As we blogged yesterday, the virulently anti-Semitic 10-minute play “Seven Jewish Children” is making its Canadian debut in Montreal, with performances in other Canadian cities likely. Here are two strong letters to the editor from CIC board members, along with excerpts and links to well-argued op-eds that take on this disturbing drama.
National Post
May 5, 2009
Letters to the Editor
Re: Our HRCs Should Investigate Caryl Churchill, letter to the editor, May 4.
I would like to thank Michael Enright of the CBC for airing the short play Seven Jewish Children from coast to coast on our publicly funded broadcasting network. I would like to thank him for presenting a play which entirely distorts the facts of the situation in the Middle East. I would like to thank him for broadcasting a very effective piece of propaganda that can only generate Jew-hatred. I would like to thank him for presenting the position of Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist organization, without context and without balance. I would like to thank him for ignoring the many opportunities the Palestinian “victims” have had to make peace with Israel. I would like to thank him for entirely ignoring the thousands of rockets that have been terrorizing Israelis since Israel voluntarily exited Gaza. Thank you, Mr. Enright, for encouraging Canadians to hate.
Michael Diamond, Toronto.
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The Gazette (Montreal)
May 5, 2009
Letters to the Editor
Re: Packed house for provocative play (Gazette, May 4).
For the ample media coverage that they receive, I was rather surprised to learn that the Independent Jewish Voices group mentioned in your article has only 30 active members in Montreal.
This is an infinitesimal number when compared with the 12,000 people who gathered downtown last week to show their pride and support for Israel’s achievements. I can only conclude that the frequent and favourable media coverage of this extremely small group of Jewish dissenting voices must be due to the remarkable merit of their cause.
Adriana Kotler, Montreal
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Wall Street Journal
March 30, 2009
The Stages of Anti-Semitism
An avant-garde play revives an ancient hatred.
by Brett Stephens
Here’s a sketch for a racist play about “moral decline” in black America since the civil rights era.
Act I: Heroic protestors gather at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965 to march in defiance of a segregationist state. Act II: The scene moves to San Francisco in the early 1970s, where the radical politics of the Black Panthers quickly give way to robbery and murder. Act III: A New York City crack house, circa 1985. Act IV: the trial of O.J. Simpson. Act V: The present, in which a black man on a prison furlough goes on a murder spree.
Appalled? I hope so.
Now substitute the word “Jewish” for “black” and change the scene to Europe and Israel and you have, roughly, the plot of celebrated British playwright Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children,” which debuted last month to some controversy and much acclaim at London’s Royal Court Theater. It is now in the U.S., playing in small but respectable venues to sophisticated audiences that — judging from the performance I attended in New York last Thursday — are overwhelmingly disposed to like it.
Click to read the entire article »
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The Independent (UK)
Feb. 18, 2009
Let’s see the ‘criticism’ of Israel for what it really is
by Howard Jacobson
I was once in Melbourne when bush fires were raging 20 or 30 miles north of the city. Even from that distance you could smell the burning. Fine fragments of ash, like slivers of charcoal confetti, covered the pavements. The very air was charred. It has been the same here these past couple of months with the fighting in Gaza. Only the air has been charred not with devastation but with hatred. And I don’t mean the hatred of the warring parties for each other. I mean the hatred of Israel expressed in our streets, on our campuses, in our newspapers, on our radios and televisions, and now in our theatres.
A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here – the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue.
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