A few weeks ago I mentioned USC’s cancelling a valedictorian’s speech because of unspecified threats. In that case, the speaker was seen as pro-Palestinian. The heckler’s veto cuts both ways. It’s been in fannish news that the Vancouver Comics Arts Festival banned artist Miriam Libicki because of unspecified dangers her presence would create. The issue was that she was Israeli and had been in the IDF in the early 2000s, long before the events kicked off by the October 7 massacre.
The resulting reaction from the fan community has thrown the convention leadership into chaos. The people chiefly responsible for the bigoted decision have left the organization, which is good. What’s left of the board has issued an apology, a confession of cowardice. It says in part:
For background, the decision to ban this individual in our previous statement stemmed from two separate incidents on the VanCAF floor that took place during our 2022 and 2024 festivals. Neither incident was instigated by the individual referenced in our previous post. Both involved activists protesting the individual’s presence in a manner that caused concern for the safety of our volunteers, staff, and exhibitors.
This sounds like caving in to Nazis, but it’s worse. The convention’s earlier statement didn’t just say it was excluding her because it feared violence; it spat upon the people who invited her: “The oversight and ignorance to allow this exhibitor in the festival, not only this year but in 2022 as well, fundamentally falls in absolute disregard to all of our exhibiting artists, attendees, and staff, especially those who are directly affected by the ongoing genocide in Palestine and Indigenous community members alike.”
Military service is mandatory for men and women in Israel. However it dressed up the language, the convention attacked her for being Israeli.
The 2022 disruption came before the current war, so it couldn’t have been motivated by the charges of disregard for civilian lives connected with it. These “activists” allegedly engaged in harmful actions merely because they didn’t like seeing an Israeli guest. The board went after not the people making the convention unsafe, but one of the people they had endangered. (I haven’t been able to find out what the “activists” did. Keeping in mind how some convention codes of conduct work, the action might well have been something harmless, but that wouldn’t make the ban any more excusable.)
The statement of apology says, “There is no length of apology that can fully absolve that oversight.” Correct. The apology is worth nothing without remedial action. It doesn’t even offer to reinstate Libicki.
Maybe a new group can take over management of the festival and make it clear it won’t bow to threats and punish the targets. If so, I wish them the best of luck.