Criminalizing free speech in support of Israel
Globalize the ... rebellion ... if you insist
Christmas events have returned to Bethlehem this year, after two years of hiatus due to Israel’s bombs.
The cease-fire, a phrase that means that Israel is bombing Gaza less, has been in place for months. There is relative calm, if you believe the press.
What better moment, then, for a full court press to criminalize criticism of Israel?
Israel’s government jumped on the Bondi Beach massacre to tell Jews around the world that the only place that they can expect to be safe is in Israel, where the state’s horrific violence against Palestine is done in the name of Israeli safety. Canadian media seized on the massacre too, using it to condemn Hamas, an organization that is already designated as terrorist, and also, is not ISIS, even though the Bondi Beach shooters seem to have been ISIS, not Hamas, sympathizers.
These details only matter if you care to understand the difference between groups in the Arab world. If you don’t need to care about the difference between Hamas and ISIS, or Palestinians and other Arabs, then these differences don’t matter at all. A guy is arrested in Toronto with ISIS sympathies, so why not use that to attack Palestininian activists?
As I have previously written, Israel’s genocide has given racists a greenlight to be even more racist. Zionists insist that counter-protests in residential neighbourhoods in North York are the same thing as the KKK riding through Black neighbourhoods in the United States (when Israeli settlers doing pogroms in the West Bank was sitting right there for a better analogy to the KKK). The Globe and Mail’s editorial board, which has formally blacklisted me from its pages for like 7 years now, insists that Palestinian activism is the same as white supremacy — a logic that is so twisted and backward, that it gives me a headache to even try to make sense of it.
Comparing how Palestinian protests make Zionists uncomfortable to a movement that resulted in the murder of thousands of Black Americans is racist, baby-brained thinking. Highly mockable. Something that is so unserious, that I responded to it with the same unseriousness that it deserves. I used a phrase that gave Canada’s Media Class a conniption: Globalize the Intifada at the Globe and Mail.
Jesse Brown and Jon Kay tag-teamed on this one to insist that what that means is that I want to murder Jews. And so, they pushed to their supporters, the message that I am a violent antisemite. Jesse Brown in particular, whose anxiety around rising antisemitism seems to be directly related to his children being bullied at school (based on various comments he’s made), knowingly threw me to the wolves, resulting in my address and photos of my appartment being shared online. Putting the lives of three Jews at risk. Look for one of the only Hanukias in a window in downtown Quebec City — that’s where Nora lives — let’s get strangers to attack her.
For a guy trying to be the “stop violence against Jews” guy, his application of this principle is pretty uneven!
Jason Kenney tried to criminalize the phrase Israeli Apartheid in 2009. For almost a decade, the IHRA definition tried to criminalize criticism of Israel under the guise of fighting antisemitism. From the River to the Sea was the next phrase that Zionists tried to argue was code for genocide against Jews. And now, it’s Globalize the Inifada.
Not to be outdone in its maudling for Israel, the National Post dedicated an entire editorial to my use of this phrase. In a piece hilariously titled, “Globalizing the ‘intifada’ means war on Canada” the National Post once again demonstrates why Canada is Fake and Sucks Ass.
With no hint of irony, the National Post argues that, “Activists in Canada and elsewhere who want to “globalize the intifada” are effectively calling for the murder of Jews. There should be no doubt this is what the phrase means for many of those who would put it into action. To naively — or cynically — argue otherwise is to wilfully ignore reality and risk Canadian lives.” The Second Intifada killed 1053 Israelis, they say, ergo anyone using this phrase wants to murder …. not Israelis, but Jews in Canada.
Of course, that doesn’t make any sense. When Brian Lilley from the Toronto Sun called for the Toronto District School Board to purge everyone of “Land Back ideology,” no one argued that he was saying “Murder all sympathizers of Land Back,” even though the number of people who died in the purges was orders of magnitude higher than the Second Intifada. But Lilley is allowed to joke around with such terms because ultimately, people in power do want anti-colonial ideology purged from Canada. These same people want Land Back erased from civil society. Or, in other terms, they’d like an intifada against it.
What the Israel pushers don’t mention is that over both the First and Second Intifadas, 257% more Palestinians were killed than Israelis. Why, then, is Intifada immediately associated with Jewish (not even Israeli) deaths by Canadian media?
Intifada means rebellion. Canada is in desperate need of rebellion and our own history of rebellions has created some of what makes Canada great today. It isn’t a scary word, unless you support Canada’s colonial government. Unless you think that the police work for you. Unless you have some level of power in Canada. Globe and Mail columnist Robyn Urback, who thinks that Jews in Canada are experiencing similar levels of oppression to Black Americans, should ask herself if she’d still have a job if she were Black. The data would say no.
We have to be clear about what is going on here: the Globe and Mail article, columnists echoing it, the National Post editorial — they’re creating a body of literature that can be pointed to to prove genocidal intent when someone says that we need an uprising, a rebellion, against Canada’s Zionist status quo. They are fighting to give words meaning, to then force that meaning onto people like me, to declare us antisemitic, and to justify our increasing criminalization. They are creating the conditions to justify predawn raids — the likes of which World Beyond War activists experienced this past year.
As we kiss 2025 goodbye, we have to hold onto the most important tenet of liberal democracy — our freedom of speech, freedom to criticize our government and the press, freedom to speak our minds. There’s little question that these freedoms are fleeting. The governments of Quebec and Alberta are way ahead on this already, and goddammit things are going to get worse.
Chibuzo Thanh: Israeli Zionists are bombing and starving Palestinians and they have destroyed most of Gaza. What I hear Nora telling us is that Israeli Zionist extremists (terrorists) are responsible for most of the antisemitism that is happening in the world. Bondi Beach happened because of what the Zionists are doing in Gaza. It also happened because the shooters were part of an extremist Muslim group. Perhaps you didn't notice that the person who disarmed the shooter was also a Muslim, but not part of any extremist group. Some Christians are part of the extremist group of Zionism. Nora is telling us that the Canadian Press is headed in a very bad direction regarding free speech. She uses her own experience to explain that. If you saw her as a victim, that is your issue. I didn't see that at all.
The goal of Zionists is the same as the goal of Nazis ... get the world to hate Jews. That has always been the Zionist modus operandi. Make Jews think the only say place is Israel so they will go there and justify expansion ... first Palestine, then Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, etc. The Globe & Mail, the National Post, Jesse Brown, et al are Zionist supporters/enablers. If, at some distant point in the future, we ever see justice, they will be exposed and, if still alive, face accountability. In the meantime, as you say, things are going to get much worse in Canada under the leadership of the Zionist Liberal Party or the Nazi Conservative Party.