Samidoun: Canadian federal corporation 1279374-1.
Status: active, since March 3, 2021. Three directors: Charlotte Lynne Kates, Vancouver. Dave Diewert, also of Vancouver, and Thomas Gerhard Hofland, of the Netherlands.
Annual filings in 2022, 2023 and 2024, done. Last annual meeting: 2023.
Most federally-registered non-profit corporations, like Samidoun, don’t pay taxes. That’s a big benefit. Often they don’t pay HST on goods or services, either. Other benefits: being able to receive “gifts” from charities.
Now, being a non-profit like Samidoun isn’t exactly the same thing as being a charity. A charity has to stick to their charitable purposes — although, as the Sun has reported, some pro-Palestinian charities have been allowed to operate despite funding or possible links to extremism or terror, which is against the rules. But a non-profit? A non-profit can do pretty much whatever it wants to do.
Which Samidoun — full name: the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network — does. Their record is clear, and has included advocating for the listed terrorist entity Hamas, and the Trudeau government lets them do it.
For example: just this week, the aforementioned Kates — who happens to be a non-Canadian — popped off to Iran to receive, wait for it, a human rights award from Iran, the country that is considered to have the worst human rights record in the world, second only to Yemen.
There Charlotte was, her crewcut covered with a modest scarf — she was in Iran, after all, where women get tortured and killed for not doing so — beaming as she was lauded by the monsters present.
Other winners of the Eighth Annual Islamic Human Rights Award included Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ “political bureau” until Israel sent him off to meet his 72 virgins last month. Also: Hossein Amir Abdollahian, the Iranian foreign affairs minister who was killed in a helicopter crash in May, and is assumedly now swapping virgins with Hanieyh in the Ninth Circle of Hell. Also honoured: Mohammed Reza Zahedi, a top officer in the banned Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Israel sent him virgin-hunting back in April.
Now, for Charlotte Kates to honored with the likes of Haniyeh, Abdollahian and Zahedi is a big, big deal in Iran. Those dead terrorists are revered in terrorist-loving Iran. Does that mean our Samidoun gal supports terror, too?
To answer that, let’s look at some of Charlotte’s bon mots, shall we? These are quotes from Charlotte on just one day in April, on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
“Long live October Seventh! Long live October Seventh!”
“We stand with the brave Palestinian resistance, and their heroic and brave action on October Seventh.”
“The beautiful, brave and heroic resistance of the Palestinian people (Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine).”
Those are pretty clear, aren’t they? Hamas, a listed terror group, is “beautiful, brave and heroic” after beheading Jewish babies, raping and mutilating Jewish girls, and torturing children and setting them on fire in front of their parents on Oct. 7, 2023. Charlotte said all of those things, and she’s still walking Vancouver’s streets. Neo-Nazis like Ernst Zundel and Jim Keegstra, from their own perch in Hell, can be forgiven for wondering why Charlotte Kates gets to say way worse things than they ever did.
That’s not all. Here’s some key facts about Samidoun, too.
Samidoun is literally banned in Germany, but headquartered on East First Avenue in Vancouver, B.C. In Israel, they are considered a full-on terror group.
Khaled Barakat is Samidoun’s co-founder and Kates’ partner, and has been explicitly referred to as a “PFLP leader” by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine itself. He’s admitted to being a PFLP proxy on video. Israel says was part of the PFLP central committee. The Americans deported him in 2003 when his residency permit expired, and he mysteriously relocated to Canada thereafter.
Samidoun has been removed from Instagram and YouTube for violating the latter platform’s “violent criminal organizations policy,” which is pretty hard to do, considering that violent neo-Nazis and jihadists are still on there.
Samidoun gets a lot of money from something called the Alliance for Global Justice, whose website boasts that it supports “political prisoners” who are allegedly affiliated with Hamas, al-Qaeda, PFLP and others.
And so on and so on. Neither Kates nor Barakat have responded to questions sent to them.
Other questions: why is Charlotte Kates and her husband still here? Why is Samidoun banned elsewhere, but given special legal status by the Trudeau government? Why haven’t any of them been prosecuted for promoting hate and terror?
All good questions. We’ll have to wait for Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre for answers, I suspect.