Pride, prejudice and peace

DR. STEFAN BRAUN

The injection of the “Israel apartheid” fiction into the Toronto and Montreal Gay Pride parades presents an instructive contrast in censorship strategies and a valuable lesson in freedom of speech.

In Toronto, a once consensual, but now increasingly politically torn, city council reviews and struggles to replay last summer’s defunding of Gay Pride festivities if Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) marches. In contrast, Quebec Jewish Congress stepped up to the free speech plate and faced down Montreal’s QuAIA challenge; sparing themselves from ensnarement in the kind of self- and democracy-defeating silencing circus now playing its way out in Toronto, without political end.

Public funding does not obviate core free speech imperatives. To say that no partisan political voice should be funded on the public dime is one thing. To defund a politically divided, historically excluded voice for official disagreement with the message is quite another. If you think freedom of speech is politically divisible this way without repercussions, think again.

First, trying to officially ban the term “Israel apartheid” reinforces the very falsehoods fearful banners seek to mute. Yes, some people are too gullible, impressionable or cynical to critically evaluate the QuAIA message. But aren’t such cynics even more likely to suspect that there is truth to it precisely because public officials fear to let them hear it and decide for themselves? Public hushing raises suspicions even when there are no secrets. Misinformation, freely spoken, can be countered. Cynicism and suspicion, we can only despair.

Second, muting refutable falsehoods only mainstreams other more sinister and intractable antisemitic prejudices lurking beneath. “Why,” the suspicious will wonder, is it “only Zionists who can speak their ‘truth to power’?” Resuscitated conspiracy theories of governments in the “silencing pockets” of “the Jewish lobby” resonate with deep-seated antisemitic stereotypes that are far more difficult to refute.

Third, excluding QuAIA from mainstream political discourse legitimates more oblique homophobic prejudices and stereotypes. In struggling for inclusion, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community has long labored to educate the public that it is no different in its diversity from the rest of society – warts, virtues and all. LGBTs can no more be of one political mind on a divisive global controversy than can any other community. Conditioning public funding on pretending otherwise only reinforces the kind of public exclusions of “difference” that LGBTs have fought hard and long to correct. In so casting out an historically excluded voice from the mainstream family of political imperfections and ideological diversity, defunding risks tainting and tarring Jewry’s own struggles against prejudicial stereotyping and public exclusion.

Fourth, discriminating against determined voices of political disaffection is never a one-time event, but a slippery slope. Political activists are linguistic chameleons and their language of disaffection is as colorful as any thesaurus. Today, officials cut funding for using the term, “Israel apartheid.” Next year, they may have to ban “Zionism is racism.” What’s next? Ban the words “powerful Jewish lobby”? Then, what? Ban all parody, allegory, satire, song, metaphor, mime and mockery? All that banning certain expressions does is to drive the speech-frustrated to substitute more oblique and insidious phrases/ideas in their place. The more expressions officials ban, the more they will need to ban. In the end, the less free all of us will be to speak.

Fifth, hushing deep-seated disaffection is a double-edged political sword. No throat is immune from being hoisted one day on the blade of its own silencing petard. Worse, all are not equally vulnerable. The stronger eventually devour the weaker, the belligerent the civil, the popular the disfavored. Those who embrace officialized quiet “today” need beware of swallowing, lest, one day, official quiet devours its own young “tomorrow.”

Finally, as previously stated, delegitimizing speech fosters worse messaging alternatives. For example, last summer, QuAIA promised they would stay away from the Pride Parade. They then did a flip-flop, participating in the event after it received city funds based on their promise not do so. Should we be surprised? Deny fundamental rights to political voice – to plead, to protest, to persuade – and the disgruntled and disaffected will use force, fear or political deceit to ply their point and message their cause. Are speech bans’ concealed disharmony, fictional peace and fraudulent “tolerance” what a truth-seeking democracy and a far-sighted Jewish community should be encouraging, or discouraging?

Only victims need to suppress vocabulary they fear. Masters of their own destiny boldly confront it. They do not want for confidence in their own voice for free exercise of their opponents’. They rise to the speech challenge. If Israel can rejoin its own version of QuAIA and be a stronger democratic community for it, should the Diaspora expect less of itself?

Two years ago, only about 125 people marched in Toronto’s Pride festivities with Kulanu, the city’s main pro-Israel Jewish LGBT organization. Last summer in Toronto, in response to QuAIA’s flip-flop on its promise not to participate, the Kulanu contingent grew to more than 500 vocal pro-Zionist revelers. In contrast, and better still, Montreal’s free speech-inclusive Pride festivities saw QuAIA’s free participation uneventfully fizzle from the public eye – heard but mostly unnoticed. That, not free speech fright and self-defeating censorship flight, is rising to the challenge.

Dr. Stefan Braun, JD, LLM, PhD, has published more than 30 articles on freedom of speech. He is the author of the peer-reviewed book Democracy off Balance: Freedom of Expression and Hate Propaganda Law in Canada (2006 Harold Adams Innis Prize finalist) and a 2009 Simon Rockower Award for excellence in Jewish journalism first-prize winner for “Transparency good for Jews,” Jewish Independent.

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