Tag: palestine

Yves Engler: My 5 Days in Jail as Political Prisoner for Criticizing Israel

I recently spent five days in jail for social media posts critical of Israel and police charges brought against me. It was an unpleasant, though interesting, experience that culminated in a small victory for free speech and Palestine campaigning.

On Thursday February 20 at 9:30 a.m. 30 rallied at the detention centre where I turned myself in for charges related to ‘harassing’ a Zionist influencer and the Montreal police. I told the crowd the charges and conditions brought against me were police and judicial harassment.

More than a dozen police were on hand to monitor those accompanying me at the detention centre. As I crossed over into the police precinct, we chanted “Free Palestine”.

Two inspectors were waiting for me near the door. I was searched twice and only allowed one shirt and pant. They also made me remove my glasses, which was disorienting.

The police inspectors sought to question me, but I refused to talk. I have no problem ‘incriminating’ myself by speaking publicly about state/Zionist abuses, but it should serve a political aim.

Another officer asked the two inspectors if I was to be released, which is common when you present yourself to be arrested. Instead, I was sent to the detention area because the police were seeking stifling conditions for my release and wanted to punish me. There was a lot of yelling from those locked up in adjacent cells. There was nothing except for two benches and a toilet (no seat) with water fountain in the cell. I slept using my boots as a pillow. Five hours and a bad oatmeal cookie later I appeared before a judge by video. The Crown objected to my release, so I was sent back to my cell where I exercised and played imaginary football with a cup. They gave me another oatmeal cookie and bad cheese sandwich. Around 7 p.m. a bunch of us were given our jackets, handcuffed and sent to the Bordeaux prison. Initially, the paddy wagon induced a sense of claustrophobia and it was cold. A man next to me and someone in the wagon ahead repeatedly yelled for heat, which made for a bizarre experience. It was nice to have my first conversation in 10 hours with a Newfoundlander related to former NHL player Michael Ryder, who I played with briefly when I tried out for the Hull Olympiques in the Quebec Junior Hockey League.

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Jailing Canadians Is Just One Way Government Supports Israel

Canada supports Israel’s violence and apartheid in innumerable ways. Targeting critics of Israel has long been a way Canada assists Palestinian dispossession.

I was recently arrested for social media posts critical of Israel and spent five days in jail to win the right to discuss social media influencer Dahlia Kurtz who pursued charges against me. My experience fits a long history of Canadian police and intelligence services targeting critics of Israel and includes close ties to their Israeli counterparts.

Over the past 16 months Canadian authorities have responded to the popular uprising against Israel’s horrors in Gaza by greatly escalating their assaults on critics of Israel. As I’ve written or discussed, dozens of individuals have been jailed or had their residences raided. In the most egregious abuse of state authority, Ottawa listed the grassroots Vancouver-based Samidoun Palestinian Political Prisoners Network a terrorist organization.

While the suppression has escalated in parallel with the upsurge in activism, it’s been going on for a long time. In recent decades the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) has demonized and targeted critics of Israel. In one of the rare cases that was publicized, at least seven friends of Stefan Christoff were visited by CSIS agents over an 8-month period in 2009 and 2010. They arrived unannounced early in the morning and asked detailed and sometimes menacing questions about the Montreal activist’s work with Artists Against Apartheid or trips to the Middle East.

As Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) engaged in negotiations during the 1990s many Palestinian Canadians accused CSIS of intimidating opponents of the Oslo accords. CSIS allegedly offered cash in exchange for information on those opposed to the PLO’s compromise. A 1994 Washington Report on Middle East Affairs article explained, “CSIS is carrying out a political agenda by targeting only those who are aligned with non-Fatah groups of the PLO — those who oppose the accord signed by the PLO. More than 20 PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] supporters have come forward alleging that they have been interrogated by CSIS.”

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ICC Urged to Investigate Allegations of War Crimes in Gaza Involving Biden & Blinken

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been requested to conduct an investigation into allegations of war crimes involving President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken for their role in facilitating Israel’s genocide of the native Palestinian population in Gaza.

This marks a significant precedent, as it is the first instance in which a United States-based entity has sought a judicial inquiry into a former president’s potential involvement in purported war crimes and crimes against humanity…

Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) published a 172-page report outlining their request and communications to the International Criminal Court (ICC), in which they have alleged former President Biden, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin – played an accessorial role in aiding and abetting, as well as intentionally contributing to, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

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Manifest Destiny in the Histories of the US and Israel

For Palestine and Palestinians, 14 May 1948 was a fateful day in its 4,000-year history.   It was also historically pivotal for the United States.  Paraphrasing British author, George Orwell, it is essential to rediscover the past in order to gain control of the present and save the future.

Eleven minutes after David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, declared Israel a state in May 1948, President Harry S. Truman recognized his claim, giving legitimacy to Ben-Gurion’s bogus declaration.

In 1947, thirty-three members of the newly-created United Nations General Assembly (57 then) voted in favor of Resolution 181, recommending the partition of historic Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states.  Truman, undeterred by the fact that the UN Security Council had not voted on the resolution, which would have made it binding on all members, threw the full weight of the United States behind it.

Truman’s decision to position Israel as a citadel of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East has boomeranged and has resulted in the United States being despised in much of the world.  Rather than protect U.S. interests in the region as planned, Israel has imperiled them.

As we have seen since the 7 October 2023 insurrection, there are no limits on U.S.-Israeli brutality and on the suffering they have been willing to inflict on the Palestinians in order to preserve their imperium in the region.

Imperial arrogance on the part of American presidents is, of course, not new.  It reached new heights, however, when President Donald J. Trump threatened to take over, “to own” Gaza and remove (euphemism for ethnically cleanse) Palestinians from their ancestral land to foreign destinations. The Zionist colonizing baton in Gaza would essentially be passed to American imperialists.

Trump revealed his illegal plan for Gaza during a recent (11 February) White House press conference.  As humiliated King Abdullah of Jordan looked on, he said:  “We’re going to hold it; we’re going to cherish it… It’s fronting on the sea. It’s going to be a great economic development job.” When asked by a reporter under what authority are you permitted to take the sovereign territory of Gaza; he smugly responded, “U.S. authority.”

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Turkey Warns That Netanyahu Will Resume Gaza War Once All Captives Released

The first phase of the Hamas-Israel ceasefire is coming to a close, with Hamas Thursday night expected to handover the bodies of four more deceased Israelis. This time there won’t be a handover ceremony, after outraged Israeli officials threatened it could collapse the deal and all progress made.

Negotiations for the second phase don’t really appear to have gotten of the ground as yet. The first phase took effect Jan.19 – and has resulted in the release of 25 living hostages by Hamas, as well as the bodies of four more.

The deal called for the exchange of some 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners held by Israel. Over 60 Israeli hostages still believed to be held in Israel, but some half are suspected to be dead at this point.

Conditions in the Gaza Strip continue to deteriorate amid winter conditions. “Sila Abdul Qader is the seventh child confirmed to have died from the cold in Gaza in just 24 hours,” Al Jazeera reports Thursday.

Meanwhile, Turkey is warning that once Israel gets all its citizens back, Prime Minister Netanyahu will simply resume the war, also as the White House has been vocalizing plans for a total displacement of the Palestinian civilian population there:

In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, Turkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan says he fears Israel will resume the war on Gaza after all the captives are released.

“As it is known, an ethnic cleansing war was witnessed by the whole world; almost 60,000 civilian Palestinians were killed, most of them were women and children. This must never reoccur,” Fidan said.

“However, it is feared that once all Israeli captives are released, Netanyahu will resume the war. There are deep concerns in this respect and they give rise to constant threats within the region,” he said.

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Netanyahu Views the Hostages as His Excuse To Restart the Slaughter

Israel sustained the West’s support for its slaughter in Gaza for 15 months only through an intensive campaign of lies.

It invented particularly heinous Hamas war crimes, such baby beheadings and mass rape, for which no evidence has ever been produced. Conversely, it played down its own, even graver war crimes in response to Hamas’ attack on Israel.

With Hamas’ October 2023 crimes ever-more distant in the rear-view mirror, and Israeli crimes still all too visible in Gaza’s complete destruction – amounting to a “plausible” genocide, according to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – Israeli leaders have been desperately trying to shift attention to a fresh narrative battleground.

They need a new set of lies to justify resuming the slaughter. And as ever, the western establishment media are actively assisting.

Both Hamas and Israel are playing a predictable propaganda game, using the regular exchanges of Israeli and Palestinian hostages in the ceasefire’s first phase to seize the moral high ground.

Israel once again has all the cards, care of rock-solid western support, and yet once again it is failing to win the public relations war.

Which explains why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threw another of his temper tantrums at the weekend, this time blaming Hamas for stage-managing the release of Israelis in what he called “demeaning” and “humiliating ceremonies”.

Israel and its supporters were particularly incensed, it seems, by one of the captives, released on Saturday, beaming on stage as he warmly kissed two of his captors on the forehead.

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Bibas family threatens to sue Israeli govt as official propaganda on hostage killings unravels

The Bibas family demands the Israeli government cease exploiting the deaths of their family members for propaganda purposes as layers of evidence support claims an Israeli airstrike killed them.

The relatives of an Israeli family killed while in Hamas captivity in Gaza have demanded the government stop making statements attributing blame for the killings of their loved ones, threatening to “take all legal measures at their disposal” if the Netanyahu administration refuses to comply. The request came three days after a declaration by Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari that Palestinian “terrorists” had “deliberately” killed two young members of the Bibas family “with their bare hands.”

Lawyers representing surviving members of the Bibas family have accused government ministries of seeking to exploit their plight for propaganda purposes, complaining “the family continues to receive, surprisingly, repeated inquiries from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Information System… with the aim of satisfying the public’s voyeuristic instinct.”

“Although it is surprising that it is necessary to request and emphasize this,” the lawyers continued, “we ask once again and in every language of request that all parties” be instructed “not to contact the family, nor to speak with any professional party entrusted with conducting the examinations regarding the circumstances of the murder and the condition of the deceased.”

Read the Bibas family’s letter to Netanyahu and other officials here.

The Bibas family has become a symbol of the plight of Israelis taken captive on October 7, but the truth behind their experience remains obscured by official spin. All four family members were taken captive on Oct. 7, but the father was separated in the chaos. 

While he survived his time in Hamas and was later released to Israel, his wife, Shiri, and two young sons, Kfir and Ariel, were killed while in the custody of the Mujahedin Brigades, a smaller, lesser known faction. According to a Mujahedin Brigades commander, “When [Shiri Bibas] was captured [on October 7], we sent her children with her out of compassion for them. The Israeli occupation killed her along with her children after bombing them along with their captors.”

The commander also declared that Shiri Bibas had served as a soldier in the Israeli army’s Unit 8200 intelligence division, which spies on and seeks to compromise Gaza residents, and later served in the army’s Gaza Division.

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Top Israeli Calls for the Killing of All Palestinian Adults in Gaza: Report

Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Israel’s Knesset, sounded like a Fox News host on Sunday when he called for the murder of every adult male in Gaza.

The New Arab reported that Vaturi, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, indicated to an Israeli radio station that there are no innocent Palestinians and that the IDF is being too “considerate” in the enclave.

“We need to separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza, we are being too considerate,” he said, calling them “scum and subhumans.”

He also called on the IDF to turn the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank into Gaza.

Vaturi’s comments — if they were directed at any other group of people in the world — would be met with scorn and disbelief, but his position is the same as many politicians in Washington and commentators on network news channels.

Martin Oliner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s appointee on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, penned a recent column claiming that Gazans are fundamentally evil and unworthy of mercy.

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The Moralistic Risk for Trump’s Foreign Policy

As the new Trump Administration turns a critical eye to the priorities of government spending, one target of its investigations seems to be delivering an endless supply of questionable practices for scrutiny. USAID, long theorized to be part of a global soft regime change network by many opposed to the status quo of foreign policy, has been proven to be exactly that. This ranges from manufacturing opposition to the Cuban government, to using progressive identitarian groups to affect elections in Bangladesh, and even to create a feedback loop where American media cites supposedly independent activists abroad (who are funded by USAID)  in order to justify distorting the narrative at home.

None of this is particularly surprising to those of us who have been skeptical of the softer side of endless interventionism. Two and a half years ago I published Woke Imperium: The Coming Confluence of Social Justice and Neoconservatism, which made the case that the increasingly messianic nature of progressivism served the cause of moral justification for a foreign policy of endless interventionism abroad; it provides a built-in excuse to be involved in as many foreign countries as possible. Through everything from non-governmental organizations supporting ethnic minorities in geopolitical fault lines to the funding of media that pushes a North American–style cultural vanguardism onto very different societies, a changing domestic audience could be brought into the quest for global domination through a self-flattering moralism.

That process is hardly unique to the liberal faction of politics, however. The George W. Bush administration was obsessed with democracy promotion and nation-building as a part of its plan to combat terrorism. It also had a reputation for conflating its own conservative Christian fixation on culture war with foreign policy, such as when its plans to combat AIDS in Africa were tied to abstinence-only education and a ban on condoms, reflecting the administration’s domestic obsession with similar policies at home. It was under such conditions that foreign governments could reasonably claim that American missionaries were tied at the hip to intelligence operations.

The present Trump administration’s willingness to question old talking points about foreign policy being a moral project are laudable but inconsistent. In the transactional worldview that Trump emphasized on campaign, there can be little room for such sentiments, yet already there are signs that he is willing to lean into domestic culture war in order to justify unnecessary interventions abroad. Any plan to remake war-shattered Gaza by acquiring it in a real estate deal facilitated by the United States reflects a long line of interventionist thought about the United States playing some kind of providential role in transforming the Middle East. Indeed, USAID itself once cooked up a potential plan for the relocation of Palestinians into new settlements in Egypt.

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Status Panic on the Campus

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is “fighting back against efforts to intimidate professors into silence,” which—for many of us whose memories of college lecture halls are not uniformly pleasant—is yet another ACLU cause we might not support. The issues here, however, are of more momentous social and political consequence than our initial reaction might suggest.

The ACLU’s efforts—they’re raising funds to support them—are a response to lawsuits brought against students and faculty at Columbia University and elsewhere for their opposition to the war in Gaza. 

The issues are complicated, but the ACLU says it is fighting against attempts to “weaponize our legal system to punish and silence constitutionally protected speech.” Such lawsuits “have become a common tool for intimidating and silencing criticism—including from whistleblowers, journalists and political protestors… not necessarily to win in court, but to entangle people in expensive litigation, using the prospect of mounting legal fees and a potentially ruinous financial penalty to chill speech. In other words, to bully people into silence.” 

The plaintiffs in the Columbia case say statements by faculty supporting student protestors “somehow injured them by causing Columbia University to move classes online, restrict campus access, and cancel commencement.” Three defendants in the case are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman—members of the notorious Capitol Hill “Squad”—which might be about all most conservatives will want to know before making up their minds.

Personally, I have no dog in this fight. Both sides—all sides—seem intent on dragging their opponents into court, a strategy that seems unlikely to improve matters. This conclusion that the atmosphere on campuses will only get more poisonous, tentative as it is, was reinforced the other day in a casual conversation with a college professor friend at a public university more than 300 miles from Columbia. 

This professor and I have a mutual friend who was hoping to land a job at the university, and I asked what he might do to help make that happen. 

“I have no influence here,” the professor said. “I’m just a content provider.”

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