Shooting the messengers who call attention to inequality
The recent conflagrations of outrage engulfing Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) and journalist Nora Loreto illuminate the boundaries drawn around permissible free speech.
In response to the Israeli military’s use of live ammunition against predominantly peaceful protesters and journalists in Gaza, CJFE released a statement earlier this month urging the Canadian government to “condemn the one-sided use of military force against demonstrators and media.”
Since the Land Day demonstrations against Israel’s policies of occupation began on March 30, at least 36 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 3,000 wounded; there have been no Israeli casualties. Photojournalist Yaser Murtaja was killed while wearing his press jacket, and at least 12 other journalists have been injured by live fire — for which the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders have all demanded justice.
Human Rights Watch described Israel’s fatal violence against demonstrators as “calculated” and “unlawful” — “the foreseeable consequence of granting soldiers leeway to use lethal force outside of life-threating situations in violation of international norms.”
Amnesty International castigated Israel for “unleashing excessive, deadly force against protesters, including children, who merely demand an end to Israel’s brutal policies in Gaza” — including the strangling blockade threatening to render the territory uninhabitable within the next two years, in vio- lation of the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition of collective punishment.
CJFE — whose stated mission is to “boldly champion the free expression rights of all people” — has issued similar condemnations of Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia, Turkey, and Egypt. None elicited the type of outcry generated by the organization’s criticism of Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
Prominent Canadian media personalities rushed to denounce the statement as “one-sided” (former National Post editor Jonathan Kay), a “mistake” (Canadaland’s Jesse Brown), and “one-dimensional political lobbying” arising from an “obsession with Israel” (Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders). CJFE rescinded the statement and fired the employee who drafted it, communications co-ordinator Kevin Metcalf.
Far from being “one-sided,” CJFE’s statement reflected the profound asymmetry of violence on the ground, and sought to uphold principles of international justice that are claimed to be universal. Perversely, however, CJFE has been subjected to greater censure for speaking out against Israel’s violations than the Canadian government has for remaining silent in the face of them.
Like CJFE, Nora Loreto has experienced a severe backlash for expressing words of manifest truth: that not all tragedies in Canada are mourned equally, and that the exceptional outpouring of national grief for the Humboldt Broncos (including the largest GoFundMe campaign in Canadian history, which has raised more than $13 million so far) is in part due to “the maleness, the youthfulness and the whiteness of the victims.”
“I don’t want less for the families and survivors of this tragedy,” Loreto explained on Twitter, “I want justice and more for so many other grieving parents and communities” — echoing the words of one of the bereaved Humboldt mothers, Celeste Leray-Leicht, who said that “there is so much tragedy and affliction in this world and they (particularly Indigenous communities) don’t get the attention they deserve sometimes.”
The Humboldt Broncos crash has received 11 times more coverage on CBC’s website than the 2014 fire in a Quebec nursing home that killed 32 seniors, and 40 times more than the Ontario truck crash that killed 10 migrant agricultural workers from Peru in 2012.
In the wake of the Quebec mosque shooting last year, the community had to struggle for months to raise $400,000 for paralyzed survivor Aymen Derbali, and a neighbouring town denied their request to build a Muslim cemetery to bury the dead.
Loreto’s tweets calling for more universal empathy have been met with a torrent of hate: thousands of sexist and racist messages and death threats.
Maclean’s magazine — which has previously refused to apologize for suggesting that Canadian universities are “too Asian,” and defended Mark Steyn’s antiMuslim polemics as “a worthy piece of commentary on an important geopolitical issue” — put out a statement publicly repudiating Loreto, who has written for them as a freelancer: “we had nothing to do with her extraordinarily inappropriate tweet regarding the Humboldt tragedy.” It is troubling that instead of rectifying the unequal valuation of life, media organizations participate in shooting the messengers calling attention to the inequity.