The Lie That Kills (the Arts)

Another month, another brave artist stands up against the Israeli genocide. In this case, actor Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers receives an award for “outstanding supporting performance” in a Canadian film. The award comes via the Toronto Film Critics Association. Tailfeathers does not attend the ceremony and instead sends a video. The video does the usual thank-you stuff then ends with this: “When we were shooting Sweet Angel Baby, October 7th happened and it changed everything. I just want to say that my heart continues to be with the people of Palestine who are experiencing this ongoing genocide and thank you to anyone in this industry who’s been brave enough to say anything.”

When her prerecorded message is played at the gala, those lines are edited out. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t have noticed, given the lack of attention the TFCA garners and the fact that such pronoucements are a common thing these days. (See Bardem, Javier.) At any rate, according to then TFCA president Johanna Schneller, the edit is done exclusively because Tailfeathers went too long in her remarks. Tailfeathers responds by annoucing she is returning her award to rebuke the organization’s odious censorship.

News of the outrage reaches the media and Schneller immediately resigns. Predictably, the TFCA apologizes and restores the full unedited speech to their website, vowing to never ever edit another speech again. Just as predictably, a bunch of members of the association (almost half) take to social media to announce they are quitting what is obviously a reactionary, proto-fascist, groyper hellhole posing as a film critic’s assocation. (No one bothers to mention that Tailfeathers took home the $100,000 Best Canadian Film prize from the same horrid assocation in 2019.)

Now there’s a lot going on in the world. So much that it’s hard to believe that this kerfuffle made national news. It did though. It was reported on widely and was also the topic of a segement on the nationally broadcast CBC Radio arts show Commotion. The general tone was ‘I can’t believe the TFCA would censor this brave artist.’ The Commotion show made sure that the circle would stay closed by only bringing in the journalist Alex Nino Gheciu to talk about this for 15 minutes. He wrote the article that appeared on the CBC website, an article that quite notably couldn’t find a single person with a different take on the whole affair.

What sort of ‘other’ take could Gheciu and Commotion have explored? Well, they might have at least touched on the fact that there is no genocide in Palestine, ongoing or otherwise. It’s a disgusting lie to say what Tailfeathers said. Furthermore, they could have discussed her very particular framing of the issue. By leading with “October 7 changed everything….” and not mentioning what actually happened on that day, Tailfeathers is reshaping history. She tells a story much more to the far left’s liking: Hey everyone, on this day evil colonialist entity and worst country in the world Israel just totally randomally started genociding. Hmmm…what else happened on October 7, we wonder?

I don’t support censorship. Furthermore, artist-activists sporting watermelon pins on their jean jackets are very unlikely to take kindly to having the Free Gaza part of their acceptance speech lopped off for whatever reason. The TFCA should have gone back to Tailfeathers and asked her to record a shorter speech. Simple as that. If she wants to perform outrage and spew a massive lie within her alloted time, that’s up to her.

Except. Well. It is a lie. Should an actor be allowed to spout a hateful fabrication that at this point is clearly serving to demonize not just an entire country but also an entire ethnicity? Since I’m anti-censorship, I have to say ‘yes’. But I also have to say that these kinds of lies, and the complete failure of anyone in the cultural sphere to address them, have serious consquences, both for Canadian culture and for Jewish Canadians.

The Tailfeathers saga encapsulates the much larger problem facing the arts in this country. The Canadian Press/CBC article goes out of its way to report on how Tailfeathers rejects antisemetism and will even tolerate some Jews, provided they agree with her. In Tailfeathers’ email to the TFCA she writes: “To those in the Jewish community who are speaking out against the genocide of Palestinians, I recognize the incredible risk you are taking in critiquing the actions of the state of Israel. You are brave and your actions do not go unnoticed.”

On behalf of no one else, I would still like to thank Ms. Tailfeathers for her shout-out to the “Jewish community.” Unfortunately, she recognizes only a miniscule percentage of us: “Those” Jews. The good Jews. The Jews that agree with her. The rest of us are presumably bad Jews who are not performing our Jewishness in accordance with Ms. Tailfeathers’ preference. That would be the vast majority — over 95% of Jewish people in Canada — who support Israel, the only Jewish country in the world and home to more than half of all Jewish people on the planet. As part of our support, we will occasionaly note, politely, that Israel is not performing a genocide; in fact it allows food and medicine into a territory populated entirely by people who actually did attempt a bloodthirsty genocide that featured mass murder, rape, hostage taking and child murder.

We, the ‘other’ Jews, don’t matter. Neither do facts. In fact, the Canadian cultural scene prefers to proceed as if the majority “bad Jews” don’t even exist. Canadian culture only has space for the Good Jews. They’re the one’s whose “actions” will not go “unnoticed.” Who notices the good Jews (and presumably the bad?). Well in the culture scene, it’s the people who are funded and awarded and paid to make and manage the arts in Canada. People like Ms. Tailfeathers. This is a small group; a much smaller group than you might think. It’s a relatively incestuous group in which the creators are often asked to help decide which of their peers, colleagues and friends get funding, grants and awards. So, presumably, this is where the noticing happens. And what is done with this information, this noticing, this listing of good and bad Jews? If we go by the way the arts has been functioning for the last fifteen or so years, we can presume that the information will be used to keep “bad” Jews outside looking in.

This has already been done quite effectivley to other enemies of the politically homongenous far left arts scene. There are no people making a living in the Canadian arts who openly question the efficacy and wisdom of DEI quotas for grants and opportunities; there are none who oppose the ridiculous and ever conflicting fatwas on so-called “cultural appropriation”. Good luck getting a grant or a job in the arts with “volunteered at local Conserative Party of Canada riding assocation” on your resume.

Ideological conformity in our arts scene is mandatory. If you don’t toe the line, you will be pressured — financially and socially. You will lose opportunities and gradually find yourself deplatformed. Self censorship abounds, but for the Jewish creator even staying silent is no longer permitted. If you want to get in and stay in with the arts scene, you must perform your good Jewishness including, first and foremost, performing your hatred for the demon state of Israel. Otherwise, you’ll be put on notice. You’ll be suspect. You’ll be culled.

Here’s what it looks like: When I expressed disgust at the waves of post-October 7 campus occupations, the result was that my magazine Broken Pencil was relentlessly attacked, boycotted, and libelled. “Broken Pencil publisher is Zio-Nazi” announced a prominent “good Jew” on Twitter. Subscribers cancelled, advertisers fled, and cowardly writers pulled their articles. The magazine — bastion of left leaning voices and independent creative action — folded.

With “bad” Jews excluded from the public sphere, especially the arts and culture sphere that speaks, primarily and to everyone’s detriment, mainly to the left leaning urbanites, there’s no one inside to debunk the lie. It’s an echo chamber of colonizer white fragility nonsense that very conveniently demonizes the one Jewish country on the planet, a land mass the size of New Jersey surrounded by countries that want to raze it for the glory of their celestial amibitions.

But you won’t hear anything about that on the CBC. Everything changed on October 7 when Israel started genociding, remember? With only the “good” Jews platformed, the echoes can keep getting louder and louder. 2 +2 = 5. Say it again. Say it with more fervor. Say it like you really mean it. It’s a continuum of escalating exclusion. The woke, not the Jews, control the arts and media in this country. As a result, we have now moved from celebrating a lie, to demonizing and excluding the Jews who aren’t willing to parrot the lie. Furthermore any attempt to set the record straight or otherwise tamp down on the lie will be met with shrieks of outrage — “Censorship!”

This is about the arts, but it’s also about everyday life. The lie is a violent, abhorrent thing. It normalizes violence against Jewish people. Its constant repetition is leading to everything from shots fired at synogogues in Toronto to Jews being attacked and murdered simply for the crime of going about their lives in the UK, the USA and Australia. So to Ms. Tailfeathers, to the former members of the Toronto Film Critics Assocation who quit in outrage, to the CBC and everyone else going along with this, I say: You are spreading one of the oldest lies, one of the most heinous libels. You are not only harnessing your sacred social justice to systematically exclude Jewish Canadians from your millieu, you are putting them in grave danger. We notice. We are noticing.