Behind the Scenes at the 34th National Magazine Awards

Last night Canadian magaziners feted themselves with due and tasteful pomp at the annual National Magazine Awards.

For my multi-pronged role* as the NMA show stage manager, program editor, script composer and ticket-queue improv greeter, I was rewarded with backstage access which, coupled with the sobriety that outlasted most others in attendance, has yielded a few memorable impressions of the soiree.

Jacqueline Hennessy absolutely rocked the MC gig, employing the best kind of wit for this crowd (the succinct, self-deprecating kind; and all the funny bits were of her, not my, writing).

And she ran the tightest show on the NMA stage perhaps since Pierre Berton brandished a cane and aimed it at anyone who got within 10 feet of the podium to attempt a thank-you speech.

Magazine Week in Canada

What's better than a warm spring afternoon in the park? How about a warm spring afternoon in the park with a large stack of magazines that has been quietly, patiently yet doubtless eagerly awaiting my return from India.

And what beats the heck out of that? Having a [part-time*] job that encourages one to spend his afternoon in the park reading a large stack of magazines.

Jazeera to Canadians: You can call me Al

Mothers, hide your children. Dads, disable your remote controls. Al Jazeera is coming to town. The swarthy, menacing cable news network based in Qatar has cleared the last CRTC hurdle and, after a five-year struggle, is now available for distribution in Canada.

Having received its CRTC licensing Al Jazeera English (AJE) can now be picked up by Canadian cable distributors. The news giant is also planning to open a Canadian bureau as part of the process of gaining a toehold in North America. (BBC doesn't even have a bureau here. They've long been too polite to disturb Canadians.)

Oh me, oh my! Is Canada ready for this? Is Canada prepared to receive its daily serving of news with a side of global perspective? Can Canada find Qatar on a map?

Some Canadians* are skeptical. Al Jazeera is propaganda ("Give us Fox News!"). Al Jazeera is terrorist journalism ("Give us a CNN embed!"). Al Jazeera doesn't even sound Canadian ("We only watch acronyms!").

Alas, opponents of AJE are off the mark. Al Jazeera is nothing more than a guy named Al with a foreign-sounding last name. Surely nothing is more Canadian than a visible minority with an assimilated name.


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AJE is well known (elsewhere) for its in-depth coverage of global events, in the model of BBC World. Recent feature reporting includes the evaporation of South America's Lake Titicaca, Catholic-church child-abuse scandal in Ireland, and the celebration of Thanksgiving in American Indian communities.

So what kind of frightening programming will Canadians be subjected to? If you're watching AJE today, for example, you'll get:
A debate about race and recession in the US;
Reporting from India on the one-year anniversary of the Mumbai attacks;
An interview with the prime minister of Thailand;
A feature on Panama's small Muslim community making the hajj;
A round-table discussion of the strength of the new European Union.

Chilling stuff.

[Related post: "Walrus tackles Al Jazeera"]

* Actually only 2% of Canadians are unsure, according to the CRTC, which said that 98% of letters it received from the public during a 30-day feedback window before granting AJE a license were supportive of the network broadcasting in Canada.

Kafka and/or Kafkaesqueness help save Canadian in Sudan

Hear, hear!

The Globe and Mail was all up in the face of the Harper government yesterday after a federal court judge ordered that Abousfian Abdelrazik--the Canadian citizen imprisoned, tortured, and stranded in Sudan for the past 6 years--be returned home to Canada posthaste.

Kudos to Globe journalist Paul Koring for following the case so meticulously and outing the injustice at every turn. Cheers to Gerald Caplan for penning a scathing op-ed without referencing Kafka (everyone else did, including the judge, who likened Abdelrazik to the protagonist in The Trial). Grudging thumbs-up to cherry-picking human-rights guru and Liberal MP Irwin Cotler and celebrated Israeli writer David Grossman for their rebuke of Harper and CSIS.

Excerpts from the Globe's friday blitz of the Abdelrazik story:

"To the very end, the Harper government maintained a consistent attitude toward Abousfian Abdelrazik: mean-spirited, callous, destructive. Instead of announcing that they were willing at long last to allow this innocent Canadian citizen to return home from Sudan, instead of a hint of remorse for his ordeal, instead of explaining how our government intends to help him restore the life they stole from him six years ago, all he and we got was a begrudging eight words from the Minister of Justice."
--Gerald Caplan

"[Maher] Arar got an apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper and $10-million in compensation for Canada's role in getting him shipped to Syria where he was tortured. In Mr. Abdelrazik's case, the involvement of Canadian governments lasted far longer and was more direct..."
--Paul Koring

"After such a judgment, our government has little moral choice. This case is no longer about legal arguments, if it ever was. It is about a Canadian citizen stranded in Sudan and a government that has shown wrongful resolve in keeping him there."
--Irwin Cotler and David Grossman

"The document, marked 'secret,' shows that the Bush administration knew Sudan was about to release Mr. Abdelrazik from prison in the summer of 2006, and wanted help from Canadian police and anti-terrorism agents to try to charge him."
--Paul Koring

"As well as the Conservative government, a previous Liberal government was involved in denying Mr. Abdelrazik the right to come home. But since the Liberals were in power, two major inquiries, including one into Canada's role in the Maher Arar affair, have criticized Canada for how it deals with torture states. The Conservative government had an obligation to learn something from all that."
--Globe editorial

Here, too, is the Globe's timeline of events in the Abdelrazik affair. Notable is what Conservative Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon did personally to deny Abdelrazik his rights.

Related Tuque Souq post: Canadian in Khartoum celebrates year of squatting in embassy

National Magazine Awards gala is Friday

This Friday, Canadian magazines will win awards. Guaranteed! The 32nd annual National Magazine Awards gala is June 5. I'll be there.*

Earlier we took a look at 4 Middle East-related articles up for awards this year. Should victory transpire, they'll grab a place in history alongside these other recent NMA winners covering the Middle East:

Last year (the 2007 awards) George Jonas won a Gold award in the Essays category for his 7,600-word, um, essay/saga: "Meditations on Israel" published in Queen's Quarterly. I tried to get through it and failed. Obviously the judges fared better. (I've linked to the article on Jonas's personal website; if you can find the original QQ publication, there are some nice accompanying photographs.)

In 2006, Deborah Campbell won a Gold and a Silver award for "Iran's Quiet Revolution" in The Walrus... fantastic piece on the fabric of Iranian society just as the nuclear issue was first heating up (pun intended). The same year, George Jonas (again) won a Gold award for "The Spielberg Massacre" in Maclean's, in which he ripped the director for messing with his book about the Munich tragedy.

In 2005, it was The Walrus again: A photo essay by Rita Leistner, "Al Rashad"--about an Iraqi psychiatric hospital--won a Gold award in the Words & Pictures category (obviously the captions were great). (Unfortunately the above link doesn't call up the entire photo essay, just the intro.) "The Peace Wager" by Kathy Cook, also in The Walrus, won a Silver award for reporting on the Darfur crisis.

And just so you don't think that every award-winning Canadian magazine article about the Middle East has to be either published in The Walrus or by George Jonas (or in English, for that matter), in 2004 the venerable Michel Vastel won a Gold award for "Ma guerre d'Algérie" in L'actualité, ruminating on the 50th anniversary of the start of the Algerian war for independence, in which Michel Vastel fought. [Find out a bit more on this in the latest Ryerson Review of Journalism's profile of Vastel, who died last year.]

See you at the gala.

* I have to be there; it's the perk of my day job.

The Dregs of Journalism? Toronto Star serves hot cup of prejudice

At the Tuque Souq, we are obviously very forgiving when it comes to using bad puns in headlines. But we draw the line when bad journalism follows bad pun.

Take Oakland Ross's column from Saturday's Toronto Star: "Logo lands Starbucks in Middle East brew-haha." Mr. Ross picks up on a story that has been around the Middle East blogosphere for weeks and decides to write it with an egregious, if subtle, anti-Arab bias.

At the heart of the matter is Egyptian cleric Safwat Higazi delivering a tirade against the U.S. coffee chain because he thinks its logo resembles the biblical Jewish queen Esther, which obviously--to Higazi--makes Starbucks part of some amorphous Zionist conspiracy.

If the lunacy of this may be self-evident to you, think of how your average Middle Eastern coffee drinker feels about it. The problem is, Oakland Ross didn't bother to find out. It appears he didn't attempt to seek out anyone else authoritative in the Arab world to provide a rational counterclaim to Higazi's remarks.

If Ross were in America capturing conservative televangelist Pat Robertson likening the Starbucks logo to a Jewish conspiracy, do you think he'd be able to publish an article without first seeking out some other Christian leader to remind us that Pat Robertson is a loony.

It is a subtle generalization like Ross's about the Arab world that feeds a greater mischaracterization about Arabs (maybe Israelis too) as twitchy, reactionary, unable to think rationally (and no, I don't think Ross or the Toronto Star are being ironic*).

Take the opening line of the article:

"Sometimes it seems a person can't have a simple cup of coffee in the Middle East without making a political statement."

What this says to a reader is: "Read me, I'm another quirky article about those wacky Arabs always making a fuss over something. And don't worry, I'm not burdened with investigative reporting or journalistic nuance. Instead, I've got a link to YouTube."

Then, he finishes with a tidy insult to the Arabs: your resistance to economic exploitation is futile.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Canadian media! We have a new guest in the Tuque Souq doghouse.

[Thanks for the link, Quinn.]

*Editor's mitigation: The Toronto Star is not a bad paper. It's not a tabloid. It has a circulation of over 440,000, largest in Canada. It wins awards for Investigative Reporting (see: Cribb, Robert). Which is why this piece of claptrap from Ross is all the more vexing.


Blast from the Tuque Souq past: The last time the Toronto Star ran afoul of the Tuque Souq, it was over a terrible crossword-puzzle clue. Read more.

National Magazine Awards nominations announced

Tonight we found out the nominees for the 32nd annual National Magazine Awards, for which there are 36 categories and 341 total nominees from 79 mags, which gives the impression--I hope true--that this country is flippin' crazy about magazines.*

Among the nominees are at least 4 articles involving Middle East issues:

• "Iraq's Walking Dead" by Chris Watt in Maisonneuve magazine is nominated in the category Investigative Reporting. It's about Iraqi Kurds and a Kurdish prison in northern Iraq. Chris, a student, is also nominated for the Best Student Writer award for this piece.

• "The Prince of Little Mogadishu" by Gerald Hannon in Toronto Life is nominated in the Profiles category. (Hannon is hands-down the best magazine profile writer around this town, for those of you who like profiles, which honestly I don't, but I liked this one.) It's a story of K'naan, a Somali refugee-cum-hip-hop-artist. (Clay Stang, who took the photographs for this piece, also got a nomination in the Portrait Photography category.)

• "York's Middle East War" by Brett Grainger in Toronto Life is nominated in the Society category. I read this article when it first came out and found it a bit sensationalist. But having been involved in campus wars involving Middle East issues for years, my opinion probably matters little here. If you're a Tor Life fan (and really, a magazine's job is to pleasure its readers, not necessarily me), or if unlike me you don't have 20 friends who are grad students at York U, I'm sure you'll find it very insightful.
  
  
• "Liban, les « métiers » du chaos" par Katia Jarjoura dans L'actualité, sur l'équipe de nuit, d'une sorte, au Beyrouth. (Possibly the most interesting article nominated, but it's in French. C'est okay, oui, because all of you are bilingual, non? Like moi, I'm being bilingual maintenant.)
  

Up for grabs for these and hundreds of other articles: Gold and Silver awards at the 32nd annual National Magazine Awards gala on June 5. Stay tuned.

*Full disclosure: Your humble blogger platoons as the Communications Manager for the National Magazine Awards, so this blog posting is probably 49% utterly shameless promotion of the organization he works for and, more to the point, initiates and tracks the media coverage of. But the other 51% is pure, unaffiliated love for Canadian magazines!

Save Mohamed Kohail: Update February 2009

Earlier this month, the fate of Mohamed Kohail for the first time in 2 years looked infinitesimally sunnier after the Supreme Judicial Council of Saudi Arabia decided against upholding the death sentence against the Canadian citizen, his brother Sultan, and a third co-defendant who is Jordanian.

The Council asked the lower court to revisit its ruling and death sentence. This is not the same thing as the Supreme Council rejecting the death sentence; by not upholding the ruling the Supreme Council is basically asking the lower court: "Are you sure?" The Kohails are far from in the clear.

[Brief background: the Kohail bros. are on death row in Saudi Arabia for allegedly causing the death of a schoolmate in a brawl in January 2007. They are Canadian citizens of Palestinian origin. Find out more in our Tuque Souq Mohamed Kohail bureau.]

Liberal MP Dan McTeague (Pickering-Scarborough East) is Parliament's point man on the negotiations to free the Kohails (at least from the clutches of the Saudi justice system). Click here to send the Hon. McTeague an email, encouraging him to step it up and free these boys on death row.

Also, an update on an item we mentioned in an earlier Kohail post:
There is an online petition for clemency for Rizana Nafeek, the Sri Lankan national who is facing the death penalty in Saudi Arabia for allegedly causing the death of an infant she was babysitting; Rizana was 17 at the time. According to the Asian Human Rights Commission, Ms Nafeek is very ill in prison and must undergo surgery while awaiting the outcome of her trial.

[Also not so unrelated: this press release from the Canadian Association of Journalists came across the wire today about freelance Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout, who is still missing and presumed kidnapped in Somalia for 6 months now.]

Obama sworn in as President of Gaza

Three things are evident in the editorial coverage of the Israel/Hamas ceasefire:

1) There is undeniable innuendo that the glory of Obama's inauguration caused the tanks and rockets to fall silent; this was necessary so that the entire world could watch the Bush-to-Obama transformation unfettered.

2) There continues to be this absurd insinuation that Hamas is a multi-headed beast with a frail body; that if you chop off the heads (Yassin, Rantisi, Siam... someday Zahhar, Haniyeh, Meshal) that the body will fall over and decay into humus from which will rise the body of a docile farm animal agreeable to Western palates.

3) One shouldn't drink hot coffee while reading the National Post; there's a dangerous potential to burn one's nasal passages.

In the Toronto Star, Monday's editorial painted a monochrome portrait of destruction/relief in Gaza, then panned to Obama's side of the court with a plea that the new prez bring his change to the peace process. But then, columnist Martin Regg Cohn urged Obama to direct the peace process status quo ante. Well then, good thing there's another Clinton on the field.

The Globe and Mail's Friday editorial was the cause of some chortling at the Tuque Souq; Hamas, it said, should accept the inevitability of defeat, in perpetuity, forever. Unfortunately, the very reason that Hamas now sits before the typewriter of the Palestinian national narrative is because it won't accept defeat. And this, in a perversely cyclical way, is the reason it picks a fight with such an unbeatable military force. Recall Hamas's campaign slogan from 2006: "One hand builds, the other resists." There will be a lot of building to do in Gaza now.

An op-ed in Monday's Globe said that among the victories that Israel can take from this war are a) that now Israel in unquestionably militarily superior to Hamas; and b) that now it is revealed that Hamas's promises and proclamations are empty rhetoric. 'Duh' journalism at its finest.

The Montreal Gazette parsed the "hate-mongers" amongst the more legitimate protesters, but over at the National Post, well, now it's time to laugh:

“Many [supporters of the Palestinian side] were the genuinely good-hearted college sophomores, possessing naiveté and Che Guevara T-shirts, claiming to “understand” the “root causes” of suicide bombers, while still regretting their toll on humanity...

In Gaza today, with no real 'occupation' to resist, and Hamas’ organized attacks against Israel, those supporting the Palestinian side have a much harder time arguing ethical equivalence...

Relatively moderate voices, and the let's-get-along crowd, with less to say, and probably less motivation to say it, are crowded out by those who loudly root against Israel as a general rule: postmodernists, hard-edge Islamists and old fashioned anti-Semites.”

Postmodernists?

Canadian media use human shields as shields against humanity

Thumbing the pages of Canada's major national dailies, it's not hard to discern that the editors prefer Israel's acknowledged defence to Hamas' accused offence on the topic of the current bloody brouhaha going on in Gaza.
Canada's largest-circulation daily, the Toronto Star, said on December 30 that "Israel is justified, but at what cost?" Expounding, the editorial sought a nuanced perspective:

"First let it be said that it is understandable why Israeli forces are attacking Gaza... It can be argued, of course, that the Israeli counterattack is disproportionate. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the past few days, while only two Israelis have died in the latest rocket attacks."

Nuanced is the article, though not the difference between "Let it be said..." and "It can be argued..." And then...

"But that just points to the difficulty of mounting an attack against a covert force using civilians as shields."

A sweeping grab of all Gazan civilians as human shields? So much for nuance.

A few days later, on January 3, the Star sobered up:

"[M]oderate Palestinians are becoming radicalized by the lopsided war. This past week 430 Gazans, including women and children, were reported killed and 2,200 hurt; four Israelis have died."

The Star then argued that Canada should offer to send monitors to Gaza as part of a UN initiative. But the Star knows what happened to the last Canadian soldier stationed between Israel and its adversary.

The Globe and Mail's January 6 editorial was less than "measured"...

"The ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, to prevent the firing of rockets into Israel, is consistent with the Israeli government's prudent, limited war aims... If the Israel Defence Forces have to return again and again, to suppress new supplies of such rockets, so be it."

... and practically offered tactical advice to the IDF...

"The seizure of a few apartment buildings on [Gaza] city's outskirts, however, makes sense to provide the IDF with good vantage points... The priority is to root out as many rocket-launching positions and mobile militia squads as possible."

... and compared - very oddly - Israel's siege of Gaza with that of Stalingrad:

"...avoiding the horrific precedents of Stalingrad in 1942 and Manila in 1945."

Um, who besieged Stalingrad again?

A rather feeble January 3 editorial in the Globe mentioned that,

"... the broad Israeli public is sick to death of eight years of rocket attacks from Gaza."

... which is certainly true, but they neglected to mention anything about the broad Gaza Strip public and its metaphorical health vis-a-vis 42 years of Israeli oppression. The editorial concluded with the meek line,

"International pressure is needed to persuade both sides to accept an exit plan before an already deadly conflict takes a turn for the worse."

It's worse.

The National Post, which has opined on the recent conflict with the help of notorious Israel apologist Daniel Pipes, went to press on January 6 with an editorial that unambiguously called Israel "the victim" and further summed up Gaza's entire civilian population as human shields...

"Never mind that Israel's campaign in Gaza has been humane by military standards -- surgically killing hundreds of Hamas gunmen yet only a few dozen of their human shields."

"Humane" is a matter of opinion, but civilian deaths are a matter of fact lost so often by the press during the past week. At the time of this editorial, more than one hundred Palestinian civilians were confirmed killed.

Now it's up well over 200.

[Editor's note: Don't think for a sec that we condone or defend the deliberate use of human shields by combatants, nor willy-nilly apologize for the belligerence of Hamas. But the fact of the matter is that the Gaza Strip is not exactly the Ardennes Forest. Humans live everywhere in the Gaza Strip, densely. And while we would prefer to see neither side engage in armed conflict, and further deplore the deliberate use of human shields (such as Israel did during the siege of Jenin Refugee Camp in 2002), it is undeniable that residency in the Gaza Strip does not ipso facto make one a "human shield." There are 1.7 million residents in the Gaza Strip. We acknowledge that, just as we acknowledge that war ain't pretty and all people under oppression have a right to defend themselves, be they residents of a town under rocket fire or residents of a Strip under bombardment. We humbly argue that the mainstream media should acknowledge likewise.]

Blog Fodder: Two popular blogs go down the economic drain

At the Tuque Souq, we blog for fun, for cheeky infotainment and the occasional heart-felt call to arms (along with the odd research query). We're happy with a comment here and there, and our mere hundreds of page hits.

Some blogs have a much greater reach, with readership in the many thousands (or hundreds of thousands) per month, and aspire to provide a greater service to the public as collective newsgatherers and online communities. And to get to these ends they require a modest bankroll to be as successful and ingenuous as they are, though they provide what is essentially a free service.

Therein lies the rub for two popular Canadian blogs that have announced they are closing as of the new year. The popular Torontoist blog is closing down after more than 4 years of being the most popular blog in the GTA. And one of our all-time favs, MediaScout - put out by the great folks at Maisonneuve magazine in Montreal - is also folding its shutters indefinitely, citing lack of sustainable funding.

R.I.P. blog sisters and brothers. May you find happy days in blog heaven (or blog hell).

Media giant CanWest slaps SLAPP suit on Palestinian activists

Notoriously pro-Israel media conglomerate CanWest Global Communication filed a lawsuit against at least 3 Vancouver activists who allegedly produced a pro-Palestine parody of a Vancouver Sun issue last year.

CanWest owns the Vancouver Sun as well as dozens of other media outlets, including Global TV, the National Post, canada.com, and almost all dailies and weeklies in the Vancouver area.

From the website of the Seriously Free Speech Committee, organized to help defend and raise awareness about the issue:

"In June 2007, the Palestine Media Collective produced and distributed 12,000 copies of a newspaper parody of the Vancouver Sun that satirized Canwest’s anti-Palestinian bias... Canwest has launched an unprecedented civil lawsuit against local activists... for “conspiring” to produce and distribute a four-page parody of the Vancouver Sun’s satirising Canwest’s biased coverage of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories."

[Watch the video clip explaining the case here.]