Samidoun: Offended It is Recognized as a Terrorist Group

"[Between the three politicians [Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre] recklessly and maliciously [accusing Samidoun as a terrorist entity owing a retraction and apology, a lawsuit has gone forward]."

"The suit will force the biggest mouths in government to actually show proof of the allegation of terrorist activity."

"It is very dangerous if we allow a government to decide who gets to enjoy full rights and who doesn't without showing actual proof."

Toronto lawyer Stephen Ellis

 

"The Liberals cannot legislate away our right to free speech."

"If they contend we are terrorists, let them prove it in court."

Charlotte Kates, co founder, Samidoun

 

"Samidoun does not have any material or organizational ties to entities listed on the terrorist lists of the United States, Canada or the European Union."

Samidoun statement

Anti-Israel demonstrators march in Ottawa on March 9, 2024. Samidoun, a group listed in Israel as a terror organization and banned outright in Germany, is one of the main groups organizing pro-Palestinian protests in Canada. Photo by Ashley Fraser / Postmedia

 

Vancouver-based Samidoun established a global network of support branches to which they give direction in the promulgation of 'public relations' announcements and protests in support of Palestinian 'rights' and entitlements in a world where Palestinian terrorism wreaks havoc as it mounts terrorist assaults against Jews universally and within Israel in particular, exacting a penalty of murder as the price it feels Israel must pay for its insistence that it has a right to exist on its own ancestral land. 

Palestinian terrorism is geared toward penalizing Israel and Jews through a never-ending devotion to lethal assaults against their 'oppressor'. Portraying themselves as victims seeking restitution of land they claim as theirs despite that it is historically Judean land, and Jews the original inhabitants native to the land, those identifying themselves as 'Palestinians' are in fact looting from the indigenous Jewish population the heritage that was never theirs.

There is, and never has been, a shortage of militant terrorism among the Arab Palestinian population. Among the earliest and most barbaric has been the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, involved in plane and sea-going vessel hijacking, hostage-taking and murderous assaults. Samidoun is a later, public-relations manifestation of Palestinian terrorism's realization of what can be accomplished when slanderous lies are repeated frequently enough to seem believable to the history-ignorant West.

Samidoun, ostensibly created to speak for the rights of Palestinians in Israeli prisons serving sentences for violent crimes against Israelis -- to agitate for their recognition as 'freedom fighters' eligible for release by virtue of the fact that whatever crimes were committed were in defense of their right to 'struggle against' their colonialist oppressors -- is committed to portraying violent criminals as merely asserting their humanitarian right to free themselves from imperialist colonizers.

 

Protesters from the Samidoun organization gather in front of the Muelheim train station in Cologne, Germany, on April 15, 2023, to commemorate Palestinian Prisoners' Day (Ying Tang / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

 

Those like Charlotte Kates preach to a public in the West for whom antisemitism is not unknown, that there is a connection between colonizers of the past and those of the present, as despised, indigenous-injurious exploiters of original, authentic territorial populations. Not only do they promote chants of 'death to Israel', but also 'death to Canada', tarred with the same colonizing brush as Israel. Samidoun portrays itself as a human-rights group seeking justice for all disentitled people, with a special emphasis on Jews and Israel, its first and foremost agenda.

Its links with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine are obvious enough, not least since the other of its co-founders, Kates's husband Khaled Barakat, is a prominent leader in the PFLP. Kates has run afoul of Canada's hate-speech prohibitions in law, with Vancouver Police leading an investigation following on her having fulsomely praised the savage Hamas attack in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Jewish groups in Canada have identified Samidoun for what it is, lobbying government to have it recognized as a hate group and enabler of terrorism; linked in its formation and purpose with an already-listed terror group, the PFLP.

Several weeks back, no longer able to ignore the reality of Samidoun's purpose, linkages and incitements the federal government finally relented and announced its decision to place Samidoun on the country's terror list. With the kind of impudent, defiant arrogance recognizable as a hallmark of Samidoun, it now portrays itself as ill done by, a victim of government over-reach, and should apologies not be forthcoming, a full-scale lawsuit is to be mounted.

The leader of the official opposition in Parliament, Pierre Poilievre, had called on the Liberals to designate Samidoun as a terror entity, emphasizing that the group had "clear and direct ties" to designated terror groups abroad. Mr. Poilievre stated, before the official announcement of its designation, that prime minister Trudeau and the federal New Democratic Party "have allowed terrorist organizations to operate freely across Canada", which qualified him a place alongside Canada's public safety minister and prime minister in the pending lawsuit.

A screenshot of the Samidoun-led anti-Israel protest outside the Vancouver Art Gallery where Charlotte Kates was arrested, April 26, 2024. Photo by freepalestinetricitiesbc/Instagram

It's Not Over 'Till It's Over...University of Windsor Capitulation

"Protesters, many of whom were living full-time in tents on university property for two months or longer, have packed it in at the University of British Columbia [both the Okanagan and Point Grey campuses], University of Ottawa, Western University and University of Waterloo." 

"At the University of Guelph, administrators issued a notice of trespass to the campers ... a move that likely signals the school intends to imminently seek a court injunction."

"University of Waterloo President Vivek Goel issued a statement on July 6 that the university would retract its legal proceedings against the protesters once they vacated the private property -- which they did."

"Things have taken a darker turn at McGill, where it has emerged that the urine-drenched, rat-infested encampment consisted of not just students but also -- primarily, even -- of homeless persons. One man was arrested after a campus security guard was ... assaulted by a protester. Multiple instances of vandalism occurred, and two ... drug overdoses occurred inside the encampment since July 6."

Amy Hamm, journalist, National Post

"Windsor has fallen. Hamas rules. Reading this proclamation is surreal. It took me back to 1930s Hungary."

"The first Jewish laws were directed at universities. It's why my mother was not allowed to study medicine."

"It's what my film Sunshine is about."

Robert Lantos, film producer

University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario by Ken Lund

 

Is it fear, cowardice, a wish to mollify, that leads some university administrators down the path of conciliation over illegal, disruptive and inherently violent demonstrations targeting Israel and Jews?

Or might it be that such arrangements are a reflection of their own biases? We will never quite know since anyone in the position of making such decisions will not willingly out themselves as antisemites, leaving conjecture to rue the day.

The University of Windsor appears to have collaborated with the Windsor Liberation Zone Team over the encampment leadership demands which, when acceded to, would see the anti-Israel tent camp swarming with antisemites finally decamp. Although not one of the more fulsomely crowded and attended of such encampments, those students who did adhere to the hate-Israel message managed to persuade the university to agree with its demands.

And so the 'demonization, defamation and destabilization' of the State of Israel received the university's approval (in the alliteratively descriptive words of Avi Benlolo of the Abraham Global Peace Initiative). An agreement that saw the University of Windsor agree to "not pursue any institutional academic agreements with Israeli universities until the right of Palestinian self-determination has been realized". No acknowledgement, needless to say, that universities in Gaza have been useful to Hamas as weapons storage depots.

 

But the agreement between the university and the pro-Hamas group idolizing a terrorist ensemble on Canada's own proscribed terrorist list, doesn't end there. For the agreement also calls for "establishing or re-establishing institutional relationships with Palestinian universities", while sundering relations with Israeli universities. 

The agreement goes further, to ensure that the school's "responsible investment policy" will take account of a United Nations database of "companies whom it has identified as engaged in illegal Israeli settlement enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territory". A page right out of Nazi Germany's targeting European Jewery in its campaign excluding Jews from academic institutions. 

Nor is that the completion of the agreement which continues on to address "anti-Palestinian racism". A charge of racism against Palestinians which do not represent a race, but rather a political movement. When in reality it is hate crimes that see the Jewish community in the majority of cases, and their persecutors are none other than Palestinians and their supporters who label themselves victims of racism.

Just as other  universities that have been encumbered by encampments leading to unfortunate incidents of verbal and physical violence and certainly disruptions of university scheduling of classes and  commencement ceremonies, the University of Windsor had the freedom to look at a series of measures available to clear the encampment without resorting to accepting terms set by radical students and their non-student leadership. 

York University took a decisive step to dismantle the encampment on their campus. Filing for a court injunction was eminently possible, demonstrated by the actions of the University of Toronto. A lawsuit could suitably have been launched against the protest organizers, taking the example of the University of Waterloo which resulted in the encampment on their campus being removed. Alternately and perhaps as a last step, law enforcement could have been called in to clear the encampment, a model from McGill University's solution.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators are shown at the University of Windsor on Monday, May 27, 2024, in the "Liberation Zone" set up on campus. Photo by Dan Janisse /Windsor Star

York University and CUPE Distinguishing Themselves Again

"Let us collectively divert this week's tutorials to teaching on Palestinian liberation."

"[Tutorials should be diverted to condemnation of the] Zionist Israeli state [regardless of the course that the TA is supposed to be discussing]."

"It is a medical issue. An arts issue. A feminist issue. A society issue. A political issue. A cultural issue. A geography issue. An engineering issue. An architecture issue."

15-page document issued by CUPE 3903 union representing contract and part-time faculty at York University, Toronto

Detail from an official "toolkit" distributed to York University contract and part-time faculty which claims that their employer is complicit in "genocide" by the mere tolerance of Jewish groups on campus. Photo by A Toolkit on Teaching Palestine

The document considered to be a new tool kit circulated to York University teaching assistants gives them instructions on denouncing Israel, and to make their own opportunities to do so, ignoring such condemnations' lack of relevance to any academic study's subject matter. The document points out a salient fact, that the very presence of Jewish groups on campus presents as evidence of "complicity" in genocide at York University.

The very existence of sanctioned "Zionist cultural institutions" in explicit reference to a Hillel chapter, one of a multitude of such chapters around the world on university campuses representing the interests of Jewish students, is indication enough of the university's culpability, points out the document. But then, it also calls out York as an accessory to genocide related to its research links with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

 

Part of a speech that TAs are given to read out before informing students that regular discussions of course work have been cancelled. Photo by A Toolkit on Teaching Palestine

A script is provided for teaching assistants to read out while informing students the tutorial is to be cancelled in favour of a substitute "teach-in ... for liberation". "Today, I open up our classroom to bring our attention to Gaza, to speak up and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement, and contribute in ending Canada's and York's complicity with genocide and the settler-colonial occupation of Palestinian land and life", the introductory line reads.

The document comes complete with the CUPE 3903 logo, redrawn to include the Palestinian flag. Should students object to their "political work" and "community organizing", the TAs are  told the union will come to their aid to protect them from reprisal: "If you are facing reprisals, harassment, or discrimination -- or believe that you might be -- get in touch with CUPE 3903 as soon as  you can", it urges.

CUPE 3903 has a long history, predating the current Israel-Hamas conflict, of organizing events and publishing literature slandering Israel and harassing Jewish students. Its literature accuses Israel of genocide, "apartheid", and alternately as an illegitimate colony whose fate should be annihilation. Following hard on the heels of the October 7 attacks in southern Israel, the union asserted Israel had brought the massacres on as a result of "apartheid, genocide, and state-sanctioned violence".

Canada, by association, was a purveyor of "settler-colonial violence". A local representing McMaster University -- CUPE 3906 -- issued an overtly pro-terror statement even as the October 7 killings were ongoing: "Palestine is rising, long live the resistance", a social media post issued by the ocal in concert with the first news reports arriving in Canada about mass shootings in Israel close to the Gaza border.

Both union locals claimed to have been subject to "intimidation and silencing of pro-Palestinian voices in Canada". The very day following the sadistic savagery of October 7, CUPE Ontario president Fred Hahn posted a Thanksgiving Day message that he was thankful for "the power of resistance around the globe. Resistance brings progress, and for that I'm thankful", he stated. 

 

York University stands out as a hotbed of pro-Hamas activities.The York Federation of Students characterized the October 7 attacks as a "strong act of resistance", adding "resistance against colonial violence is justified and necessary", hinting at the same time that Canada itself is deserving of such actions. "This is 'decolonization' and 'land-back' actualized", said the statement.

York University's Osgoode Hall Law School saw faculty hugely represented in a November petition signed by over 700 Canadian lawyers and law students, the petition message being that the attacks required to be 'contextualized'.

On Oct. 23, an “All Out for Gaza” protest began outside of Vari Hall, led by the Palestinian Solidarity Collective (PSC). Other unions, like the York Federation of Students (YFS) and CUPE 3903, attended the protest.   Photo Jeanette Williams