[R-G] [The documentary] Discordia 'whitewash' unremarked by critics

[Macdonald Stainsby]

Discordia 'whitewash' unremarked by critics


Another voice, another view
   	
   	


by Samer Elatrash
February 23, 2004

For a documentary that Judy Rebick described in rabble.ca as “more on the 
side of the Palestinians in the Middle East,” the National Film Board's 
Discordia still managed to make (nearly) everyone happy.

After its world premiere at Concordia in early February, Aaron Maté, a 
central character in the documentary, jokingly told me that he was having 
second thoughts about Discordia seeing that Yoni Petel, a B'nai Brith 
organizer and member of the Zionist youth group Betar, gave Discordia the 
thumbs-up. As did the Canadian Jewish News, the organ of the pro-Israeli 
lobby group the Canadian Jewish Congress, and Martin Patriquin, the 
indefatigably skeptical and left-ish columnist for the Montreal weekly, The 
Hour.

The Globe and Mail's engaging jester and silver haired expert on the Middle 
East, John Doyle, (he thinks I'm “very boring” and “far too young” to 
understand what's going on there) wrote that Discordia delivered exactly 
what “[he] was asking for.”

In her review of Discordia, Judy Rebick lauds the documentary for 
presenting its subjects with “honesty” and “sympathy” — it's something that 
is definitely “worth seeing and discussing.” She objects to the 
representation of women in the documentary — most are presented as mothers 
and girlfriends— something that is “extremely annoying in this day and 
age.” This is true: one of my main annoyances with the documentary was its 
portrayal of Emily Bitting, an activist with the Blood Sisters collective, 
a Concordia Student Union council member, and someone I greatly admire for 
her formidable intellect. Of the three times she is quoted in the 
documentary, two revolve around her relationship with me.

But what I also find exceedingly annoying, especially in this day and age, 
and more precisely in today's North American societies, is that a whitewash 
passed unnoticed by Judy Rebick, and many on the left who enthused over 
Discordia.

It is not as if the Concordia Student Union did not publish a report 
detailing systemic anti-Arab prejudice at the highest administrative levels 
in Concordia, or that the near riot on the day of Benjamin Netanyahu's 
scheduled lecture was largely a reaction to this prejudice. It was neatly 
symbolized on that day by the contempt it took to block off most of the 
university's entrances so that Netanyahu could speak to a handpicked 
(pro-Israeli) audience.

The administration's decision to allow Netanyahu on campus for a pep talk 
to his fans — Rector Frederick Lowy later admitted that the decision was 
wrung out of the Rector's cabinet by “community pressure” — was, of course, 
very unpopular with many students and faculty at Concordia.

But unpopular administrative measures are always passed at Concordia, and 
they do not always require a squadron of riot police and barricades to see 
to their implementation, nor do they always cause student uprisings. 
Unpopular measures are enforced every day in our society, and we can 
usually count on what Franz Fanon described as the “aesthetic expressions 
of respect for the established order [that] serve to create around the 
exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which 
lightens the task of policing considerably.”

But measures that flagrantly demean a populace, and derive their legitimacy 
only by the force of police batons, which serve as an admission that no 
appeals to good sense will suffice to allow for their implementation, are 
usually met with unrest.

As September 9 plainly showed, the presence of dozens of riot police did 
nothing to mitigate this unrest; it only punctuated the profound contempt 
shown by an administration that saw nothing wrong in inviting a man who 
bears direct responsibility for the shootings of dozens of unarmed 
demonstrators in the occupied territories in September 1996. Netanyahu's 
lecture was a statement of profound contempt towards the worth of 
Palestinian lives, and the administration made sure to cross the t's and 
dot the i's with a squadron of riot police.

Even then, the contempt I am discussing requires further clarifications. It 
is a contempt that is an obvious result of a two-tiered system of standards 
and privileges that exists in universities, which have become so reliant on 
private and corporate funding that any other points of reference are 
devalued, if given any worth at all.

In the year before Netanyahu's scheduled lecture, Solidarity for 
Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) was denied access to a university owned 
park to prevent the group from holding a human rights “bazaar,” after weeks 
of unrelenting pressure on the university from B'nai Brith Canada. In the 
same period, the university attempted to ban the local press from covering 
an SPHR exhibit, presumably in an attempt to stave off further criticisms. 
It is no secret that groups like SPHR do not have the economic or 
organizational clout to pressure the administration, and in a system where 
your point of view is merited in proportion to this type of clout, the 
administration was singularly unsympathetic to their arguments on “freedom 
of assembly” and “free speech.”

After the Netanyahu protest, the administration wanted everyone to 
understand that it was “cleaning up” Concordia, as Benjamin Netanyahu 
recommended in a press conference, and was holding trials to punish the 
“guilty students.” Again, the trials were an issue of public relations, and 
judicial niceties were of secondary concern to the administration. I was 
expelled, but I appealed and won, because the appeal panel was sympathetic 
to my argument that I had walked out of my initial hearing in protest over 
the administration’s rigging of my hearing panel (two panellists that sat 
on the hearings for the September 9 cases later publicly denounced the 
administration for attempting to “railroad” the verdicts.)

This all took place against a backdrop of palpable prejudice against 
Palestinians and Arab students at Concordia, which eventually prompted the 
Concordia Student Union to commission a report on anti-Arab prejudice at 
Concordia. The report dealt only with Concordia, leaving out the context of 
a society in which anti-Arab stereotypes and prejudices have become 
something of a substitute for thinking when it comes to the Middle East, 
and our government's complicity in the misery of the West Bank and Gaza's 
Palestinians.

Rebick wrote that Discordia affords a glimpse of “the impact of a struggle 
like the one at Concordia on the individuals involved.” If that were true, 
then I would not have much cause to complain, although I think that at 
least a few people who have given Discordia the “thumbs up” would view the 
documentary differently if it indeed represented the “struggle” at 
Concordia — discomfort, perhaps, over how it is perfectly normal to 
silence, defame and vilify opponents of our government's support for 
Israel's brutish practices against the Palestinians, and how it can only be 
normal in a society where Palestinians are not fully seen as human beings 
who want and deserve the same things we all do.

Samer Elatrash is a pro-Palestinian activist in Montreal and was featured 
in the film Discordia.
-- 
Macdonald Stainsby
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
In the contradiction lies the hope
		--Brecht.