EDITORIAL: Moral cowardice at Toronto film festival

Article content

The chief executive of the Toronto International Film Festival insists censorship had nothing to do with TIFF’s decision to pull a film from this year’s festival on the horrors of Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on Oct 7, 2023.

Such claims, Cameron Bailey said in a statement, are “unequivocally false” and he “remains committed” to working with Canadian filmmaker Barry Avrich “to allow the film to be screened at this year’s festival.”

The film — The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue — recounts the story of retired Israel Defence Forces General Noam Tibon’s heroic efforts to rescue members of his own family, including two granddaughters, along with other victims of Hamas’ terrorist attack.

The allegation of censorship was made — reasonably we believe — by Avrich and his film crew, who told the online U.S. entertainment website Deadline, in response to TIFF’s original decision:

“We are shocked and saddened that a venerable film festival has defied its mission and censored its own programming by refusing this film. Ultimately film is an art form that stimulates debate from every perspective that can both entertain us and make us uncomfortable … We are not political filmmakers, nor are we activists: we are storytellers.”

TIFF has offered a word salad of explanations for why it initially rejected the film.

The most absurd one was that the filmmakers failed to obtain permission from Hamas to use footage of its massacre of 1,250 Israeli civilians and kidnapping of 250 hostages.

But if it wasn’t that, and if it wasn’t an act of antisemitism by attempting to cancel out Israeli suffering in the 22-month Israel-Gaza war, unlike Palestinian suffering, when both are valid topics for filmmakers, then what was it?

We believe it was fear since TIFF repeatedly cited as one of its reasons for initially disinviting the film — including in an email to Avrich first reported by the Globe and Mail —  that  “the risk of major, disruptive protest actions around the film’s presence at the Festival, including internal opposition, has become too great.”

That’s a coward’s response and sadly not unexpected since pro-Hamas demonstrators have learned they can intimidate politicians, film festivals and universities into cancelling events on the Israeli perspective of the war.

They will keep doing it as long as it works.