The Arts for Hamas
Canadian Literati Promoting Terror
Today I’m pleased to welcome Brian Henry as a guest writer at Canadian Zionist Forum. Brian is writing here about support for Hamas in the publishing industry, a domain he knows well. I hope you appreciate his article, as much as I did. Please share and subscribe. If you are a paid subscriber, you can leave a comment
.Image: Guest Author Brian Henry
In Canada, it seems we have some 5,700-plus authors and artists, professors and publishers, willing to sign on to statements condemning Israel in its war with Hamas. To date, three such public statements have made the rounds in Canadian anti-Israel circles.
The best known (and mildest) is an open letter calling for charges to be dropped against the “pro-Palestinian” protesters who disrupted The Scotiabank Giller Prize ceremony. Some 1,700 writers and publishers have signed on. What’s not generally known, because the media doesn’t report it, is this letter calls on Israel to end its supposed “75-year occupation of Palestine.”
As it happens, Israel is 75 years old. In other words, the signatories consider all of Israel to be occupied Palestine, and they’d like Israel to kindly cease to exist. As to what would happen to the seven million Jews in Israel, the letter is silent.
The letter does not condemn Hamas’s atrocities. It fails to even mention Hamas, although Hamas started the current war.
The letter does call for “a release of all hostages,” both Israeli (who actually are hostages) and Palestinians held in Israel. Contrary to the letter, these Palestinians aren’t “hostages.” They’ve been detained for rioting and terrorism – activities ranging from rock-throwing to failed suicide bombings to multiple counts of murder.
The signatories want Israel to let the murderers loose. And if your goal is to remove Israel from the map, why not?
While the open letter calling for charges to be dropped against the Giller protesters does not come right out and endorse Palestinian “resistance,” the other two public statements floating about the Canadian arts world aren’t so shy.
The “Publishers for Palestine” open letter is an international effort with 416 signatories to date. As the book and magazine publishers signing on, helpfully add their home country, we know that forty-four of these pro-terror publishers are Canadian.
Plus, there is “Artists & Academics in Canada: Statement of Solidarity with Palestine” signed by some 4,000 individuals and organizations. This statement begins:
We, the undersigned artists, academics, and cultural workers, pledge our support for the Palestinian people in the face of over 75 years of Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, military occupation, and ethnic cleansing.
You get the gist – for its entire 75-year existence, Israel has been evil personified. That’s their justification for terror.
The letter goes on to argue in favour of Hamas’ atrocities on October 7. This is when terrorists went through southern Israel murdering 1,200 people – men, women and infants – beheading them, burning them alive, first torturing many of them, raping countless women, and recording much of it on social media for their own pleasure, and to torment the friends and family of their victims. In addition, the Hamas terrorists took 240 hostages, ranging in age from babies to grandmothers.
Some 4,000 Canadian “Artists & Academics” assert that such “resistance” is “a right guaranteed by international law” and that “the militant reaction from Palestinians in Gaza on October 7, 2023, is a result of decades of cruel and oppressive treatment.”
Yes, you understood that right – those babies the terrorists murdered, the mothers and fathers shot in front of their children, the 360 young people murdered at an outdoor music festival? It was their own fault.
You and I and other tax-payers across Canada pay the salaries for many of the “Artists and Academics” who supported the murder of babies and the rape of women by signing this statement. To take one signatory at random: Whippersnapper Gallery in Toronto is supported by the Canada Council, The City of Toronto, Ontario Trillium Foundation, and Ontario Council for the Arts.
Some 300 professors also signed this statement, plus The Canadian Lebanese Academic Forum, including some 50 more academics. So we can be assured that our kids are being well taught in universities.
Similarly, the “Publishers for Palestine Statement of Solidarity” begins: “We honour the courage, creativity, and resistance of Palestinians.”
They honour the resistance – this is their response to Hamas’s mass atrocities.
The statement goes on to say: “Now is the time to stand with Palestinians and step into a new era of anti-colonial resistance – an era that refuses the Oslo concessions and the normalization of ties with the Zionist state.”
In other words: Hurray for the terrorist “resistance” and forget Oslo. Forget peace. The signatories of this statement want Israel wiped off the map.
This statement is signed by some 44 Canadian publishers, bookstores, magazines and whatnot. Most you will have never heard of, but there are a few better-known names, such as ARC Poetry Magazine.
A couple of the organizations signing on to the “Publishers for Palestine Statement” have a history of anti-Israel obsession:
Canadian Dimension is a leftwing journal published out of Winnipeg. Like other “smash the state” organizations in Canada, it “acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada” – meaning we pay to keep Canadian Dimension publishing through our tax dollars.
Canadian Dimension published its first piece following the October 7 atrocities on October 8. In it, Larry Haiven wrote with great excitement that Hamas’s “incursion” into Israel could be a turning point in the conflict:
Not only has Hamas sent the message: you in Israel thought you had us bottled up; you thought you were safe, that you could ignore us; but you are not safe on your streets, in your offices, your homes, even your bomb shelters and panic rooms. But, with the hostage-taking, it has also sent the message: we can and we will come and drag you out of your safety and drag you into hell.
All of which Haiven clearly thinks is quite wonderful.
In a November 1 piece in Canadian Dimension, Sunera Thobani, a professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is just as enthusiastic:
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the Hamas attack on the Israeli military establishment and Israeli civilians that began on October 7, 2023, challenged the morality, legitimacy and legality of the settler colonial society.
That’s right, it wasn’t a terror attack that included burning infants alive, it was a challenge to Israel’s morality.
Canadian Dimension has also published numerous pieces by Chris Hedges who, like Thobani, asserts Palestinians “have a right to armed resistance under international law.” So beheading babies is apparently no problem.
Hedges also likes to compare Israel to the Nazis and goes so far as to compare Hamas to the Warsaw Ghetto fighters.
Of course, the Jews of Warsaw did not go rampaging through Germany, raping, torturing, and murdering. Nor were Warsaw Jews holding some 240 innocent Germans hostage. When they revolted, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters did so to avoid being shipped by cattle car to the Treblinka killing centre (history here). In contrast, Hamas’s motivation is the same as that of the Nazis: to kill Jews.
Hedges surely knows all this. But antisemites love finding the most offensive comparison possible; for them, Jew-baiting is always fun.
The far left Fernwood Press in Halifax (another signatory of the “Publishers for Palestine Statement”) has a similar unhealthy Israel obsession. It’s published a dozen anti-Israel books, including by such obvious antisemites as James Petras. (Here, for example.)
The Anti-Defamation League notes Petras “has stated U.S. presidents are at the mercy of ‘Jewish power,’ that Jews are ‘the greatest threat to world peace and humanity,’ and that Zionists were responsible for the global financial crisis in 2008.
In 2022, Fernwood added to its anti-Jewish catalogue with a collection of essays titled, Advocating for Palestine in Canada.
To give you a taste of what this book is about, in her essay, “Zionist loyalty and Euro-Jewish Whiteness,” Sheryl Nestel accuses Jews, and Canadian Jews in particular, of becoming racist so that we can be accepted as white.
Personally, no one’s offered this deal to me, nor have I accepted it. Neither has any other real life Jew. But Nestel isn’t writing about real people. Her Jews are a figment of her own imagination.
To avoid being recognized as an antisemite, authors typically substitute “Zionist” for “Jew,” but Nestel seems to believe the academic aura of her essay means she doesn’t need this fig leaf.
Nestel and academics like her are creating a mirror image of the so-called racial science of the 19th and early 20th Century. They claim to be anti-racist instead of pro-racist and denigrate whites instead of blacks. But it’s the same kind of thinking, and at the centre of both the old racist ideas and the new self-styled anti-racist ideas, Jews end up as villains.
Fernwood Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, Nova Scotia, and Manitoba. So again, we’re paying for this.
The Canada Council for the Arts is overseen by the Canadian Heritage Department. This is the same Department that gave $122,000 to the antisemite Laith Marouf to provide anti-racism training (money the department is now trying to get back – see here).
Canadian Heritage ought to go through these 5,700 organizations and individuals who have signed on to these public statements and see which of them are funded through the Arts Council. Surely, as with Malouf, it’s time to cut them off too.
Brian Henry teaches creative writing and publishes the Quick Brown Fox blog. He’s been a regular contributor to the TheJ.ca and has also contributed to The Line, the National Post, The Toronto Star, the (now defunct) Jewish Tribune, and the Engage and Harry’s Place websites in the UK. Read more of his pieces on Quick Brown Fox here.
Addendum – the three open statements and the signees:
Publishers for Palestine Statement of Solidarity here.
An Open Letter in Support of the Scotiabank Protestors at the Giller Prize Ceremony here.
Artists & Academics in Canada: Statement of Solidarity with Palestine here.
As we enter the 10th week of war in Israel, the importance of resilience is greater than ever. The
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