Last year, peace activist Mordecai Briemberg was
served with a lawsuit by CanWest. The charge? Producing
a fake edition of CanWest's Vancouver Sun, and infringing
upon the company's trademark related rights in the process.
The four-page parody, produced by a group calling itself the
"Palestine Media Collective," focused on what they perceived
to be biased media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict
in the Vancouver newspaper.
Briemberg maintains he was not involved in the fake edition's
"imagining or creation or publication or production," but
merely in distributing free copies he found. The activist has
nevertheless been tied to the parody, due in no small part
to his outspoken views on Palestine.
According to CanWest's writ, Briemberg and six other
unnamed "John/Jane Doe" defendants, have been
involved in "anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian media
activities," and have written or spoken "harshly critical
of the State of Israel and of the plaintiff and anyone who
publishes articles or views which the defendants perceive
to be contrary to their own views." The co-founder of the
Canada-Palestine Support Network, Briemberg has long
been an advocate for Palestinian self-determination.
Briemberg spoke with Alex Samur in Vancouver.
Alex Samur: Congratulations on winning the
YMCA's Power of Peace award.
Mordecai Briemberg: Well that's very kind, I was very
thrilled ... beyond the question of personal satisfaction for
me it marks the continuing shift of public opinion on the
question of Palestinian rights and the recognition of these
from people moving away from reflexive support of Israel
towards an acknowledgment of injustices to the Palestinian
people, so I think the award by the YMCA shows they too
are quite prepared to acknowledge peace work that's
being done on behalf of Palestinian peoples' human,
national and democratic rights.
It must be very encouraging that your efforts as
a long-time activist are being recognized. I guess
being served a writ by CanWest is a form of
recognition for you as well!
Well I think the CanWest writ grows out of exactly the same
thing I mentioned. Namely, opinion is shifting and however
much they try to advocate and propagandize for reflexive
support of Israeli state policies and practices they recognize
themselves that they're less and less successful with that one
note beat and they're frightened by the fact that however
intense and huge they are people are disengaging from that
mantra and so their alternative to acknowledging an open
debate or having an open discussion because they fear is to
try to attack, silence, chill, intimidate people who have a
critical perspective based on upholding international law,
based on upholding human rights law, based on upholding
major United Nations resolutions on return of refugees etc.
They try to silence that voice as much as they can however
small that voice may appear in respect to their own huge
power – but power doesn't always command authority.
That is, it doesn't always command confidence among
those it lords itself over.
Over the years students at SFU and UBC have also
created parodies of the Vancouver Sun but were
never sued for trademark infringement. Why is
this latest parody so contentious?
Yes, there have been parodies created but usually when
people create the parody [they] modify, in one small way
or another, the name 'Vancouver Sun' or 'Globe and Mail,'
which has been done as well as a parody. This listed
'Vancouver Sun' exactly as it is on the newspaper, but
you'd have to be very, very obtuse to not recognize
immediately that this was a spoof and not the authentic
Vancouver Sun.
So CanWest is claiming that it is a deception, it's a fake.
But this was four pages, it had names of authors which
were like "P. Rupa Ghanda" and "Cyn Shorsheep" or
plays on those names which were immediately evident
and the articles were clearly a parody. So laughter would
be your first response rather than to take it as authentic.
What's interesting to me is that in the writ that they
brought to the court to bring the suit against me and the
other unnamed people is that most of it deals with political
accusations of our views about Israel and about Palestine.
It's more like a political diatribe than it is a factual
documentation of a case around commercial abuse of
trademark.
I understand there was a preliminary evidence
gathering session yesterday? What did that involve?
I'm not at liberty to speak at this point about the
examination for discovery.
What happens next with the case?
Well what happens next is that they will proceed with
further examination of discovery. We may call to examine
them etc. and then the case can go to court. But what I think
is very important for people to understand is not just the
court process or the legal process because this is a political
case and suppression of freedom of ideas, freedom of
expression.
It's a SLAPP
[Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation] suit,
an attempt to chill people, these kind of mechanisms that
corporations use to silence criticism of the policies and
practices that they engage in [are] very dangerous and
increasingly used across the country and it's really
necessary to fight against this in a public campaign and
that's why we formed a committee called SeriouslyFreeSpeech.ca
to get as many people from a breadth of constituencies to be
involved in seeing the dangers posed by monopolization leading
to a singular, homogenized view on contentious issues, leading
to these attacks on dissenting views, not being allowed space,
an attempt to financially break people and to try to scare them
into dropping the activities that are entirely legitimate in any
democratic culture.
So, in that regard there are people who have given their
names to the committee to join as honorary members
who are really highly respected and who understand the
stakes. People like Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein,
Avi Lewis, Joy Kogawa, writers, musicians — Anton Kuerti
— an Order of Canada pianist, etc. It's not a single area that
these people come from. They recognize comprehensively,
they want a democratic culture where discussion can take
place away from intimidation, silencing, and censorship.
And that is what this is about and the fate of the issue will
be determined much more by what happens outside the
court than what happens inside the court.
Yours isn't the only suit CanWest is currently
pursuing; the local B.C. website, The Tyee, also
has a CanWest suit on their hands. What impact
do you think suits like these will have, if any,
on free speech in Canada?
I think that depends on whether people rally together to
oppose these efforts of silencing or whether they try and
duck their heads and that's really the issue. The effort of
CanWest is to intimidate and scare people, and surely
they're powerful and it's costly to resist these kinds of
efforts, but it is also important to recognize that when
we resist we're fighting a corporation which is itself
frightened by what's happening in public opinion.
So if public opinion changes and recognizes the rights
of Palestinian people in this case or on environmental
questions or on any question you want to pick that's
contentious. As people recognize that their opinions have
popular support then in fact we can broaden the area for
public debate. We can reverse the trend from silencing to
actually giving more play, more attention to these issues.
In a way CanWest is drawing more attention both to itself
and to the suppression of the diversity of views on the
question of Israel and Palestine. And that's exactly what
they don't want to do. They would rather people didn't
think there are diverse views. In a way their strategy can
backfire on them if people have the resolve to not be
intimidated.
As the first daughter born in Canada to my
Palestinian father I was told to keep my head
down and my mouth shut on Palestine. In effect
your lawsuit reinforces exactly what my dad
warned me about growing up. How has this suit
affected your activism and do you have any
encouraging words for activists engaged in
fighting for justice on issues like Palestine?
I really share the sorrow of your father that he felt that the
environment and attitudes of people were so prejudicial that
the best way to deal with it was to keep your head low.
I remember when my father immigrated to Canada from
Poland and his brothers had immigrated before him, they
had anglicized their name as a way of trying [to lessen] their
vulnerability to anti-Semitism. So I grew up with an
anglicized name and when I was a young adult I changed
my name back to my father's original Jewish name,
Briemberg, and I did that as an act of affirmation that
it's necessary to have the necessary self-respect and
dignity to be self-confident enough to confront the
bigotry that did exist in this society at that time.
Certainly the bigotry against Palestinian people, against
Arab people and Muslim people at large is far more an
issue in this society than anti-Jewish sentiment is, but
my encouraging words are if in fact we recognize some
confidence that people, Canadians at large, can come to
a more realistic and just understanding of what has
happened to the Palestinian people and what their
situation is and the rights that their being denied and
that they deserve to enjoy. If we can have a vision of some
confidence that Canadians at large can come to appreciate
that then we can encourage that change by being dignified
in our own identity and in confronting the bigotry that comes
from the mass media and from the government voices and
put our confidence in Canadians.
How can more people get informed and
support your cause?
The best way is to go to the website SeriouslyFreeSpeech.ca
where they will find some background on the issue, there's a
petition that people can sign and a number of other suggestions
of ways they can support it.
There will be a public meeting on the case and on media
censorship and concentration on May 14, at 7:30 p.m., at
Vancouver's Simon Fraser Harbour Centre campus,
featuring talks by Murray Dobbin and Briemberg's
lawyer, Leo McGrady.
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