Michael Riordon

As residents of Prince Edward-Hastings riding in Ontario, Canada, we call on you to exercise your influence and responsibility in the following matter of urgent concern to all of us.

As of October 1, Canadian citizens John Greyson and Dr Tarek Loubani have already been imprisoned for 46 days by the military government in Egypt.  This past weekend their imprisonment was extended once again, for an additional 45 days.  They have not been charged with any offence.

In contravention of international law, the Egyptian military regime claims the right to hold them without charge for as long as two years.

We are encouraged to hear that the Prime Minister finally told Canadian media on Sunday, “In the absence of charges, Dr. Loubani and Mr. Greyson should be released immediately.”  This is a step in the right direction, but given the life-threatening circumstances it’s inadequate.  The Prime Minister should be speaking directly to his counterpart in Egypt, demanding that these two Canadian citizens be released immediately and allowed to return safely to Canada.

John Greyson is an award-winning film and video maker, Dr Tarek Loubani an emergency room physician in London, Ontario.  Both of them teach at universities in Toronto and London.  Each is highly respected in his field.  On the night of their detention, Dr Loubani was doing what his professional oath as an MD requires of him, helping people who’d been injured in protests.  John Greyson was doing what he intended to do on this trip, documenting Dr Loubani’s work.

To protest both the injustice and deplorable conditions of their detention, they are now in the second week of a hunger strike.  Each day that passes, their health is at greater risk.

Amnesty International has called for their immediate release.  More than 140,000 people have signed an international petition demanding their immediate release.  Their release has also been demanded by the Ontario & Canadian Medical Associations, the United Church of Canada, the Presidents of York, Ryerson, Queen’s and Wilfred Laurier Universities, and many other organizations and individuals.

We call on the Prime Minister of Canada to make the same demand, immediately and directly to the appropriate Egyptian authorities.

(Signed by 146 residents of Prince Edward-Hastings riding, Ontario, Canada, and delivered to the local Member of Parliament)

As it goes in the US, so it goes in the northern colony, Canada.  Details have leaked about vast federal trawling of metadata from our phones and computers, in collusion with the giant corporations that control all electronic communications.

Fatal illusion:  “If I don’t do anything wrong, I have nothing to fear.”  Problem: who decides what’s right or wrong?  Same gang that do the trawling.  They are notoriously fickle, and hungry for targets.

OpenMedia.ca is on the case.  A smart, vital citizens’ organization, it does excellent work.  Check out their current initiative here.  And pass it on.  The more we know, the freer we are.

(This story will be pursued in Bacon’s Garden: doing science in dangerous times.  Expect it in spring 2014, from Between the Lines, print and ebook.)

From a rural distance, the city of Toronto dazzles.  It also puzzles me.

I gather that the municipal government there faces enormous challenges, and ever-shrinking resources.  Same dilemma in the small rural county where I live.

How then do a few municipal councilors in Toronto get away with wasting so much time and public money on their perennial campaign to silence one apparently small but – judging by the degree of their hostility to it – surprisingly effective community group, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid?

Year after year a handful of councilors keep trying to silence it.  No matter how many times they’re told by city legal staff that they have no legal grounds for doing so, no city legislation is being contravened, they keep trying.

When the majority of their fellow councilors fail to join their campaign, the determined few use executive fiat to delay or shut down debate.  When they fail to bully city hall staff into producing an illegal legal decision, they dangle a bribe – really, what else can you call “a diversity bonus”? – if the Pride Toronto organization will do their dirty work for them by booting QuAIA from the big parade.

Year after year, intimidation, bullying, slippery maneuvers to short-circuit democracy.  This is bizarre – isn’t it?  Well, so it looks from a rural distance.   Of course such things happen in small rural counties too, but somehow the stakes seem – well, smaller, less dangerous.

Then again, from a historical perspective this attempt to silence dissent is not unfamiliar to me.   In 1968, my 24^th year, homosexuality was still a crime in Canada, and still widely considered a mortal sin and a mental illness.  That year, in a desperate bid to convert, I endured a year of electric shock ‘therapy’ at the hands of a psychiatrist.  I would now call it torture.

Recovering in the early 1970s, I came out, became a gay activist and a writer.  On a giddy summer day in 1981, I co-hosted Toronto’s first official Lesbian and Gay Pride Day, in Grange Park.  By then it was no longer a crime but still an act of defiance to celebrate our Pride in public.   Our grounds for pride: we defied fear and bigotry, we refused to be silent, and we demanded justice and equality – for all.  We understood that human rights have no boundaries.

Then as now, some people, including some of our own tribe, told us to shut up, go away, stop ‘rocking the boat.’  But then as now, if a boat needs rocking, I’m with the rockers.

Which brings me – or took me – to Israel-Palestine.  My latest book, Our Way to Fight, explores the lives of grassroots Israelis and Palestinians who defy the dominant politic to build grounds for a just peace in Palestine-Israel.  It was from Jewish Israelis that I first heard the phrase “Israeli apartheid,” which they acknowledged with anguish.  At first it was shocking to hear, but since then it’s been confirmed again and again by actions of the Israeli government, and by a range of eminent authorities on international law, including South Africans who know apartheid when they see it.

On my travels for the book, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem I met Netta Mishly and other young Israelis who’d been imprisoned for refusing compulsory conscription into the army.  Just before entering military prison Netta declared: “I am not willing to be part of an organization committing war crimes in the name of humanism and democracy.” 

When I met her, Netta Mishly had just returned from a speaking tour in the United States.  At one event, she said, security had to escort her and fellow speaker Maya Wind to safety.  “People were yelling and throwing things at us.  Israel is doing very good PR work in the US, so many Jews there feel like Israel is theirs, they feel it belongs to them.  I was quite offended by the arrogance of people who live so far away telling me, an Israeli, that by telling what I’ve witnessed and experienced I’m being disloyal to Israel and I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

It sounds remarkably similar to the Toronto councilors’ campaign to silence Queers Against Israeli Apartheid.  In my experience this kind of arrogance is not unusual, it’s not limited to Israel’s backers, and it’s not exactly arrogance.  When people feel they’re losing an argument, often they become angry and defensive, and do what they can to silence their antagonist, or failing that, to shut down debate.

It seems almost perversely ironic that the more these councilors try to suppress any criticism of Israel’s military occupation, the more attention they draw to its brutal realities: Every day more Palestinian homes bulldozed by the Israeli army, more Palestinian land stolen, more new Jews-only homes built on it, more olive groves burned by settlers, more Jews-only roads, more night raids on Palestinian villages, more non-violent protestors tear-gassed, shot with rubber-coated steel bullets, arrested and beaten, more Palestinians imprisoned without charge, more torture, more killing.  Every day, more apartheid.

From a rural distance, having seen what I’ve seen, I can’t help thinking it’s about time Toronto’s elected representatives told the bullies among them: Enough – no, too much already – not one more day.