Concordia's Thursday Report

Concordia faculty, staff and alumni/æ pop up in the media more often than you might think!

Bassel Salloukh (Political Science) was on CBC national television several times recently, as an expert on the politics of the Middle East. Henry Habib (Political Science, emeritus) was asked April 15 by The Gazette what he would do in U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell’s place. He said Powell should proceed as if there were no terrorism, and make every effort to bring the peacemaking process back on track.

Greg Nielsen and Donat Taddeo were interviewed for a feature article in The Gazette about the legacy of tapes of BBC news broadcasts from 1970 to 1986 now being transferred to CD-ROM. Taddeo, a colleague of the late Denis Diniacopoulos in the Department of Communication Studies, talked of his friend’s interest in the BBC news, going back to his childhood in wartime France. Nielsen, who is now head of the Centre for Broadcast Studies, praised Diniacopoulos for having preserved a dying form of news-gathering for scholarly use.

In an essay in The Gazette, Frederick Krantz (History/Liberal Arts College) excoriated student and pro-Palestinian activist Zev Tiefenbach for an earlier essay in the newspaper. Krantz said that “Tiefenbach’s invocation of his Jewishness as a kind of moral validation of his political views is . . . an old stock-in-trade of anti-Israel propaganda.”

Christopher Jackson, dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts and himself a conductor, was asked for his views on the angry departure of maestro Charles Dutoit after a public rebuke from the players in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He told The Gazette that a conductor needs to be forceful. “It’s a musical dictatorship.”

Frank Chalk (History) was quoted in a long article in the Ottawa Citizen about the prosecution — or lack thereof — of war criminals. “If we’re going to end the culture of impunity that surrounds genocide and develop a culture of accountability, it’s vital,” he said, and called it “extremely frustrating and disappointing” that so little has been done by the Canadian government in this regard.

Enn Raudsepp, chair of Journalism, called for a public inquiry into media ownership in an essay in The Gazette. He pointed out that only eight English-language centres in Canada have more than one newspaper, and in several of these, both have the same owner. Eighty per cent of newspapers’ revenue comes from advertising, which drives the enterprise, and when chains buy more newspapers, they squeeze more money out of them with cutbacks, often to the detriment of quality for the discerning reader.

Angela Ford-Rosenthal, a lecturer in Sociology, was asked by The Gazette to explain the phenomenon of wife-killing, of which there are about 100 cases a year in Canada. These men feel they own their wives, and don’t want to share them, she said. Moreover, their identity is closely bound up with their wife’s existence, which is why many of them subsequently kill themselves.

William Bukowski (Psychology) was asked by The Gazette about the well-being of a 12-year-old Sikh boy who wanted to wear his kirpan to school for religious reasons, and was first excluded, then readmitted, amid controversy. He was sympathetic. “Inter-peer conformity is never higher than in Grades 7 and 8,” he said. “As people, we all champion the notion of individuality, yet we know the value of fitting in.”

Harold Simpkins (Marketing) is one of three entrepreneurs behind Email.com, an Internet marketing company. As reported by Susan Pinker in The Gazette, the new enterprise has acquired 650 dot.ca domain names over four years, and is gradually attaching real businesses to them that sell goods and services. It’s like virtual real estate, they say, and has stayed afloat, and growing for four years now.

Harold Chorney (Political Science), who ran as a candidate for Vision Montreal in Dollard des Ormeaux, appeared often on local television, French and English, during the municipal campaign, including a weekly Newswatch panel with Dennis Trudeau and Robert Libman. He’s still at it. Over the past month he has appeared on Global half a dozen times discussing conflicts of interest and other municipal issues. In December, he was on a national CBC-TV panel with Alan Gregg and Jeff Rubin discussing the federal budget. He also wrote an essay for the Saturday Gazette, “Don’t drop our dollar: Abandoning Canadian currency would further erode this country’s sovereignty.” It figures in his research on foreign exchange rates and the development of a commodity-based currency.

Karin Doerr (CMLL) was featured in The Gazette in March, in an article headlined “Scholars decode Nazis’ vocabulary,” and in The Canadian Jewish News in April, in “Unique German-English lexicon defines Nazi terms.” Doerr recently co-authored a book called Nazi Deutsch/Nazi German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich.