The reader must appreciate Dan Lett’s near heroic attempt to provide a fair and balanced reflection on the upcoming Nakba Exhibit scheduled to open on the 27th. of this month. His column reflects a tone of sweet reasonableness: a tone that fades under closer scrutiny.
Mr. Lett, whose work, along with that of Tom Brodbeck, is a “turn to” read in the Free Press, omits a number of critical points in support of exploring inconvenient truths.
To begin, for a truth to be inconvenient, it follows that it must first be truth, with at least an effort to be comprehensive. There’s the rub.
Following the 1948 establishment of Israel under the jurisdiction of the UN, the five Arab nations surrounding Israel, refusing to accept the establishment of a Jewish state in the indigenous home land of the Jews, pressed the Palestinian people to evacuate their homes so that the nascent state could be annihilated. They lost. Israel survived. Therein is the original application of the word “nakba”: a failed attempt at a genuine genocide.
Mr. Lett proceeds to cast doubt on the charge of foreign interference attributed to a Palestinian representative, suggesting it was “based on a news report.” Mr. Lett omits that the news report itself was based on correspondence implicating a publicly self-proclaimed hater of Israel, and by extension, Jews.
Mr. Lett then dismisses charges of bias by the CMHR leadership, noting, correctly, that bias is an inevitable byproduct of dealing with any complex human event.
In the academy we deal with bias regularly – but by declaring that bias openly. The CMHR denies and obscures any bias on their part.
Finally, any naiveté suggested is on the part of Mr. Lett if he does not grasp how any further publicly supported attacks on Israel and implicit support for Hamas has a bearing on Canada’s horrific rise in antisemitism.
If the CMHR, its director and board, really wanted to highlight the human rights narratives emerging from the complexities of Israeli and Palestinian narratives, they might have essayed the herculean task of bringing together a task force of leadership from within both the Jewish and Palestinian communities to address a host of inconvenient truths. The CMHR has failed. So, in this instance, has Mr. Lett.
