| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Exporting Freedom, Importing Intolerance |
| 2004-12-28 |
| The author of Behzti (the Punjabi word meaning dishonour or shame) is in hiding. News agencies reported last week that Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti had fled her home on the advice of the police. The law's counsel came after a theatre that was to present Ms.Bhatti's black comedy had abandoned further performances, following an attempt on Dec. 18 by hundreds of violent Sikh protesters to storm the building. The riot caused considerable property damage. Five police officers were hurt and 600 patrons had to be evacuated. Later, a spokesman from the Guru Nanak Gurdwara temple, Mohan Singh, was quoted welcoming the theatre's decision to cancel the production, regretting only that the management had not considered Sikh concerns about the play when they were expressed earlier. Readers who might think this happened somewhere on the Indian subcontinent would be wrong. It happened in central England. It was the Birmingham Repertory Theatre that cancelled further performances of Ms. Bhatti's play and the Birmingham constabulary that advised the author to flee. None of this should surprise Canadians. After all, it was in Montreal, not somewhere in the Levant, that the authorities at Concordia University were intimidated into cancelling two scheduled speakers, former Israeli prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. And it wasn't in Falluja but in Toronto, at York University, where those who came to hear American scholar Daniel Pipes had to have their venue shifted from a campus pub to a curtained-off corner of a basketball court for their own security. |
| Posted by:tipper |