In a joint statement, the governments of the United States and Canada have officially declared Samidoun Palestinian Prisoners Network a “terrorist organization.”
Make no mistake—this designation is a direct attack on the Palestine movement and free speech as a whole.
Samidoun is an advocacy group for Palestinian political prisoners, with chapters around the world. As of April this year, Israeli prisons held 9,500 Palestinians including 200 children, who suffer ill-treatment and abuse at the hands of their jailers. Samidoun is also the largest pro-Palestine group in Vancouver, where they have most recently come under attack.
The terrorist designation is the culmination of a coordinated campaign by all mainstream political parties and news agencies after an Oct. 5 rally in Vancouver where Canadian flags were burned and protestors were heard shouting “death to Canada, death to America, death to Israel.”
BC NDP Premier David Eby said: “there is no place in British Columbia for groups inciting and glorifying violence.” Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc was quoted as saying “violent extremism, acts of terrorism or terrorist financing have no place in Canadian society.”
The day before Samidoun were declared “terrorists” for burning flags and shouting slogans, the IDF bombed the al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza, igniting a fire that destroyed makeshift facilities and refugee shelters. At least four patients burned to death in their beds, and dozens more were injured. On this, the politicians who were so upset about a few flags have been silent.
Apparently, Israel repeatedly targeting hospitals and other civilian infrastructure is not worth their condemnation. Nor is setting off thousands of pager and walkie-talkie bombs in private homes and public spaces in Lebanon. Nor the slaughter of at least 40,000 Palestinians. Nor any of the crimes and atrocities that the Israeli state has inflicted on Palestinians over the past 76 years, while receiving full support from Canadian and American imperialists.
It is the governments of all the Western imperialist powers that are complicit in inciting, supporting, and financing “violent extremism” and “acts of terrorism” committed by Israel.
These imperialists are dripping with the blood of civilians and they will grasp at anything to try to distract from their complicity. In truly Orwellian fashion, they then brand and repress any opposition to their wholesale massacre of civilians as “terrorism”. In doing so, they can’t help but reveal their hypocrisy to ever-wider layers of workers.
