AMS’s motion 14 censorship
Dear Editors,
I would hope (though I dare not expect) that the student leaders of the AMS recognize their own attitudes in the uproar over the Mohammed caricatures. As the Globe and Mail editorial stated on the subject: “The right to free expression is worth nothing unless it includes the right to offend. For dialogue and debate to flourish, citizens must be allowed the maximum freedom to say what is on their minds, even if it is provocative, insulting, inflammatory or, yes, blasphemous. The protesters betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how free societies work.” So do the leaders of the AMS, who have still not rescinded Motion 14, a censorship motion grounded on perceptions of offense. The leaders of the future? Let us all hope not.
Adèle Mercier
Department of Philosophy
Hamas no solution to corruption
Dear Editors,
RE: “Hamas holds appeal in face of Fatah’s corruption” (Journal, Feb. 7, 2006).
Fatah may be corrupted, but the entire purpose and existence of Hamas is the eradication and genocide of over six million Jews in Israel. I do understand some Palestinians are caught between a rock and a throwing hard stone, however they do know the edict of Hamas. It is up to Palestinians to have had another party to vote for—one that was not corrupted and one that did not want to wipe the State of Israel off the map.
Hopefully some level-headed Palestinians could do this without the threat of death upon them. Now should they not be able to form a third party because they would be afraid of being killed, that does not say much for any leadership of the Palestinians, does it? In closing, I would say the Palestinians need to be recognized and need to have their own state, however the anti-Israel education they receive from kindergarten onwards, the hatred and the targeted terrorism need to disappear. Negotiations must be the only force of power between Israelis and Palestinians.
Vardit Zafri
Toronto resident
In defence of Atwood
Dear Editors,
RE: “To Canada’s snob laureate” (Journal, Feb. 7, 2006).
Rosel Kim, whose Postscript musings I usually enjoy, steps far out of bounds with her editorial on Margaret Atwood. While the Guardian article Kim cites does suggest something I’m not too excited about either—a remote book-signing machine—Kim neglects to include Atwood’s theorizing on such a device’s “democratizing” qualities, and avoids entirely the possibility that talk of such a thing is merely self-deprecating satire after all.
As for The Penelopiad (a book Kim seems content to comment on without actually reading, based entirely on what “popular opinion tells” her), I will say I was lucky enough to hear an interview with Atwood on CBC Radio about it. I say lucky because anyone who gets to hear her speak will be able to reassure Kim that Atwood’s sense of humour is indeed alive and well. Having listened to the author discuss the book’s conception and composition for an hour, I can say it had nothing to do with “sell[ing] out to the gimmicky publishing scheme” (is anything involving Margaret Atwood, Jeannette Winterson, and Chinua Achebe really “gimmicky”?) but was a project that, on the contrary, challenged her a great deal.
To propose, without giving specifics, that Atwood has been “recycling” for the past two decades is a dismissal of much of a major writer’s career. If you insist on making generalizations about “much of literature” becoming “sadly—a solitary activity,” try to avoid slandering, while doing so, a member of that very “community” you praise so highly.
Wade Guyitt
ArtSci ’04, MA ’05
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