June 16, 2006

I must admit that when I wrote an internationally syndicated column on Canada's arrest of 17 alleged terrorists this month, I did something I rarely do: I held back. I didn't want to tell other nations about commentary from Canada's media that I think is fuelling racism.

This was partly to protect Canada's reputation from distortion — we are not a racist country even if some columns appear to represent Canada in this way. But it was also because the world isn't interested in Canada, a reputedly dull, nice country. I didn't think anyone would have the faintest interest in a handful of ill-read nasties.

But the great British journalist Robert Fisk noticed and, on June 10, he wrote in The Independent, one of the world's finest newspapers, a column headlined "How racism has invaded Canada: What is the term 'brown-skinned' doing on the front page of a major Canadian daily?"

Good question, Mr. Fisk.

Antonia Zerbisias is a brave unstoppable media critic for Canada's best and biggest paper, the Toronto Star. She took issue with a columnist named Christie Blatchford, who was objecting to the police statement that the accused men came from "a variety of backgrounds," for writing the following in a front-page column in the Globe and Mail: "The accused men are mostly young and mostly bearded in the Taliban fashion. They have first names like Mohamed, middle names like Mohamed and last names like Mohamed. Some of their female relatives at the Brampton courthouse who were there in their support wore black head-to-toe burkas … which is not a getup I have ever seen on anyone but Muslim women." Despite Blatchford's comments favourable to the majority of Canadian Muslims, I find the quoted material horrifying.

The Globe and Mail is known, rightly, as a civilized paper. Many readers were horrified (a few were pleased) as the Globe letters page showed the next day.

'Some things … you can never forgive'

But I had other problems. I had just read a biography by the British publisher Carmen Callil that began with the suicide of her psychoanalyst Anne Darquier, a brilliant woman devoted to her patients. As Callil was knocking on her doctor's door, Darquier was dead on the floor. She left no note. At one time she had said to Callil: "There are some things and some people you can never forgive."

It's possible that two weeks before her death she visited her father. He was Louis Darquier, one of France's most successful turncoats. An enthusiastic Nazi, he was the one who forced all Vichy Jews to wear a yellow star. He played a large part in Vichy's contribution of 77,000 Jews to the death camps. I can barely tolerate reading of this, such is my grief. He made children wear that star. It was this lifelong knowledge about her father that Anne Darquier, the kindest of women, could not live with.

Fresh from her story, I didn't read the sentence as Mohamed this and Mohamed that. I read it like this:

The accused men are mostly young and mostly bearded in the Jewish fashion. They have first names like Yehoshua, middle names like Ariel, and last names like Morgenstern. Some of their female relatives wore typical Jewish garments, black and alien, their hair covered in typical Judaic fashion, not a garment I have ever seen on anyone but Semitic women.

Blatchford did not write this. I'm sure she never would write this. But people do write things like this when they believe it is popular. Racism is lumping a people together as if they were all the same. Thus the alleged sins of one are the sins of the group and this is when the bully pulpit and the violence join forces. This is how it begins.

Fisk noted that the accused were described as "Canadian-born" and that there is a subtle difference between this and "Canadian" even when they describe the same person. Thus, they are Canadian-born (Muslim) as opposed to Canadian (the rest of us), wrote Fisk.

On that same Globe front page, an eyewitness in a news story was quoted as describing two "brown-skinned young men" who had rented the unit next to him. I have never heard these words used this way in a Canadian paper. Most of the world is brown-skinned, most of Toronto's citizens are brown-skinned. No one points this out ever but now apparently we must beware the brown-skinned.

Is 'brown-skinned' now part of our idiom?

Fisk interviewed Jonathan Kay of the National Post, seeking his opinion of describing people as "brown-skinned." To my infinite sorrow, Kay responded: "These things are heavily idiomatic in the sense that, you know, 40 years ago, we would have said 'coloured.' "

At this point, I briefly considered driving a spoon into my heart, Kay not being available. People in Britain and worldwide are now reading that "brown-skinned" is part of the Canadian idiom.

So now the world thinks we talk this way. But we don't. I don't know if Kay is Canadian or Canadian-born. I don't care to know. I do not wish to know his religion, since I don't wish to know anyone's religion. That is their concern. We don't do that here. That is why we get along. That is one of the many reasons Canada is a good place to live. Paul Darquier wouldn't like it here.

Fisk's column ends in heartbreak. He shared his flight from Calgary to Ottawa with Tim Goddard and his remaining family. Beneath them in the cargo hold was the body of Tim's daughter, Nichola, the first woman soldier to die in action in the Afghanistan war.

Goddard's photo only made page 6 in the Post. On the front page, the Post ran a picture of a British Muslim "who may have links to Canada."

I guess he might have links to any brown-skinned person here. Or "coloured," as we used to say as we approached our centennial year of 1967, according to Kay.

The Canada being described in this way is not the Canada I know exists. I am disgusted by the suggestion it does. There are some things and some people you can never forgive.