I’m not reporting any of this to say one way is better than the other. You can forget about world events in Paris or Belgium, without the lamppost reminders every few steps of the horrors of war. That’s not great, right? You should know about the world around you, and not everyone picks up a newspaper, digital or otherwise.
But do the flyers and white-person-keffiyehs of downtown Toronto constitute information or advocacy or antisemitism or some impossible-to-disentangle mix thereof? The imperative not to stick your fingers in your ears and ignore difficult issues can make it seem like the noble alternative is to inundate yourself with the visual political messaging your surroundings happen to have landed on.
Is what I’m describing, then, a stifling of political expression? Or is it an aesthetic commitment to not everything being about politics? Because my hunch is that the typical Parisian wearing a French-person scarf rather than a keffiyeh isn’t doing so out of Zionism but rather out of a desire to wear the scarf that goes just so with their outfit.
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
Source link : https://thecjn.ca/perspectives/pmb-summer/
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Publish date : 2024-08-19 07:00:00
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