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Kevin Klein: Human rights museum treating Jewish concerns as an afterthought

The museum has remained largely silent in the face of widespread opposition to its upcoming 'Nakba' exhibit

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The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) will open its controversial Nakba exhibit on June 27, and it isn’t talking.

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“Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present” will explore what the CMHR describes as the “ongoing forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians” through artwork, photographs, video testimonies and personal stories from Palestinian-Canadians.

Kevin Klein: Human rights museum treating Jewish concerns as an afterthought Back to video

Despite a formal legal threat from the Israeli advocacy group Shurat HaDin and calls from multiple Jewish organizations to pause and review the exhibit, the CMHR has largely deflected. The museum’s spokesperson, Amanda Gaudes, and its CEO, Isha Khan, have provided brief written statements, but made no commitment to pause or alter the exhibit.

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For a growing number of voices, including members of the family most responsible for the museum’s very existence, the silence speaks volumes.

SUBHED: ‘He would be disgusted’

The CMHR was the dream of the late Winnipeg media magnate and philanthropist Israel (Izzy) Asper. His family raised millions to build it, and it opened in 2014. His son, David Asper, a prominent Winnipeg lawyer and businessman, says what is unfolding at the institution is a betrayal of everything it was supposed to stand for.

“My dad never had a problem with telling the whole story,” said Asper. “I think he’d be disgusted at how the telling of this story has become weaponized in the antisemitism game.”

For Asper, the exhibit is not simply a curatorial misstep; it is a symptom of a broader failure of institutional leadership and of a political class unwilling to take a stand. He says the exhibit perpetuates what he calls a victim-oppressor propaganda narrative, one that deliberately carves out the historical context of the 1948 Arab-Israeli........

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