The Problem With The Selina Robinson Story...
. . . It wasn't true. What follows is the story of what really happened.
There’s just so much more to this whole thing that I couldn’t bring myself to let it go. So I went very, very deep, because the news coverage of this whole affair has entrenched in the public record this expediently indelible impression: Owing to the “depth of hurt that she has caused”, as British Columbia premier David Eby put it, and owing to what her loudest critics call the “racist” and “colonialist” remarks she’d made, British Columbia’s advanced education minister simply had to go.
This is an untrue story.
I got well into the true story here in the National Post, in a way that’s suitable to a family newspaper, so to speak. The subhead in the online version is more helpfully specific: Too many journalists have fallen for claims that the B.C. cabinet minister said something 'racist.' She didn't.
There is a big story here, but you won’t learn about from what you’ll read below these headlines: B.C. minister stepping down amid outcry from pro-Palestinian groups over 'crappy piece of land' remark. Selina Robinson steps down as B.C. minister following controversial comments. Selina Robinson quits cabinet post following 'crappy piece of land' comments.
All of those accounts amount to an untrue story, and it brings me no comfort to conclude that quite a few of my overworked colleagues in Canada’s rickety and decrepit news media complex just went along with it. Timidity is part of it, but to an alarming extent you could also say that some of the “journalism” in this case involved an untrue story’s whole-cloth invention.
If you were following this story as it unfolded in just about all the news media you will have been led to believe that it was the content of Robinson’s comments during a January 30 Zoom panel discussion, hosted by the 149-year-old Jewish human rights organization B’nai Brith Canada, that led to her dismissal, or resignation, or whatever you want to call it.
That’s only part of what was untrue about the Selina Robinson story.
An important thing here is that the campaign to banish Robinson from public life did not begin with the January 30 panel discussion. Her comments during that panel were merely the pretext for a public execution that had been decided and planned months earlier.
Real Story newsletters tend to be pretty link-rich and my usual advice is to skip the links until you’ve finished reading the newsletter. Today it would help if you have a read of my National Post take on the affair, at least so I don’t have to retell it all here.
What really happened was the campaign to oust Robinson began shortly after October 30, when Robinson and Eby announced that Holocaust education was to become mandatory in British Columbia’s schools.
After everything that has happened, here’s just one question you should ask yourself: What kind of “Holocaust education” should we expect to end up being taught in British Columbia’s Grade 10 social studies classes? Here’s another: How will the creation of that “racist, colonial, genocidal Zionist entity” in Palestine figure into the course work?
What has happened here to a Jewish member of a Canadian provincial cabinet, a woman who headed the Jewish Family Service Agency in Vancouver beore getting into provincial politics, is an event that is both disturbing and illuminating. In this newsletter I’m not going to be quite so delicate as I was in the Post.
What follows is a true story.