A Tempest In An Art Gallery

"It's none of their [Embassy of Israel in Ottawa] business. I felt they were extending the occupation into Canada."
"I was really upset of any pressure on the city to interfere in the selection of art. We don't want to go there."
"The proximity of government and art creates a tension."
"I am an artist. I have the right to express what I want."
Toronto-based Palestinian-Canadian photo-artist Rehab Nazzal

The Ottawa Citizen

Can one not differentiate propaganda and slander from art? Or insisting on a presentation of putative art that takes the visage of mass murderers to exemplify sacrifice on behalf of an ideology, exalting murder as a political weapon? If that's the case, then Beijing should take the photographs they most certainly have on file of the Tienanmen massacre and publish them under the headline of 'extinguishing dissent and abuse heaped on the Glorious Communist Social Revolution'.

Israel's Rafael Barak, ambassador to Canada, made a visit to Ottawa City Hall to inform the city's mayor, Jim Watson, that in partnering the municipality with this photographic exhibition whose purpose was to demonstrate the immense suffering of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation, an occupation that resulted from a conflict imposed upon Israel by her Arab neighbours, he was lending the nation's capital city to a long tradition of slandering Jews through hitting Israel.

Mayor Watson gave it some thought and in responding to an overture from the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, claimed the city was helpless in the matter. It had never before closed an art exhibit before it ran its allotted show-time, and the city itself had nothing whatever to do with the selection of the 'art' being showcased, that being the purpose of an unnamed three-person jury. (Shifting the moral responsibility inherent in the decision-making of  mayor to unfortunate happenstance.)

And, as such, the city had no intention of violating freedom of expression rights. Effectively aligning the city and all its taxpayers who have paid for the mounting of the exhibition, with the damning condemnation of the Palestinian General Delegation to Ottawa, which was swift to accuse the Israeli ambassador of censorship and assaulting Canadian foundational values of protection of free speech.
Art as propaganda a free speech issue.

This, from the inheritors of the morbidly terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization whose Fatah wing is part of the PLO whose violent exploits of hijacking of planes and ships, suicide bombings of synagogues and Jewish community centres within Israel and abroad, distinguished it as a violent movement of 'liberation', against an oppressor which felt obliged to protect itself from atrocities committed against its presence in the Middle East.

The Delegation was "unsurprised" that the Israeli ambassador would "stoop to the level of interfering in a local exhibit". Lauding the "brave decision by City Hall to reject Israeli censorship and uphold Canada's free speech laws", laws that they have become cynically adept at manipulating to their political advantage over the years, in a generalized manipulation of the Canadian public, sensitizing certain levels of society to the pain and suffering of Palestinians, but not the fear and terror of Israelis.

The exhibit which highlighted images of Palestinian prisoners languishing in Israeli prisons for crimes such as planning violent attacks against Israelis, or carrying out such attacks, claiming them to be martyrs and the country that imprisons them after due process of law to be an illegal and monstrous international player was named "Invisible". When, in fact, they are very much visibly paying the price for committing violent acts of terrorism.

Asked to explain the purpose of placing front and centre on the exhibit's brochure the face of a man who planned the Munich Massacre of Israeli athletes, no response was forthcoming. That the very face of a mass murderer was displayed on a brochure purporting to present him and others like him as victims, would appear next to the logo of the City of Ottawa is a matter of great concern to many, but obviously not the mayor, nor the city manager.

Typically, the story has generated much interest, not only within the country, but much further abroad, leading the artist to receive enquiring telephone calls from international galleries interested in showing her work. The name of the game is attention, controversy, notoriety and free publicity for a Palestinian-centric writing of history.