Nonetheless, the fighters gave the crowd its money’s worth. The headline fight, a Canadian Professional Boxing Council super-middleweight title bout between Martin Desjardins and local hero Ali Nestor Charles, came curiously in the middle of the bill, befuddling those who thought the best would be kept for last.

Charles, the 41-year-old Montreal North gym owner of Haitian descent, was serenaded by the adoring crowd’s chants of “Ali bumaye!” – or “Ali kill him!” – a tip of the hat to the Ali-Foreman ’74 epic in Zaire so fantastically documented in When We Were Kings. The chants were well-intentioned but likely unnecessary; Charles never appeared anything less than sure that he would win the fight organized for victims of an earthquake that had taken the lives of his friends and family.

The southpaw swaggered around the ring while allowing Desjardins to control the first two rounds, shaking off a few well-placed rights by the younger Quebecker. Buoyed by emotional energy early on, Charles defiantly looked away from the referee who lectured him after some questionable behaviour in the clinch. Even getting knocked down at the first round bell didn’t seem to faze the driven Charles, who was given a three-count despite his vocal protests.

The crowd ate it up and the small pocket of chanting Desjardins supporters would consistently be drowned out by “Ali Bumaye!” as Charles began to fight smarter and swing the momentum his way. Charles opened a cut over Desjardins’s left eye midway through the third, which became a blood-red welt to which Charles would return again and again with his surgical lefts. Desjardins fought admirably in front of the hostile crowd, never backing down while becoming more and more desperate to land his booming rights as the rounds ticked off and the scores shifted more and more in Charles’s favor. Seeing more red from a new cut over his right eye made Desjardins bullish after the fifth, leading him to charge hard behind his right hand at the increasingly patient and elusive Charles.

Rounds eight and nine featured more close combat than the first seven, with the fighters trading turns on the ropes for body blows and clinches before foxtrotting around the ring from corner to corner. Charles would take an occasional uppercut at the end of a combination, but nearly each time he’d just shake his head before giving back better than he’d gotten.

A spent and bloodied Desjardins came out swinging in the tenth. The boxer tried in vain to pull off a knockout before an almost certainly detrimental decision, but Charles, who had been steadily improving throughout the fight, was simply too fast to catch. In the closing seconds, Charles bodied the tired Desjardins off his feet. The bell rang with Desjardins sprawled across the ropes, while Charles bounded around the ring with his fist in the air as the crowd roared in appreciation for the new champion by unanimous decision.

Thankfully, the night’s organizers had not completely forgotten the “save the best for last” mantra, as the night’s closing four rounder between up-and-comer Abdou Sow and Jean Charlemagne rewarded those who stuck around. Sow, a protege of Charles who combines speed and power in his long left, added another efficient victory to his unblemished record (3-0) by way of technical knock out at 2:40 of the third round.

With money raised for a good cause, an emotional victory for a community’s golden boy, and a tantalizing glimpse at a rising talent, it seems hard to believe that anyone could have left the Complexe Claude-Robillard disappointed.

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Hillel’s web site claims to represent a diverse Jewish community and support a democratic State of Israel. Am I not Jewish enough to be represented if I hesitate to agree with the second statement without further qualification? They weren’t representing me while ceaselessly attacking CKUT and other campus institutions that many Jewish students choose to be a part of. They do seem to unfailingly represent a Zionist voice, despite the fact that they were founded as a Jewish student union before the independence of the State of Israel.

I have never equated Zionism with Judaism, except possibly during my years as a Zionist. However, Berk made this linguistic slip while discussing an alleged (and unsubstantiated) bias in the Islamic Studies department. I ask Kideckel and Berk to sincerely ask themselves: who is equating Judaism with Zionism?

Ben Foldy
U3 History and Political Science (joint honours)
Daily columnist
Associate editor, McGill Foreign Affairs Review

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On June 5, boxing premiers at the new Yankee Stadium with a top light-middleweight billing between Miguel Cotto – probably best known recently for losing to current golden boy Manny Pacquiao – and Yuri Foreman – probably best known for being undefeated and un-ironically fighting from an orthodox (right-handed) stance while training to be a rabbi. I graduate a day or two before, and have been thinking about rewarding myself for my studies with a trip down to New York and a ticket to the fight. In a tip of the hat to Adam Smith, I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that drives me to want to pay a minimum of 50 of my hard-earned (read: student loan) dollars to watch the fight in person. I’m reminded of the time a neighbourhood kid ran over to tell me that a house was on fire. I grabbed my coat, hurried down the block to join my friends, and got exactly what I expected: human suffering, some good old macho “just another day’s work” firefighting, and the intoxicating scent of danger mingled with melting roof. That’s not a slight to boxers (or firefighters). It’s a tough job. My boxing experiences came in a friend’s basement. He and another friend trained and fought at a Hispanic community centre on the south side of Milwaukee. We would spar in the carpeted basement, cutting off an imaginary ring to avoid backing anyone into the sharp corners of a ping-pong table. I would inevitably end up playing the part of Glass Joe in NES Punch-Out, taking head shots and body blows for a few minutes until I either gave up or a stop-watch went off and I would go to my corner to wash the blood out of my mouth and drink sugar water. These were the days of Oscar De La Hoya, whom we all idolized. We used to get together with our fathers to watch the pay-per-view feeds for his fights. Even my diminutive, intellectual, pacifistic dad would come sometimes. Back in those days, there were no significant Jewish fighters to identify with and I internalized my friends’ infatuation with certain Latino fighters. Red, white, and green silk boxers with “La Raza” emblazoned on them meant something more than pants. They meant standing up, pride in language and culture, commanding respect, and embracing social mobility – they were like an updated zoot suit.

I wouldn’t say I was ever a real boxing fan. I was more a fan of boxers. The greats always seemed to transcend the ring to represent ethnicities, religions, cities, and so on. In this, fighting is timeless and universal. It evokes cultural memories passed through generations of immigrants of “our” fighters, those who fought not for money but for aspects of our identities with the fists we wish we had and felt somewhat responsible for. In these histories, we drew our strength from them, and they draw their strength from us. These stories are integral to our culture. The human tragedies of structural inequality and agency in the boxing world are nostalgic even while rued – On the Waterfront and Raging Bull in cinema, Tyson and Ali in recent history. Boxing lends itself to a certain type of intellectualism as Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, George Plimpton, and Norman Mailer come to mind. They knew that nothing had the aesthetic appeal of the lone fighter. Think matadors, boxers, Christ, Tony Montana, Ralph Nader, and so on.

MMA has been taking identities a step further into the ring, err, cage. Avowedly neo-Nazi fighters might someday be lined up to fight Left Coast anarchists or law students from the University of Minnesota (examples of all three are currently in the ranks). Who wouldn’t want to watch that? And let’s not forget about the rise in popularity of MMA women’s fighting that has no real equivalent in boxing history. As identity is expanding far beyond the immigrant communities that rallied behind Jewish Barney Ross or Italian Jake LaMotta, MMA appears to embrace its role as the quilt through which the newer fabrics of identity are lovingly woven together in order to beat each other up. Kimbo Slice – a man who owes his fame to YouTube videos of backyard bareknuckle fights – attained televised stardom only to have it taken away in one round by Seth Petruzelli, a pink-haired, occasionally cross-dressing, underweight replacement fighter. I don’t have the adjectives to properly describe how amazing that is. Why? Because I think it’s incredible that whether we define ourselves as intellectual, brutish, radically feminist, Zoroastrian, racist, whatever, there is likely someone like us who draws on the same symbols and experiences and uses them to fight. We like to imagine that these fighters represent us, and that it’s more than just two people hurting each other for money. And in some ways it is. Amir Khan, a British Pakistani Muslim, fights in Union Jack emblazoned shorts, spitting (punching?) in the face of both white British ethno-nationalists and anti-integration sentiments in immigrant communities. He recently defeated Dmitry Salita – an Orthodox Jewish, Russian-immigrant, previously undefeated Brooklynite – in 76 seconds. Could I have really rooted against either of them? Maybe that’s the fight I’d want to end in a decision, after all the imagined connections of collective identification have collapsed into contradiction. When that happens, all we are watching is two people beating each other up for money. Which is what it is. And there’s nothing wrong with that either.

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Most Israelis would admit that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) serve as a foundation of Israeli identity. Israeli Arabs are discouraged from serving in the IDF and those that do join are prevented from serving in elite units. The logical response is that most Arabs probably wouldn’t want to serve in an institution that, rightly or wrongly, has killed a large number of Arabs. Regardless, it’s a structural obstacle to Arab civic and economic participation, and it also deprives Arabs of access to important aspects of Israeli identity.

Some might answer with the story of the young Arab woman who got into the Search and Rescue team a few years back due to a filing error, and was allowed to stay. But beyond such admittedly accidental anomalies, relative exclusion from the IDF serves to marginalize Israeli Arabs politically, socially, and economically. In a country where military service is used in hiring decisions, housing allocation, and political careers, it is perhaps unsurprising that Arabs are disproportionately poor and underemployed.

These problems are compounded by the fact that Arabs are disadvantaged in terms of access to the Israeli welfare state. Despite making up roughly 20 per cent of the population, they receive no comparable amount of welfare spending and have a disproportionately limited access to land. An Israeli study found that the government spent an average of $1,100 per year on Jewish students, and only $192 per year on Arab students.

One might imagine that Israeli Arabs – economically and socially disadvantaged as they are – could mobilize to take advantage of their political rights as citizens, as 20 per cent of the population could be a game-changing bloc for any coalition. Furthermore, coalition inclusion would allow Arabs to take part in the horse-trading that results in control of important welfare portfolios, as demonstrated by the cooperation between non-Zionist and Zionist religious parties for a number of years.

But political inclusion seems unlikely. Israel has had 18 governments in its 61 years, and none of the coalitions have included an Israeli Arab party. There has been a disturbing amount of talk from both the Zionist “left” and “right,” suggesting that Arab citizens of Israel should emigrate to a to-be-determined Palestinian state in the West Bank or packed-to-capacity Gaza. In the lead-up to the last election, the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) voted to bar participation by Israeli Arab political parties in the upcoming election. The Supreme Court invalidated the decision – but it’s still a sign of the times in “the Middle East’s only democracy.”

Maybe Israeli Arabs have “full civil rights.” They are nevertheless not in an enviable position. They are not only disproportionately impoverished and economically marginalized, but are also systemically prevented from accessing the levers of power through which their situation could be ameliorated. I refuse to make any parallels to regimes contemporary or historical – or even to make a normative statement regarding the situation – but I do feel that the reality of Israel for Israeli Arabs is much more complicated than Schonbek would have it appear.

Ben Foldy is a U3 History & Political Science (Joint Honours) student. He prefers “human-rights loving” to “self-hating Jew”: benjamin.foldy@mail.mcgill.ca.

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Ben Foldy
U3 History and Political Science (joint honours)
Daily columnist
Associate editor, McGill Foreign Affairs Review

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In one of my first days at McGill, a fellow student asked me where I was from. After hearing my answer, she told some convoluted story about how she had to wear a Canadian flag on her backpack during a trip to Kenya to avoid being shot at for “being American.” I called bullshit on that, reminding her that the Harper government had not exactly worked wonders for Canadian credibility in the world. In response, she proudly showed me her tattoo – a maple leaf with “Made in Canada” emblazoned beneath it. I quipped that it should have read, “Made in Canada, exported to the United States along with the other 85 per cent of our economy,” before excusing myself from the incredibly stupid conversation.

From the militia myth to the Avro Arrow (look these up if you’re unfamiliar), much of the foundation in Canada’s sense of national identity stems from an uneasy relationship with the hegemon to the south. As a result, any arena in which Canadians exhibit superiority over Americans seems to attain near-mythic status in national discourse. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the development of what I like to call “Canadian hockey chauvinism.” From the constant references to “our” game to the fact that a different nation’s victory is considered a national disaster, Canadian hockey chauvinism – on top of being annoying – is actually socially destructive.

For this reason, I would like nothing more than the Canadian men’s hockey team to fail to win Olympic gold.

It is not merely because I am a bitter American. I take pleasure from Canada losing because of the sense of entitlement that Canadians seem to feel toward winning. Since NHL players started competing in international tournaments, I cannot remember a single competition where Canadians were not the favourites – at worst, they shared the distinction with the Russians.

But it’s not the team. It is the fans. Much like the girl from freshman year, my debates over the sport have often ended with my Canadian friends rejecting my arguments on the logic that my American-ness necessarily precludes me from any knowledgeable insights. Never mind that I played the sport for 10 years or that I stupidly devote way too much of my time to analyzing rosters and match-ups – I often forget I forfeited my hockey credibility at the border.

But the ideology behind Canadian hockey chauvinism transcends the rink. It is found in Canadians who are content with simply “not being American,” even while Parliament is prorogued by a minority government for the second time in as many years and casualties mount in an unwinnable war.

I am not unappreciative of the opportunities I’ve found in Canada. I love spending $700 a year for health care. Paying less than half the tuition of an equivalent school in the States is great. But I’m also given the opportunity to watch a great people walk blindly into the night, content to be co-opted by a reasonable standard of living and hockey medals while their government regresses both internationally and domestically.

Canada doesn’t deserve to win the gold solely on the merit of not-being-America. Regardless of not-being-America, it is still classless to boo the anthems and the 17-year-old kids representing their countries at the World Juniors competition. Canada doesn’t deserve to win just because it’s the best hockey team in the world or has the strongest tradition of winning.

I am tired of hearing Canadians rant about America while their own government obstructs climate change legislation, rolls back democratic institutions, leaves its citizens to be tortured in Guantánimo, and grants asylum to unemployed Afrikaans while sending Mexican women back to be raped and murdered.

I should mention that I am not supportive of American hegemony in either hockey or the real world. I am painfully familiar with the failings of my own government, both domestically and internationally, as well as the sting of America losing the gold medal to Canada on American soil. But when I look to hockey for an escape from the malaise induced by the state of the world, nothing kills the mood more than the boisterous Canadian kicking up more of a stir about a hockey game than the recent actions of their government.

I would be lying if I said this article wasn’t deliberately provocative. But it is ridiculous that a stupid column on sports would provoke more uproar than the outrageous stories reported every day on the current state of affairs. I’ll tell you what. If I were one of Don Cherry’s “hockey gods,” Canada could win the gold, but afterward it would have to get back on track to living up to its self-professed traditions of humanitarian, moral, and political progressiveness. But I fear that ultimately, the Olympics will be just another distraction, another reason to prorogue, another reason to root for what is becoming an unrecognizable Canada.

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Don Cherry is the host of Coach’s Corner, which airs during the first intermission of CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada. But enough with the background. It seems to be a Canadian’s patriotic duty is to have an opinion on Cherry from birth. For those of you who come from abroad – or the Canadians who might as well – I’d recommend viewing him without prejudice and forming your own opinions. This piece is intended as a defence, and you should witness Coach’s Corner on its own merits. If hockey’s not your thing and you don’t want to sit through a period of decent east coast hockey on a Saturday evening to get to the goods, feel free to YouTube him. Or – you know – just grow a pair.

I kid, friends. This language of emasculation and derision is one of the trademarks of Cherry’s persona that needles so many. The man can most definitely be a jerk. He has identified women as the only people who look away during hockey games, resulting in them being the only fans getting hit in the head by pucks. He has chastised Europeans and Quebeckers for their perceived tendency to wear visors at games, and antagonize other teams only to “turtle” (or to cower in hockey lingo) when someone fights back. He has been labeled militaristic for prioritizing time on the program to celebrate and commemorate Canadian troops in Afghanistan. He promotes some of the least socially acceptable aspects of the game – namely fighting – and stubbornly refuses to even attempt to pronounce non-English names.

For these reasons and more, he has earned himself a long list of detractors. Certain hockey intellectuals hate him for his boisterous blow-hardery on topics that they waste time contemplating before speaking on. A fair share of Quebec hates him; Propagandhi hates him; women may or may not hate him; and Europeans would either sue him, elect him, or both.

But with the initial deposition from the prosecution noted, I rise to defend Don Cherry. I will not, however, bother defending his misogynist streak. As we all know, Charline Labonté – the esteemed gardien of our McGill Martlets – could deflect an errant puck into the press booth with a popcorn box, if she wanted to. And though a study proved that Europeans and Quebeckers do indeed wear visors more often, that same study also found they were less likely to commit the offenses that Cherry accused them of. There is no defence for these kinds of comments, except maybe a selective memory.

But with regard to his supposed militarism – bearing in mind that I cannot attest to his activities early in the war – I find it more than defensible now. Since I’ve lived in Canada, I’ve mainly seen Cherry air pictures of recently killed Canadian soldiers at the end of his broadcasts. And his decision to devote the entire Coach’s Corner before Remembrance Day to pictures of the year’s deceased – set to bagpipes playing “Rule Britannia,” no less – was truly poignant, haunting stuff to get in the middle of a hockey game.

Cherry’s teary reminders of the real costs of war on the national stage every Saturday night – with or without political commentary – is nothing to scoff at. I’d give anything for a similar memorial for American soldiers on NFL Sundays, but I come from a country where a man was kicked out of Yankee Stadium for having the audacity to take a leak during the singing of “God Bless America.”

To put things in perspective, the 1965 Life magazine that featured the portraits and names of all people killed in Vietnam in a particular week was considered a turning point in the media’s presentation of that war. Grapes does the same thing every week. Short of stopping the wars, we should at least be reminded of them when we’re most comfortable and fortunate: putting our feet up, drinking beer, and yelling at a television for one coloured shirt to put a piece of rubber in a net on a Saturday night.

But mitigating that indefensible occasional misogyny or bigotry – or the debatable accusations of militarism – is the fact that he manages to be both remarkably entertaining and knowledgeable about hockey. His intermission spot is genuinely insightful, the fruitful exchange of two powerful hockey minds in Cherry and co-host Ron McLean. The talk is catered to the working classes of the hockey world. He provides advice for young players, volunteer coaches, and devoted parents seeking to improve their skills and increase safety in hockey. And all this advice is given in the hopes of increasing access to the social mobility afforded by junior leagues, college scholarships, and professional contracts. Not to mention that Don also just wants the kids to have a good time.

Don Cherry is for the kids – even those overgrown ones who get paid to play the game, as his ceaseless assaults on the league for putting its players at risk attest to. Don, like all of us, simply wants hockey to be as good as it can be – and that, let no one put asunder. Sure he’s an anachronism. When he goes, his type will haunt the game in the whispers of “old-timers,” like the spectre of Eddie Shore. In the meantime, ignore the occasional stupidity, admire his candor, and challenge it with your own feelings on the matter. After repeated viewings, one feels as though half of his controversial comments come with a smirk that dares you (or Ron McLean) to engage, just like your uncle would at the dinner table during a political discussion. And while seemingly dismissive of criticism, we know that he secretly loves every one of us – even the pinko, war-hating scum like me who just happen to love hockey.

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