Failure to condemn Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank
After first shutting down 400+ UN and NGO food distribution sites, with the help of mercenaries, Israel is now operating 4 remote "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation" sites to lure, trap and kill Palestinians. They're using food to bait the traps with. These sites frequently run out of food, are sometimes closed altogether for "maintenance", and access roads are declared combat zones without Palestinians learning about it until they are shot at and killed. The UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese has labelled the GHF operation as "humanitarian camouflage" and a "tactic of this genocide." Canada is complicit. This has got to stop. Contact your MP now!
| Tue, Jun 3, 2:01 PM (6 days ago) |  | ||
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An open letter to:
Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly
Global Affairs Canada
MP Huron-Bruce Ben Lobb, CBC
Dear representatives,
Canada’s inaction belies its rhetoric and reveals its complicity in the genocide now taking place in Gaza. This duplicity must end. Its actions must match its rhetoric. Empty words are not convincing anyone. Not the Israelis. Not our allies. Not even the Canadian citizens it claims to represent. That figleaf is no longer capable of hiding our national shame. Despite our rhetorical protests, Canada has become complicit in this genocide. That is not okay. That is not who Canadians are.
Canada has long claimed to favour a two-state solution. This is simply not true. It has for decades, and continues to witness a growing number of illegal land seizures by Israeli settlers. Canada’s response has consistently been muted admonishments..
Canada continues to frame the situation as Israel exercising its legal right to defend itself from Hamas terrorists. This framing enables Israel to continue the genocide being live-streamed on our televisions every day. The starvation blockade; all buildings and infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, reduced to rubble; the tens of thousands of women and children being slaughtered; the expulsion of the UN and its programs; the targeting of journalists; the expulsion of humanitarian aid organizations; the herding of the population to one or two Israeli-US run food distribution locations, conveniently close to the Egyptian border; the explicitly stated Israeli objective of removing all Palestinians from Gaza; are all consistent with ethnic cleansing and genocide. They cannot possibly be misconstrued as Israel exercising its legal right to defend itself.
Canada’s continuing supply of arms to the IDF, its refusal to acknowledge Palestinian statehood, and its failure to take Israel's outright rejection of a two-state solution seriously, all indicate that Canada’s response, or lack thereof, disregards the facts on the ground and enables genocide rather than discourages it.
Rather than amplifying the voices of the victims of this genocide and their supporters, Canada is consistently taking steps to protect the perpetrators of genocide from criticism, while bolstering the Israeli narrative that all Palestinian protestors and their supporters, including their Jewish supporters, are antisemites that must be restrained and contained. Meanwhile, some Jewish organizations and synagogues that openly support the IDF and its genocide are granted protective bubbles that prevent public protests from taking place anywhere near their headquarters, installations or activities.
Please end Canada’s complicity in this genocide and take immediate and concrete action to condemn and end it. The lives of all Palestinians, and the very existence of a state Canada purports to support, depend on it. So does the integrity of our country. Please respond appropriately so Canada will once again be a country we can all be proud of. The fig leaf you’ve been using can no longer hide our shame.
Sincerely,
Stewart Vriesinga
110-5 Railway Street, Teeswater, Ontario. N0G 2S0
[Phone number removed]
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No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption (Freire, 1970, p. 54).
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