Earlier today, Phil posted on a leading Israeli book chain that has removed a book critical of the settler movement. Seems the trend is spreading. Tablet reports on an effort by the Canadian Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to ban the book The Shepherd’s Granddaughter
from a program run by the Ontario Library Association for 7th and 8th graders:
The book was published in 2008 to mostly good reviews and little controversy. But when it was nominated to the 2010 Forest of Reading list, the uproar began. Canadian Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center demanded that the book be “made unavailable” to students. “The Simon Wiesenthal Center does not promote censorship,” said president Avi Benlolo, “but the issue is that this book is so skewed and so overtly against the State of Israel. … Any school child who reads the book will grow to hate the State of Israel and possibly the Jewish people.” The Jewish Tribune, a publication of B’nai Brith Canada, ran a story with the provocative headline: “Could this book turn your child against Israel?” The story’s opening sentence: “Reading this book made me want to go to Palestine and kill Israelis.” The quote was attributed to a girl named Madelaine on the book review site Goodreads.com. Quoting her was Toronto parent and Jewish Tribune contributor Brian Henry, who also wrote an open letter to Ontario’s education minister demanding the book’s withdrawal from the reading list. “Unfortunately, that’s a perfectly natural reaction to this book,” Henry wrote. And in the same issue of the Tribune, Sheila Ward, a trustee of the Toronto District School Board, said, “I will move heaven and earth to have The Shepherd’s Granddaughter taken off the school library shelves.”
Ward, it was clear, hadn’t read the book. “This book,” she wrote, “on the basis of what Mr. Henry has sent to me, is so blatantly biased that it is intolerable. I suspect I’ll be accused of censorship. If it means I will not support hate-provoking literature with no redeeming qualities, I am delighted to be called a censor.”
To its credit Tablet quotes the Goodreads review at length showing that the author in fact does not want to kill Israelis, and says that Henry is being intentionally "disingenuous and hyperbolically alarmist." Unfortunately that doesn’t mean he won’t be successful.
