Canadians opposing Israel’s holocaust continue to be unjustly targeted while security officials fail to charge those who fought in Gaza. My upcoming trial highlights the crass double standard.
On Friday former United Nations special rapporteur Richard Falk was interrogated by border authorities for four hours at the airport on route to speak at a conference on Palestine in Ottawa. In another recent example of the targeting of dissidents, Toronto activist Tynan Liebert was found guilty of “being a party to an assault” for protesting genocide at a Chrystia Freeland event while a half dozen Toronto Metropolitan University students were arrested for protesting soldiers who took part in genocide. According to one estimate, the Toronto police have arrested over 150 individuals for opposing genocide and the just released Razing Palestine: Punishing Solidarity and Dissent in Canada documents many cases.
On November 28 I will stand trial on four charges related to “harassing” the police. Recently the prosecution submitted expert testimony to my lawyer, suggesting the Crown plans to waste more public resources on pursuing me for calling on the police to drop charges brought against me for opposing genocide, which they subsequently abandoned.
In February the Montreal police accused me of harassing anti-Palestinian media personality Dahlia Kurtz. After I wrote about the charges and asked people to email the police to abandon them, they charged me with intimidation, harassment, harassing communication and “entrave” (interference) towards the Montreal police. Concurrently, they sought to impose release conditions that would have muzzled my ability to discuss the initial Kurtz charges.
I spent five days in jail in a successful bid to defeat the conditions for my release that would have blocked me from mentioning Kurtz’s case against me. After charging and jailing me for political posts on X — I’ve never met Kurtz, messaged her or threatened her in any way — they quietly dropped the charges in July, effectively admitting that the initial charges levelled against me were absurd. Yet they maintained the four charges related to me calling on them to drop the now abandoned charges. (more...)
Repression continues against Palestine defenders — including me
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