With only weeks to go until the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg is slated to open its highly controversial exhibit, “Palestine Uprooted: The Nakba Past and Present,” there are increasing calls demanding that the taxpayer-funded institution seriously address the potential dangerous consequences of hosting such a project.
The proposed exhibit focuses on the so-called “nakba,” an Arabic word meaning catastrophe, referring to the attempted Palestinian-Arab genocide of Jews in 1948 as part of Israel’s War of Independence. When the effort to exterminate Israel failed, there was a subsequent wave of Arab refugees, who then termed their attempted mass murder of Jews a “catastrophe.”
Given the scandalous nature of such a project, Winnipeg’s Jewish community castigated the museum for failing to even consult the city’s Jewish organizations, though local news media outlets like CBC attempted to sanitize those concerns and instead promoted the exhibit.
A recent letter from legal rights organization Shurat HaDin warned the museum that their exhibit was potentially running afoul of Canadian law, specifically the Museums Act, as well as provincial and federal human rights legislation, by hosting such a brazenly anti-Israel exhibit.
As the group’s president, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, noted, “a national human rights museum cannot become a platform for politicized narratives that risk contributing to division and misunderstanding including here by erasing Jewish history, delegitimizing Jewish self-determination, or contributing to hostility against the Jewish community.”
Antisemitism experts have lambasted the museum, saying that its exhibit will only fuel hostility towards Jews at a time of historic levels of anti-Jewish hate crimes, primarily driven by the dissemination of anti-Israel propaganda.
While the museum has defended the exhibit, observers have pointed to a number of highly controversial figures involved in the project.
According to news reports, a group called the Palestinian Content Advisory Network (PCAN) played a “central role in making this exhibit possible.”
Members of this committee included figures such as Ramsey Zeid, president of the Canadian Palestinian Association of Manitoba (a regular guest on CBC radio), who has been seen at a local anti-Israel demonstration and was accused of encouraging children to spread hateful anti-Jewish slurs, such as “all Zionists are racists.”
Despite Zeid’s own apparent enthusiasm for anti-Israel slogans, he has not hesitated to accuse Jewish children of racism against Palestinians. Zeid is no obscure activist; he has been an invited guest to the Manitoba throne speech, claiming to have been invited by Premier Wab Kinew.
Another member of the committee, Najat El-Khairy, is an artist whose work was promoted by Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), a group that openly celebrated the October 7, 2023 massacres in Israel, and has been accused of ties with the banned terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
In fact, virtually every member of the committee which played a “central role” in conceiving the exhibit is reported to be hardline anti-Israel activists who have spread extremist statements.
It is unconscionable that the taxpayer-funded Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), ironically conceived by one of Canada’s most prominent Jewish philanthropists, would rely on a cadre of anti-Israel radicals to create an exhibit that carelessly promotes radical pro-Palestinian propaganda, and equally inconceivable that the Canadian news media would have little interest in exposing this scandal.
