Canada’s Minister of Identity and Culture, Marc Miller, has endorsed a censorship campaign against a new exhibit about the Nakba in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg.
The Nakba—the Arabic word for catastrophe—was the brutal 1948 terror campaign wherein at least 750,000 Palestinians were killed or expelled from their homes to clear the land for the creation of the state of Israel. The museum exhibit aims to “explore Palestinian history, culture and lived experiences through interactive and tactile elements, video, objects and art,” including personal stories about intergenerational trauma.
Upon hearing about the exhibit, a Tel Aviv-based “pro-Israel advocacy” group called Shurat HaDin launched a campaign against the museum, threatening it with legal action. This same pro-Israel group claims responsibility for, among other things, helping the IDF capture the Freedom Flotillas, waging a legal battle against fans of singer Lorde after they convinced her to cancel a concert in Israel, and for attacking the funding of North American universities with BDS campaigns. These are all part of what Shurat HaDin calls their “legal war strategy” of throwing their financial, legal, and media weight into censoring those that dare to criticize Israel, or in this case mention Palestine. The CMHR is just their latest target.
The Nakba exhibit is reportedly small, taking no more than 10 minutes to go through. The same museum features a permanent exhibit on the Holocaust, including an examination of antisemitism in Canada. A separate permanent exhibit also addresses Holocaust denial.
Miller says it’s a “failure” that the Nakba exhibit doesn’t explicitly call Hamas “a terrorist group that wants to kill Jews.” Never mind that a permanent exhibit has called Hamas a terrorist group for years. The acknowledgement of the atrocities suffered by Palestinians at the hands of Israel is enough to be slammed with accusations of antisemitism. It’s clear that the main concern here is not antisemitism, but making Israel look bad.
The censorship campaign against the museum succeeded in rallying a couple dozen people with Israeli flags to protest the exhibit on June 26, the day before it opened. Just a few days later, Miller joined the Zionist chorus decrying the exhibit. He said, “it isn’t up to me to speak to, or insert myself into, the curation of any particular exhibit,” reflecting on the fact that the Museum is an educational institution that is meant to be independent of his political influence. But he did exactly that: interfered with the Museum’s content because of his political commitment to Israel.
It should go without saying that an activist Israeli legal group has no place influencing the curatorial decisions of the Canadian Human Rights Museum. The Culture Minister’s criticism of the exhibit shows that there is little the Liberals won’t do to make their Israeli allies happy, even if they have to censor history to accomplish it.
