What’s Going On? Human Rights and the Quandary of Exceptions

I found him.

First row, seated, third from the right.

My grandfather, in his third-year engineering class photo, the University of Manitoba. 1932.

Steadfast gaze, feet planted firmly on the ground, in a suit, wearing a tie, and a knitted sweater peeking through the jacket lapels in the black and white of long ago. His right hand lies on his knee with the left hand on top of it, but not fully. As if in the moment that the photographer engaged the shutter, my grandfather shifted and the fingers of his left-hand slipped off in an uncharacteristic moment of distraction.

My grandfather, a significant presence in my childhood, was a serious man and based on the image in this photo, he was a serious young man, too.

As I gaze back at the image of this man that I knew and didn’t know, I wonder if he has any inkling of the life ahead of him. Of living in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. Of moving after graduation and returning to the region he had left in 1927 to join other members of the family who had settled in Brandon, Manitoba a decade or two earlier.

Palestine. Where he and his family, his wife and young children, would be forced to leave Haifa in 1948 in the great displacement of that era. The Nakba.

The first displacement of many for my grandfather. Driven out of Haifa in 1948, driven out of Beirut after the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1974, and forced to endure occupation for a time in the early 1980s while living in our ancestral village of Karoun in the Bekaa Valley.

My original intent had not been to reach out to the University of Manitoba archives to see if they could help me track down information about my grandfather as a young university undergrad.

My principal reason for making the trip to Winnipeg was to visit the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) and specifically to visit their most recent exhibit, Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present (Uprooted).

Why?

Given the opportunity, privilege, and resources, the question is why not?

I hadn’t pursued the chance to visit Winnipeg and the CMHR after it opened in 2014, but I was propelled to do so now by the outcry against the Uprooted exhibit.

An outcry that just didn’t make sense to me, just as the punitive actions of those claiming a connection to the museum that followed the exhibit’s opening didn’t make sense to me either. That donors would withdraw their support and a board member resign because of an exhibit they claimed did not measure up to the standards and the values the museum purports to uphold. An exhibit that in my mind was topical, relevant, and necessary given the reality of the carnage that has unfolded since October 2023.

Mainstream media has also jumped on the bandwagon of disapprobation about Uprooted. The morning of my visit to the CMHR on August 26, 2026, the Globe & Mail published an article that was clearly designed to foment questions about CEO Isha Khan’s governance style rather than questioning the actions of those who have opposed an exhibit that speaks to a factual and ongoing historical reality.

A lived reality for so many including my grandfather who was living in Palestine in 1948. He was forced, in the face of unfolding terror, to abandon his home, his career, and all he had contributed to the community as a civil engineer during his time in Palestine.

I had to see the exhibit for myself.

To judge whether my feelings about the reactions to the exhibit were coming from my personal connection to the topic or whether the dismay that others were expressing was as irrational as it appeared to be from a distance or whether the opposition was warranted.

The exhibit, the one that has fuelled such outrage, is surprisingly small. It has been carefully and judiciously curated. Looking at the space that the exhibit occupies, my bewilderment grew. How could an exhibit that was so restrained be subjected to such manufactured contention when in fact it perfectly aligns with the stated objective, mission, and mandate of the CMHR, a national Canadian public institution that belongs to all Canadians?

The CMHR invites guests into its galleries with a question: What Are Human Rights?

The explanatory text the museum provides reads as follows:

Throughout history, people have grappled with ideas about human dignity, respect and responsibility. Today the term “human rights” generally refers to the rights and freedoms we have simply because we are human. It’s an idea thousands of years in the making.

“Simply because we are human.”

And the truth is that although this may be “an idea thousands of years in the making” it is a concept that is continually under threat and the experiences of people around the world do not equally reflect the ideals of rights and freedoms for all.

Elsewhere in the museum, there is another principle that is highlighted on plaques and banners including a banner that drops down a considerable vertical height, and which visitors can see from multiple vantage points. The plaques and the banner present an excerpt from Article 1 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and states simply and directly: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

“All human beings.” Not some human beings. All human beings.

The preferred storytelling method at the CMHR is to showcase the voices of people affected by situations that have contravened their freedoms, denied their dignity, and negated their rights including the right to peace and security let alone rights such as shelter, food, and clean water.

These voices make the abstract harm of different eras, times, and locations real. As do the many personal effects that capture the losses, the grief, the tragedy of being expelled from one’s home, being driven out of one’s land, and, more fundamentally, being denied one’s humanity.

That’s why Uprooted has raised such a commotion. In capturing the voices of Palestinians who can demonstrate their material losses as well as the moral, intellectual, and physical harms that they have suffered, people from across the world who visit the CMHR, or those who visit virtually, gain insight into what it means for a human being, for a family, for a community to lose everything.

Such insights play a critical role in shifting narratives and shifting narratives always, always, always poses a threat to power and authority. It undermines the ability to control telling a story in only one way and from only one perspective. It encourages folks to ask why instead of insisting that they accept a position without question.

In Uprooted, for example, there is a short video of a Palestinian Canadian woman telling the story of her family. She holds the key to her ancestral home and talks about what it means to hold on to such a key through seventy-five years of occupation. A key to a home she can no longer visit and to which she is forbidden to return.

Watching the short video in the display, I was overcome with the uncanny feeling of deep understanding and identification. I know what she was talking about. I know that it’s not a lie. I know that is not an imagined harm. I know all that because my grandmother had such a key hanging on the wall in our family home in Karoun, Lebanon. It was the key to her home in Haifa, the home she had to leave behind, the home she dreamed of seeing again.

She never did see that home again.

I understood and identified with the testimony of the witness in the Uprooted video because during a 2019 visit to Jerusalem, a family friend drove us by his grandfather’s house — his mother’s family home — a home that his mother and her siblings grew up in, a home that they cannot even get near let allow claim. They are in their nineties.

But when a narrative is based on the dehumanization of a subject anything that humanizes that subject is a threat. Making human stories real through first-person accounts opens the space for individual critical thinking, and it opens doubt about single-sided narratives that have been constructed and disseminated for so long.

Does the museum deserve the punishing withdrawal of support including criticism from a federal government minister because of Uprooted? No.

Does the museum deserve accolades for seeing all humans as equal and for telling the stories of those whose freedom and rights have been and continue to be questioned, challenged, and undermined to support apartheid, occupation, and genocide? Yes.

Rather than a dereliction of duty, the CMHR and its leadership team have fulfilled the terms of their mandate with honour, compassion, and integrity.

So, what are my next steps?

Encouraging others to visit the museum, to see the exhibit, among all the other exhibits, and to sit with questions about the need for the exhibit, the reason it’s created such controversy, and the role each of us plays in working towards justice.

To stand up for curatorial independence and freedom for interference that insists on perpetuating one narrative above all others.

Asking folks, within their means, to donate to the museum.

And that’s what I’ll be doing. I’ll be talking to my family and seeing what steps we can take, in the tradition of philanthropy that my parents have instilled in us, to support the work of the CMHR to tell stories — without dictating or tying our support to having only certain stories told or advocating for certain stories to be withheld.

And even though so much of my grandfather’s story is lost to time, I hope that in this way our family will help to ensure that other stories are recorded and shared so that instead of perpetuating injustices we can use the power of such narrative storytelling to uphold the principle that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”