Palestine

Every once in a while the act of an individual can make a big difference to a struggle.  Yesterday, Toronto film maker and long-time gay activist John Greyson wrote an open letter to the directors of the Toronto International Film Festival pulling his short film Covered out of TIFF in protest of their spotlight on Tel Aviv.  His courageous action and eloquent letter, reproduced below, is a significant contribution to the Palestinian solidarity movement and the Boycott Divestment and Sanction strategy that it has adopted to shine a light on the inexcusable aggression of Israel against the Palestinian people.  Please read the letter below, watch the film and write to TIFF in protest of their decision tiffg@tiff.net

The sun is slowly coming down in this northern West Bank village. We are really a few kilometers from Galilee just outside the green line. Around the city of Jenin and the nearby villages, a cluster of Israeli settlements remind us of the occupation, as well as numerous checkpoints controlled by Israeli soldiers.

One of the sessions that I participated in during the Congress was a meeting that the Gindin Chair co-sponsored with Faculty4Palestine.   The Gindin Chair has been sponsoring sessions at the Congress ever since its foundation in 2002 trying to bring some activism into Academe.  This is the first time that I've been part of a truly activist event including faculty and student discussing a real struggle that had happened over the past year. It was exhilarating. The importance of the event could be noted by the attack against it in the National Post the day before it happened.