Censoring the Dead

[Violet_Crumble]

by Naomi Klein
and Aaron Mate
June 15, 2005

Even after her death, it seems the attacks on Zahra Kazemi will not end. It was only two months ago that Canadians were stunned by new evidence that the Montreal photojournalist was tortured to death while in Iranian custody. Kazemi was arrested in June 2003 while taking photographs outside of a prison in Iran, the country of her birth. To punish her for this transgression, Kazemi’s captors raped and beat her, according to a doctor who fled Iran to tell the story.

Close to two years later, there are new attempts to cover Kazemi’s lens, to prevent her photographs from reaching public eyes – only now the censorship is happening inside her adopted country of Canada. Last week Montreal’s Cote St. Luc Library removed five of Kazemi’s photographs from display after Jewish patrons complained of alleged “pro-Palestinian bias”; they left up the rest of the exhibition, which had already been displayed in Paris. Kazemi’s son, Stephan Hachemi, called the removal of the Palestinian photographs “a violation of my mother’s spirit” and rightly demanded that the library show the entire exhibit or nothing at all. So the library took down the entire show.

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The decision to take down photographs thought to be “too sympathetic” to the Palestinian cause is also part of a disturbing pattern to silence opposition to the expansionist Israeli occupation of the Occupied Territories, now in its 38th year. Two summers ago, CanWest Global, Canada’s largest media conglomerate, went so far as to produce a heavily-promoted full-length documentary that compared pro-Palestinian students at Montreal’s Concordia University to Nazis. In September, the company’s newspaper chain was admonished by the Reuters news agency for running its stories with ideological alterations to the original text. And rarely in the media do we hear the many anti-occupation voices that challenge the delusional consensus that Palestinians are to blame for their own misery.

But it’s not just Palestinian resistance that is distorted or ignored: so too are Palestinians themselves, their faces, their lives. And it was this de-humanizing void that Kazemi was trying to fill with her work. She “illustrated the daily life of Palestinians and the problems they faced as they sought to preserve their land and their identity” in the face of “exodus, poverty, humiliation, suffering, and the ravages of war,” according to the caption that accompanied the photo exhibition. And this is indeed a threatening act: Simple images that capture the human consequences of occupation are a direct challenge to those who have found ways to seal themselves off to a people’s collective suffering.

In the words of her son, Zhara Kazemi had the courage “to have shown the unshowable, to have shown the truth.” In her death, we dishonour her memory and legacy by allowing her photographs to be suppressed, images that are an expression of the very courage and humanity that cost this brave journalist her life.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=8089