around the world.

The case is being condemned by Jewish organizations and historians as an attack on free academic inquiry. Scholars warn the ruling could further chill an already touchy area of research: the role played by Poles in the murder of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.

In a long-awaited ruling on Feb. 9, a civil court in Warsaw ordered two prominent Holocaust scholars to apologize to an elderly woman who claimed they had defamed her late uncle over his wartime actions.

Prof. Jan Grabowski, an historian at the University of Ottawa, and Prof. Barbara Engelking, a sociologist and founder of the Polish Centre for Holocaust Research, were accused of defaming Edward Malinowski, the wartime mayor of Malinowo, a village in northeast Poland, by suggesting in a book that he delivered several dozen Jews to Nazi occupiers.

The professors were ordered to apologize for a passage in Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland, a two-volume work they co-edited, which the court said “violated Malinowski’s honour” by “providing inaccurate information.”

The court declined a demand for monetary damages of 100,000 Polish zlotys (about $34,000 Cdn) but ordered the scholars to apologize to Malinowski’s niece, 81-year-old Filomena Leszczynska, who brought the case; publish a statement on the website of the Centre for Holocaust Research; and correct the passage in any future edition.

Leszczynska had argued that her uncle had actually aided Jews and was acquitted of collaboration in 1950.

Grabowski, whose father survived the Holocaust, called the outcome “a sad day for the history of the Holocaust in Poland and beyond Poland. I have no idea what will be the consequences as well as the implications of this trial. But I can say for certain this thing will be studied for a long time by historians,” he told the Globe and Mail.

Prior to the verdict, he warned that, if the lawsuit were successful, “then basically it will mean the end to the independent writing of the history of the Holocaust in Poland.”

The professors were sued under a Polish law allowing for civil action against anyone claiming that the Polish nation or state was responsible for Nazi atrocities. The law was amended in 2018 to drop plans to criminalize the offence.

In her ruling, the judge said the decision “must not have a cooling effect on academic research,” but that is how it is being perceived.

As a senior tenured professor, the verdict, Grabowski conceded in a Postmedia interview from Poland, is “unpleasant. But, imagine you are a 25-year-old graduate student of history. Do you think you’re going to embark upon discovery of difficult history? I don’t think so.”

Grabowski and Engelking said they will appeal the ruling.

Mina Cohn, director of the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship at Carleton University in Ottawa, called the campaign against Grabowski and Engelking “ugly.”

“The Polish government’s attempt to discredit them, and to silence and distort the historical facts of the Holocaust in Poland is appalling,” Cohn told The CJN. “It endangers the basic right of the future freedom of historical research of the Holocaust in that country.”

She said that, as daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors with roots in Poland, “I find this blatant attempt by the Polish government to reject the reality of inherent antisemitism within Polish society before and during the Holocaust, and to discredit survivors’ testimonies, very offensive.”

For Prof. Piotr Wrobel, a specialist in Polish history at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, the case is an example of the current Polish government’s attempt to control the historical record.

“They try to shape the ‘official’ version and persecute people who do not share [it],” he told The CJN. “This is very sad.”

It was “very clearly” the intention of those behind the lawsuit “to freeze scholarly research into the Holocaust. This was supposed to be a warning. Young people should remember this. If your opinions [and] historical interpretations are different than the official ones, then do not touch the Holocaust,” Wrobel said. “There is a choice between comfort and truth.”

In a statement on Feb. 10, the University of Ottawa offered its “unwavering support” to Grabowski and his “widely respected” Holocaust research. The university called the verdict “unjust.”

“Prof. Grabowski’s critical examination of the fate of Polish Jews during World War II shows how knowledge of the past remains vitally relevant today,” said university president Jacques Frémont. “The impact his work has had in Poland, and the censorious reaction it has generated, demonstrates this truth.”

The university “emphatically supports” Grabowski’s “right to pursue historical inquiry unencumbered by state pressure, free from legal sanction and without fear of extrajudicial attack.”

In Israel, the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum decried the ruling as “an attack on the effort to achieve a full and balanced picture of the history of the Holocaust.”

Even before the verdict, David Silberklang, a senior Holocaust historian in Israel, said the libel case intended for the two scholars to be “sued into submission.”

The decision “damages an open and honest coming to terms with the past,” said Gideon Taylor, president of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which sponsors historical research on the Holocaust.

Taylor said Poland “must encourage open inquiry into its history, both the positive and the negative aspects.”

Canadian historian Frank Bialystok, who has written extensively about the Holocaust, sees the verdict against Grabowski and Engelking as a flipping of political extremes in Poland.

The murder of Jews in Poland, even after the war, was documented at the time. “This research was acceptable during the communist era as a weapon against nationalism,” said Bialystok. Now, the two professors are being “vilified” by the nationalist camp.

Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre said the ruling could have “a devastating impact on Holocaust research and education.” The organization said it is reaching out to senior government leaders, urging them to speak out against “Holocaust distortion in Poland.”

The American Historical Association went so far as to write Polish President Andrzej Duda, saying “a legal procedure is not the place to mediate historical debates” and urged Polish leaders to “uphold the rights of historians to investigate the past without legal harassment and with no fear of reprisals for making public their historical- and evidence-based findings.”

In 2018, Grabowski announced he was suing the government-funded group that backed Leszczynska’s libel case for allegedly libeling him. He claimed that the ultranationalist Polish League Against Defamation had itself defamed him by questioning his findings about the complicity of Poles in the wartime murder of Jews.

This article originally was published on facebook.com/TheCJN. For more on Prof. Jan Grabowski, see jewishindependent.ca/revealing-truth-elicits-threats.