ON BOOKS, CENSORSHIP AND POLITICAL PRESSURE
Haroon Siddiqui

Toronto Star, Canada
March 16 2006

Just as the din of the Danish cartoon controversy – with its arguments
over freedom of speech, censorship and political or consumer pressures
– was dying down, several others with similar echoes have hit the
headlines.

The Toronto school board has joined those in York, Essex and Ottawa
in restricting access to a book about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Ontario Library Association had included Deborah Ellis’s Three
Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak in its list of 20
Canadian books for a province-wide program that encourages reading.

Students in Grades 4 to 6 will vote their choice in May for the Silver
Birch Award (others being the Blue Spruce, Red Maple and White Pine
awards for other age groups).

But the Canadian Jewish Congress argued that the book is not suitable
for young children, and called for its removal from the popular
program.

The librarians stood by their choice, backed by the Association of
Canadian Publishers, the Writers’ Union, the Playwrights Guild, PEN
Canada and the Freedom to Read Committee of the Book and Periodical
Council.

PEN director Alan Cumyn asked the Toronto board if it would “restrict
access to, for example, The Diary of Anne Frank or the more recent
Hannah’s Suitcase, which also deal with very dark subject matter,”
i.e. the Holocaust. Both books “have helped inspire and educate
countless children about the nature of our often difficult world.”

The age-appropriate argument, said Sheila Kauffman, owner of Another
Story, a Toronto children’s bookstore, is often a way of suppressing
certain viewpoints.

A similar conclusion was reached by Bernard Katz, a retired University
of Guelph librarian, who had been asked by the library association to
respond to the Jewish congress’s analysis of the Ellis book. He wrote
that the congress was reacting to “what they perceive as criticism
of Israel’s behaviour toward Palestinian civilians.”

Criticism of Israel is what prompted the New York Theatre Workshop
to cancel My Name is Rachel Corrie. That’s a British play about the
young American student activist who in 2003 went to the Gaza Strip
where she stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer to prevent the
destruction of a Palestinian home and was crushed to death.

James Nicola, the theatre’s artistic director, said that in “talking
around and listening in our communities in New York, what we heard
was that (with) Ariel Sharon’s illness and the election of Hamas …
we had a very edgy situation.”

Katharine Viner, co-creator of the play, accused the theatre of
censorship and criticized its management for having “caved in to
political pressure.”

The Los Angeles affiliate of PBS has cancelled a documentary on the
Armenian genocide, and also a follow-up panel discussion, scheduled
for airing on the network April 17.

Two of the four panelists argue that while World War I-era massacre
did take place, it was not a planned genocide by Turkey.

The Armenian National Committee of America objected. The PBS affiliate
in Los Angeles (home to more than 400,000 Armenian Americans) pulled
the plug. An affiliate in Plattsburg (which beams into Montreal)
said it would show the documentary but not the panel discussion.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone has been suspended from his elected office
for four weeks for comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration
camp guard. He has appealed the ruling by the Adjudication Panel,
which deals with disciplinary cases at the municipal level. It had
acted on a complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which
offered this sensible summation on the verdict:

“Had the mayor simply recognized the upset his comments had caused,
this sorry episode could have been avoided.”

The House of Commons in Britain has passed a law banning groups that
“glorify terrorism.” Yet it rejected a bill prohibiting anything
“abusive and insulting” to a religious group.

The latter, characterized as a sop to British Muslims, was opposed
by writers and artists concerned about their creative freedoms being
curbed. The former, aimed at another group of Muslims, sailed right
through, even though it, perhaps, threatens freedom of speech even
more, given the vagueness of the language of the act.

These examples have elicited vastly different official and public
responses to a familiar challenge.

Exposing this inconsistency may turn out to have been the more lasting
legacy of the Danish cartoon caper.