For a documentary that Judy Rebick described in rabble.ca as “more on the side of the Palestinians in the Middle East,” the National Film Board’s Discordia still managed to make (nearly) everyone happy.

After its world premiere at Concordia in early February, Aaron Maté, a central character in the documentary, jokingly told me that he was having second thoughts about Discordia seeing that Yoni Petel, a B’nai Brith organizer and member of the Zionist youth group Betar, gave Discordia the thumbs-up. As did the Canadian Jewish News, the organ of the pro-Israeli lobby group the Canadian Jewish Congress, and Martin Patriquin, the indefatigably skeptical and left-ish columnist for the Montreal weekly, The Hour.

The Globe and Mail‘s engaging jester and silver haired expert on the Middle East, John Doyle, (he thinks I’m “very boring” and “far too young” to understand what’s going on there) wrote that Discordia delivered exactly what “[he] was asking for.”

In her review of Discordia, Judy Rebick lauds the documentary for presenting its subjects with “honesty” and “sympathy” — it’s something that is definitely “worth seeing and discussing.” She objects to the representation of women in the documentary — most are presented as mothers and girlfriends— something that is “extremely annoying in this day and age.” This is true: one of my main annoyances with the documentary was its portrayal of Emily Bitting, an activist with the Blood Sisters collective, a Concordia Student Union council member, and someone I greatly admire for her formidable intellect. Of the three times she is quoted in the documentary, two revolve around her relationship with me.

But what I also find exceedingly annoying, especially in this day and age, and more precisely in today’s North American societies, is that a whitewash passed unnoticed by Judy Rebick, and many on the left who enthused over Discordia.

It is not as if the Concordia Student Union did not publish a report detailing systemic anti-Arab prejudice at the highest administrative levels in Concordia, or that the near riot on the day of Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled lecture was largely a reaction to this prejudice. It was neatly symbolized on that day by the contempt it took to block off most of the university’s entrances so that Netanyahu could speak to a handpicked (pro-Israeli) audience.

The administration’s decision to allow Netanyahu on campus for a pep talk to his fans — Rector Frederick Lowy later admitted that the decision was wrung out of the Rector’s cabinet by “community pressure” — was, of course, very unpopular with many students and faculty at Concordia.

But unpopular administrative measures are always passed at Concordia, and they do not always require a squadron of riot police and barricades to see to their implementation, nor do they always cause student uprisings. Unpopular measures are enforced every day in our society, and we can usually count on what Franz Fanon described as the “aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order [that] serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably.”

But measures that flagrantly demean a populace, and derive their legitimacy only by the force of police batons, which serve as an admission that no appeals to good sense will suffice to allow for their implementation, are usually met with unrest.

As September 9 plainly showed, the presence of dozens of riot police did nothing to mitigate this unrest; it only punctuated the profound contempt shown by an administration that saw nothing wrong in inviting a man who bears direct responsibility for the shootings of dozens of unarmed demonstrators in the occupied territories in September 1996. Netanyahu’s lecture was a statement of profound contempt towards the worth of Palestinian lives, and the administration made sure to cross the t’s and dot the i’s with a squadron of riot police.

Even then, the contempt I am discussing requires further clarifications. It is a contempt that is an obvious result of a two-tiered system of standards and privileges that exists in universities, which have become so reliant on private and corporate funding that any other points of reference are devalued, if given any worth at all.

In the year before Netanyahu’s scheduled lecture, Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) was denied access to a university owned park to prevent the group from holding a human rights “bazaar,” after weeks of unrelenting pressure on the university from B’nai Brith Canada. In the same period, the university attempted to ban the local press from covering an SPHR exhibit, presumably in an attempt to stave off further criticisms. It is no secret that groups like SPHR do not have the economic or organizational clout to pressure the administration, and in a system where your point of view is merited in proportion to this type of clout, the administration was singularly unsympathetic to their arguments on “freedom of assembly” and “free speech.”

After the Netanyahu protest, the administration wanted everyone to understand that it was “cleaning up” Concordia, as Benjamin Netanyahu recommended in a press conference, and was holding trials to punish the “guilty students.” Again, the trials were an issue of public relations, and judicial niceties were of secondary concern to the administration. I was expelled, but I appealed and won, because the appeal panel was sympathetic to my argument that I had walked out of my initial hearing in protest over the administrationâe(TM)s rigging of my hearing panel (two panellists that sat on the hearings for the September 9 cases later publicly denounced the administration for attempting to “railroad” the verdicts.)

This all took place against a backdrop of palpable prejudice against Palestinians and Arab students at Concordia, which eventually prompted the Concordia Student Union to commission a report on anti-Arab prejudice at Concordia. The report dealt only with Concordia, leaving out the context of a society in which anti-Arab stereotypes and prejudices have become something of a substitute for thinking when it comes to the Middle East, and our government’s complicity in the misery of the West Bank and Gaza’s Palestinians.

Rebick wrote that Discordia affords a glimpse of “the impact of a struggle like the one at Concordia on the individuals involved.” If that were true, then I would not have much cause to complain, although I think that at least a few people who have given Discordia the “thumbs up” would view the documentary differently if it indeed represented the “struggle” at Concordia — discomfort, perhaps, over how it is perfectly normal to silence, defame and vilify opponents of our government’s support for Israel’s brutish practices against the Palestinians, and how it can only be normal in a society where Palestinians are not fully seen as human beings who want and deserve the same things we all do.