Indigo’s Copyright Victory Opens A New Front In BDS Struggle

 

The company’s win is a familiar story for movement politics in court, where activists meet a legal system that privileges property rights.

In October, Indigo won an order blocking a website calling for a boycott of the bookseller. The case, largely ignored by the media, revealed a new and unlikely front in the struggle in Canada between the movement for Palestinian liberation and Israel’s powerful supporters, one which could have ramifications for other solidarity efforts. 

In August, anonymous activists created the website IndigoKillsKids.ca, which has been endorsed by the Canadian BDS Coalition and other pro-Palestine organizations. The site, borrowing Indigo’s visual style, told visitors to boycott the company, promoted the September 25 day of action against it and offered links to various BDS resources. It was the latest phase in a years-long campaign to boycott the bookseller over the HESEG Foundation — founded and run by Indigo CEO Heather Reisman and her husband, Indigo’s owner Gerald Schwartz — which offers scholarships to Israeli army veterans without family in Israel.  

Soon after the site went live, Indigo’s lawyer demanded it be taken down, and two weeks later filed a suit requesting an order for all major internet providers in Canada to block the site. The court granted the request, first under an interim decision issued September 19, and then with a two-year injunction on October 23, effectively shutting down the offending website along with several social media accounts for the foreseeable future. That month, it was reported that Israel’s military had killed at least 16,900 children in its assault on Gaza.

The legal issue in the case had little to do with Indigo’s alleged support for Israel’s genocide. Rather, the proceedings centered on the website’s biting appropriation of the branding associated with the division Indigo Kids, darkly parodying the cute, non-threatening logo with a horrifying assertion: “Indigo kills kids.”  (more...)

Indigo’s Copyright Victory Opens A New Front In BDS Struggle

Genocide as Charity: a critical look at the Mizrachi Organization of Canada

 

The work of the Mizrachi Organization of Canada shows how Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity are embedded within the Canadian charitable sector.

No one charity epitomizes the synergy between rampant financial complicity in the aiding and abetting of Israeli war criminality and the laissez faire attitude that plagues the Canadian tax regulator, better than the Mizrachi Organization of Canada. Legally registered as a charitable organization as of 1979, Mizrachi Canada’s bold-faced website advertises itself as the Canadian home of the Religious Zionist Movement, ready and energized to move tax-deductible donations to supposedly worthy causes in Israel. With Canadian Jewish private and public foundations sitting on multiple billions of dollars, Mizrachi Canada serves as the most overt conduit for Canadians looking to support Israeli war crimes – and earn a charitable tax credit in the process. 

Welcome to Canada, where Palestinian erasure is a charitable pastime and the Canada Revenue Agency, the charitable sector regulator, is either complicit or inept.  

For starters, as I’ve written about in detail here, Mizrachi Canada operates as a tax receipt-issuing conduit for the Israeli website, jgive.com. Jgive.com, the forward-facing platform for the Israeli-based organization, ASUR Fund, plays virtual host to thousands of Israeli-registered charities. Thumbing its nose at customary international legal frameworks, like the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statutes (which Canada has internalized into its own Criminal Code) hundreds of these Israeli charities are physically located in illegally occupied Palestinian territory.  (more...)

Genocide as Charity: a critical look at the Mizrachi Organization of Canada

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Palestine, and a message of resistance

 

In The Message, Coates writes of a constellation of shared experiences and renews a call for global solidarity

In East Jerusalem, roughly a dozen participants in the Palestine Festival of Literature, including American author Ta-Nehisi Coates, are met by Israeli soldiers outside the Al-Aqsa complex and are made to wait. “No justifications were given, no questions asked, no instructions offered,” Coates writes. The following day, in the West Bank, as the group of authors are navigating the many checkpoint of Hebron, a soldier asks Coates his religion. When Coates replies that he has none, the soldier inquires about the religion of his parents. “When I told him they were Christian, he allowed me to pass.” On his visit to the West Bank, Coates sees the cisterns, or water reservoirs, that collect rainwater atop the homes of Palestinians—a survival strategy in the face of unequal access to water. He also sees the metal fences ahead of revolving gates and autonomous turrets that fire “non-lethal” rounds via remote control.

Coates’ trip lasted only 10 days, but what he took away from his brief stay and relates in his new book The Message is varied and deep. Coates, a Black man from the United States, found what he witnessed in Palestine reminiscent of Jim Crow in the American South, and of South African apartheid. He sees Israel as being, “like its American patron, an expansionist power” that wants “the land without the Palestinians on it.”

Some would say it is that expansionist drive that connects the everyday indignities, inconveniences, humiliations, and brutalities Palestinians have faced since Israel’s formation with the current moment of live-streamed genocide in Gaza.

Jason Hickel, a professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Barcelona, also attributes US support for Israel to expansionism and, more precisely, its determination to “maintain the conditions for capital accumulation and geopolitical hegemony.”  (more...)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Palestine, and a message of resistance

Victims of Communism memorial delayed over Nazi link controversy to open

 

Ottawa’s latest monument arrives under scrutiny, with no names on its wall for now.

After more than a year of delay the controversial Victims of Communism memorial will be officially unveiled in Ottawa on Dec. 12.

The unveiling of the memorial was put on hold last year because of the controversy over parliamentarians honouring a Waffen SS soldier and potential links between the monument and Nazi collaborators, according to records obtained by the Ottawa Citizen earlier this year.

In addition, Jewish groups have voiced their ongoing concerns about the names of alleged Nazi collaborators and other fascists being inscribed on the memorial.

Charles Thibault-Béland, a spokesman for Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge, said Tuesday that at this point there will be no names on the memorial. Department officials are still reviewing the backgrounds of the names and events to be commemorated.

“At the time of the unveiling, there will be no names on the monument’s wall,” Thibault-Béland confirmed.

The memorial, which is located near the corner of Wellington and Bay streets, is supposed to honour those who suffered under communism.

But a Holocaust education organization has warned that a large number of names that were to be inscribed on the memorial had links to the Nazis.  (more...)

Victims of Communism memorial delayed over Nazi link controversy to open

Who Is Sebastian Gorka?

 

Max Blumenthal briefs the Judge on Middle East turmoil and the destruction of the international legal order.

Authors Demand Giller Prize Sever Partnership With Scotiabank

 

Canada's most prestigious literary prize was awarded on November 18 amid controversy. The Giller Prize ceremony is normally broadcast live on CBC, but this year, it was pre-recorded. This was not for technical reasons, however, but rather because protesters had disrupted the ceremony the previous year. They demanded that the bank withdraw its investments from Elbit System, Israel's largest arms producer.

The actions targeting the literary prize have grown out of a wider campaign against Scotiabank to condemn its $500 million investment in Elbit Systems. Scotiabank is the largest foreign investor in Elbit.

This massive investment, beginning in October 2022, sparked outrage with many activists who were aware of the history of Elbit Systems' weapons being “battle-tested" on Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians. In response to pressure from the campaign, Scotiabank has incrementally divested from Elbit Systems, selling off shares in each quarter of 2024, down to $112 million according to the most recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

The Canada Palestine Association launched the campaign against Scotiabank officially in June 2023. Since then, their coordination led to actions picketing 18 of the bank's branches on March 15 and 35 branches on June 25 and shut down multiple branches in the Lower Mainland of B.C. on October 2.

The campaign has called for people to move their savings and close their Scotiabank accounts to protest the bank's war profiteering. “I think that it is the most minor thing we can do is be mindful of our economic binds that are directly involved in the ongoing genocide in Palestine” said Emily Fedoruk, host of the “No Arms in the Arts: People's Tour” book club event.  (more...)

Authors Demand Giller Prize Sever Partnership With Scotiabank

Why we demand an arms embargo on Israel

 

A view from the sit-in at Parliament

That Israel is committing crimes against humanity on an industrial scale is no longer a matter of debate. In the past year, the Trudeau government has indirectly acknowledged as much, first by ceasing to issue new military export permits to Israel, and then by stating that it would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, now indicted by the International Criminal Court, should he enter Canada.

In spite of this, Ottawa continues to equip the Israeli military with the very weapons that it is using to slaughter Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. As Amnesty International has stated, Ottawa now “risks becoming complicit in violations of international humanitarian law—including war crimes—and a plausible genocide.”

For several months, the Trudeau government has responded to public concerns about complicity with tokenistic gestures that attempt to hide or downplay the scope of its ongoing military linkages to Israel. The result has been incoherence and hypocrisy. Canada now has approximately 200 active export permits with Israel, which are valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In September, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly suspended 30 of these. She did not specify which permits were suspended, nor did she suggest that any have been cancelled. The government weakly defends its position by arguing that its standing permits are for “non-lethal” goods—a term that has no legal definition and is at odds with the broader language of Canadian and international law. In fact, these permits are for aircraft, ground vehicles, and components such as imaging technology and specialized circuit boards, all of which may be used to lethal effect.

Moreover, Canada continues to export military wares to Israel via the United States with little restraint or transparency.  (more...)

Why we demand an arms embargo on Israel