Ottawa music producer and political activist Fred Litwin has been “out” for decades, not only as a gay man, but as a proud and articulate Conservative who prefers to be a “free thinker” rather than be fashionably left on a spectrum of important political causes.
In his new book, Conservative Confidential: Inside the Fabulous Blue Tent, Litwin walks us through his political conversion to Conservatism after becoming gravely disillusioned with the left shortly after 9/11.
Litwin is founder of Ottawa’s news-making Free Thinking Film Society. He’s also the architect of a gay-friendly wing of the Conservative Party of Canada whose social gatherings inside the “fabulous blue tent” at Conservative conventions were famously popular during the Stephen Harper era.
Now as an author, he’s manufactured a cogent and compelling rebuttal of modern leftist politics in Canada, America and the liberal West. Litwin writes with a strong voice: international commentator Daniel Pipes described his book as “an eloquent mix of the personal and the global.”
The point of no return in Litwin’s conversion came shortly after 9/11, when he began encountering interpretations that the catastrophe was all America’s fault. The Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui, for example, asserted that the attacks occurred because America was “indifferent to the suffering of too many peoples, from Afghanistan to Chechnya to the Middle East… thus driving the ordinary folk there to seethe in silence against America and the crazed ones into fanatical acts.”
Then he looked at Noam Chomsky’s book on 9/11: “It was all typical Chomsky – bash Israel, bash American foreign policy, blame the United States for Al Qaeda, condemn the United States as a terrorist state – all 21st-century regurgitations from the 1960s. I sighed and put the book back. I was done with the left.”
In bringing out all the usual suspects, the book presents a worthwhile rehash of many great and embarrassing moments in Canadian and global politics, including some we may have forgotten.
Remember when Prime Minister Jean Chrétien seemed to blame America in an interview with the CBC on the first anniversary of 9/11? “You cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others,” Chrétien said. “That is what the western world – not only the Americans, the western world – has to realize. Because they are human beings too. There are long-term consequences.”
Or how about Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish complaining to an Egyptian newspaper about the “influence of the Jewish lobby” in Canada, cursing our neighbours to the south (“Damn Americans, I hate those bastards”) and stomping on a George W. Bush proxy-voodoo doll?
These are not just blasts from the past, of course. Some of these fringe Liberal attitudes may again resurface in Justin Trudeau’s majority Liberal government. Indeed, isn’t the historic Liberal insistence on Canada’s role as “honest broker” in the Middle East really just a smokescreen to apportion a disproportionate dollop of blame on Israel and the West?
Litwin also reminds us that Justin Trudeau’s brother and advisor, Alexandre Trudeau, is a rabble-rousing filmmaker whose 2012 documentary, The New Great Game, defended Iran’s nuclear weapons program while vilifying Israel. The film, which ran on the CBC, was produced in co-operation with Press TV, the Iranian state-owned broadcaster.
Litwin had his own run-in with the Iranians in 2011 over plans by his Free Thinking Film Society to screen Iranium, a film that deals with the brutality of the Iranian regime and its covert quest for nuclear weapons. A complaint from the Iranian Embassy initially compelled Library and Archives Canada (LAC), where Litwin had booked a theatre, to cancel the screening.
After the press got hold of the story, however, LAC decided to allow the screening after all, but protests and threats forced closure of the building. Thanks to all the publicity generated, the film was eventually shown to a capacity crowd in a different venue. Canada ultimately sent a diplomatic note to Iran that stated, “Canada is a free country and freedom of expression is a core value that won’t be compromised.”
Similarly, when the Free Thinking Film Society scheduled a screening of the film Obsession, which traces the rise of radical Islam and its incitement to global jihad, a complaint from an Ottawa professor prompted a cancellation and much publicity – the film ultimately attracted a sold-out house in another venue.
Litwin also showed the film Reclaiming Our Pride by Toronto lawyer Martin Gladstone, which protested the inclusion of QuAIA (“Queers Against Israeli Apartheid”) in the Toronto Gay Pride parade. Litwin points out that Uzma Shakir, the city official who decided the term “Israeli apartheid” was not discriminatory, had a serious undeclared bias. Shakir, Toronto’s director of equity, diversity and human rights, had previously demonstrated antipathy towards Israel and was a regular contributor to Rabble.ca, the media sponsor of Israel Apartheid Week.
Another local institution – the CBC – also comes under Litwin’s scrutiny as he targets a bevy of producers, commentators and hosts (including Tony Berman, Avi Lewis, Jian Ghomeshi, Eric Margolis, and Robert Fisk) who were famously antagonistic to Israel. But he rises to the defence of Harper’s Conservatives over the left’s false presumption that the Conservatives had a hidden agenda to fight a holy war against gay rights.
“By 2015, I’d already spent nine years in the enemy camp, and I’d never even heard any war drums,” he writes. “I found no anti-gay war rooms, and for most of those years, I’d been a completely ‘out’ gay Conservative.”
Don’t let the word “Conservative” in the title fool you into supposing the book is past its “best before” date. With a Liberal majority government now enshrined in Ottawa, issues raised in Conservative Confidential now seem more relevant and cautionary than ever.