Silence Is Not An Option

About a week ago, Gabor Mate wrote a heartfelt piece about the genocide in Gaza. His thesis was that we must speak out against the carnage. Mate is Jewish, and that fact lent heft to his argument that criticism of Israel cannot be conflated with anti-semitism, a stance I have long held. For too long,  condemnation of Israel's slaughter of Gazans has been muted for fear of wearing that odious label. If you have access to The Star, I would encourage you to read it.

Star readers are united in their agreement with Mate. Following are some letters to the editor that unconditionally support his position.

Silence is not an option, and if images coming from Gaza of emaciated children being deliberately starved don’t get us to speak up loudly, nothing will. Gabor Maté lays out the reasons we should be able to do so without fear of being called antisemitic. It seems that the true meaning behind the phrase “never again” has been forgotten.

Paul Kahnert, Markham, ON

I agree 100 per cent with Maté that silence is not an option when Israel continues to slaughter children, as well as hospital patients and workers. This whole situation is enraging. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plays on our collective guilt about the Holocaust, but enough is enough. His behaviour is that of a crazed and power-hungry leader who’s bent on destroying Palestine, and it’s being abetted by the United States. Starving innocent Gazans while destroying their homes and their country is inhumane. I have many Jewish friends who don’t support Netanyahu’s actions. Silence will only enable Israel. It’s about time the rest of the world woke up and called a spade a spade.

Lillian Shery, Toronto

Maté deserves thanks for writing this article, and the Star deserves praise for having had the courage to publish it. Governments, workplaces and school boards in Canada have too often assented to the notion that criticism of Israel is automatically antisemitic and deserving of punishment. The fact that some Jewish children don’t feel safe is used as an excuse to ban expressions of sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza, where people also don’t feel safe — and for much clearer reasons. My opinion of what Netanyahu and the Israeli military are doing to Palestine doesn’t make me pro-Hamas or pro-terrorism. As Canadians, we should never be discriminated against for speaking out about injustice, wherever it occurs. And Israel should not be exempt from a clear examination of what it’s doing in Gaza.

Caroline Andrews, Toronto

It’s been well-documented that the Israeli Defense Forces have committed atrocities in Gaza. As citizens, we should be able to express our opinions about Israel’s actions without fear of being branded antisemitic. I have Jewish and Palestinian friends, and all any of us wants is peace in Gaza and a settlement that is amenable to both parties in the conflict.

Bill Melvin, Toronto

Speaking out may seem thin gruel when one contemplates the carnage in Gaza. However, remaining silent does no service to the starvation, mutilation and death taking place there, and can only compound the moral injury many of us feel when bearing witness to the slaughter.

I'll close with an small excerpt from Mate's piece:

The only resolution is the freeing of the discussion around Gaza. People deserve the right to experience as much liberty to publicly mourn, question, oppose, deplore, denounce what they perceive as the perpetration of injustice and inhumanity as they are, in this country, to advocate for the aims and actions of the Israeli government and its Canadian abettors amongst our political leadership, academia, and media.

Confronting Our Past: Gabor Mate Speaks

Like many blogs, mine is largely informed by the thoughts of others. To be sure, I try to make it my practice to shape and filter things through my own perspective and commentary, but on this Canada Day I reproduce in its entirety a piece by Gabor Mate in which he talks about confronting our deeply troubled past.

For Canadians to be truly strong and free, we must come to terms with our grim past

I was 13 in 1957 when, along with nearly 38,000 fellow Hungarians, refugees from a brutal Stalinist dictatorship, my family and I were welcomed with open arms by Canada. The North really seemed true and strong and free. What I didn’t know and what no one was speaking of was that in the same year, even as we were adjusting to life in British Columbia, not far from where I lived a 4-year-old First Nation child had a pin stuck in her tongue on her first day at residential school.

Her crime had been to speak her Native language in the classroom. For an hour this little girl could not put her tongue back in her mouth for fear of cutting her lips. Soon after, years of sexual abuse began. By age 9 the child was an alcoholic and later became dependent on opiates to soothe her pain. We met at a healing ceremony not long ago. Now a grandmother and years sober, she grieves to see her grandchildren suffer the throes of addiction. For her there was no true North, strong and free. Nor is there yet.

There is also no free North for the 30 per cent of Canada’s jail population that is of First Nations origin, six times their proportion in the general population. The nature of trauma being multi-generational, parents transmit their wounds and dysfunctions onto their children. Barring some healing, violence, illness and addictions follow. Very little in Canadian culture has encouraged the necessary collective healing, and there is much to inhibit it.

The depth of our capacity for denial is well-nigh unfathomable. The recently “discovered” makeshift graves near residential school sites in British Columbia and Saskatchewan are too-perfect metaphors for the truths so many of us have buried deep out of sight, mind, and heart. I use quote marks because such atrocities have long been well-known lore in Indigenous communities and etched in the historical record.

In a recent survey two thirds of Canadians owned that they knew little or nothing about the residential schools. This bespeaks not individual ill will, deliberate unawareness, or necessarily, bigotry, but systemic and structural denial on a vast scale. Any colonial system must continue to obscure he history of the Indigenous people whose people it murdered, whose culture it nearly extirpated and whose lands and resources it continues to crave. Hence the litany of broken promises to our First Nations by politicians of all hues. We have apologized to our Japanese citizens for depriving them of their property during World War II, a case of legalized larceny; but though we have apologized, too, for the residential school system, we have not yet begun to acknowledge the despoliation of Native resources because we have not yet stopped practicing it.

Emotionally, it is difficult for human beings, individually and even more so in groups, to have their cherished identities questioned. Facing the brutal realities of our history challenges mainstream Canadian self-concepts of kindness, fairness, and humanity. It can feel threatening to open oneself to disillusionment. Waking up to how things are may be extremely painful.

Painful, and mandatory. No society can understand itself nor collectively heal itself without looking at its shadow side. The shedding of illusions, though scary, is a move toward personal and collective healing. There are encouraging signs that the recent dreadful revelations will wake us up to what we, as a country, have wrought. It’s not a matter of guilt but of responsibility to ourselves, to one another, and to the generations to follow. If we are to have meaningful Canada Days in the future we have to come to terms with our past, and with its ongoing resonances in the present in the form of institutional racism in all aspects of society, from the educational system to policing, from health care through the legal apparatus to the realms of economy and politics.

The freshly identified graves of little innocents can jog us into the genuine strength and freedom that honesty bestows and healing demands. We face the challenge and the opportunity of building a North strong enough to face what’s true, and freer for it. We will be amazed, too, when we open ourselves to being informed by the transformative power of the wisdom traditions, healing practices, Earth consciousness and cultural resilience that helped First Nations peoples survive and surmount the unspeakable.

The bestselling author of four books translated into nearly thirty languages, Gabor Maté is a retired Vancouver physician and a member of the Order of Canada. His next work, The Myth Of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, will be published in 2022.