Terrorist play prompts political debate

TORONTO – Shareef Abdelhaleem was convicted in January of plotting to blow up a chunk of downtown Toronto. A convicted terrorist, he now sits in jail awaiting his sentencing.

But a new play, which opened Thursday in the very city Abdelhaleem wanted to wreck, presents the convicted terrorist in a very different light. He is, at times in the play, a heroic figure who, despite the peril he knew he was in, tried to dissuade the so-called Toronto 18 from hurting people.

The playwright, Catherine Frid, would have the audience see Abdelhaleem as a sympathetic, tragic character that is not a terrorist but a victim in the same vein as Steven Truscott or Donald Marshall, two of Canada’s most famous wrongfully convicted.

But Frid, who writes herself into the piece as a somewhat naïve and perhaps betrayed friend of Abdelhaleem, omits some key facts from what she bills as “a true story.”

The audience never learns Abdelhaleem suggested his co-conspirators could not only blow up the Toronto Stock Exchange but could get rich doing it by shorting the stock market.

At trial, the judge heard that Abdelhaleem suggested to his co-conspirators that “more logical” targets might be poisoning a food factory or blowing up one of Canada’s largest suburban shopping malls. And the play never learns he was the one who purchased enough fertilizer to make a bomb three times as large as the one used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Those omissions, of course, are the artistic right of any creator.

But Frid’s play, Homegrown, is being presented as part of a theatre festival which received $35,000 of federal funding, $24,500 of provincial funding and $36,000 in municipal funding.

As result Frid’s artistic vision has become a matter of some political debate, particularly for a federal government which cancelled millions in arts funding partly for no other reason than it found the name of some rock bands offensive and the politics of other grant recipients too “radical.”

Earlier this week, before the play opened, a spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he was “extremely disappointed that public money is being used to fund plays that glorify terrorism.”

But Heritage Minister James Moore, whose department administers the arts funding, declined to go that far.

"I speak for myself. I haven't seen the play," Moore told reporters in Ottawa.

And while several Conservative MPs, gathering for meetings in Ottawa Thursday, also questioned the appropriateness of public money, that view was not unanimously held.

“I believe in freedom,” said government whip Gordon O’Connor. “You’ve got to have different opinions. This is a democracy.”

Homegrown is to be presented six more times at the Summerworks theatre festival which closes Aug. 14.