On the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, protest organizers chanted “death to Canada!” and the crowd cheered. The speeches given at a vigil to commemorate, celebrate really, the Hamas terror attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, sounded like what you would hear from Ayatollah Khamenei.
“Do not wonder how revolution can be done. We must do it! Death to Canada! Death to the United States! And death to Israel!” the masked woman said to cheers from the crowd.
At another point, she called out, “We are Hezbollah, we are Hamas! Our resistance has existed for centuries!”
When people tell you who they are, believe them.
For the past year we have seen protests in cities across Canada that have openly supported what Hamas did last October, that currently support them along with Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen. We heard it in the streets of Toronto on the weekend with chants of “long live the resistance” and “glory to our martyrs.”
These marches and rallies in Vancouver, in Toronto, in Montreal where they set off fireworks to celebrate the Oct. 7 terror attacks, are clearly supporting terrorist acts and terrorist groups.
Yet, time and again, other media outlets simply refer to them as “pro-Palestinian” rallies.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre stood in the House of Commons on Monday and read two of the chants, “From Palestine to Lebanon, Israel will soon be gone” and “There is only one solution: intifada, revolution” into the record. He asked Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly to denounce those chants and while she offered a statement on the anniversary of Oct. 7, she refused to denounce them.
On CBC’s The National, the reporter said that Poilievre “used his time in Question Period to call on Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly to condemn pro-Palestinian chants that he described as antisemitic.”
CBC didn’t play the clip of Poilievre denouncing the chants, which he rightly called genocidal. CBC didn’t quote the chants by having the reporter read them, or play clips widely available online of protesters screaming these words, they simply called them “pro-Palestinian.”
That’s been happening for the last year.
If you get your news from CBC, or most media outlets, they don’t report on what is actually said at these rallies. You would believe that these rallies have been peaceful protests calling for an end to fighting. They haven’t been, not for a moment.
Samidoun, the organization behind the rally Monday in Vancouver, the organization that chants “death to Canada,” has been front and centre at the art gallery rallies for the last year. They have also been central to the marches and protests in Toronto, often unfurling their banner for an image of an AK-47 painted with the Palestinian flag on the butt of the rifle and bullets flying out the end of the barrel.
Not very peaceful.
On Tuesday, Poilievre called for Samidoun to be added to the list of banned terrorist organizations in Canada.
“This is a terrorist organization,” Poilievre said pointing out that Germany and Israel have already banned the group due to their ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a banned terrorist entity in Canada.
“Khaled Barakat, has been described by the Israeli Government as a high-ranking member of the PFLP,” he said.
There have been calls for the Trudeau government to take some kind of action against Samidoun for months, but they have failed to act. Instead, the organization maintains its status as a federally registered not-for-profit organization which even gives them favourable tax treatment.
It’s time for Canadians to wake up to what is happening in our streets with people openly calling for “death to Canada” It’s time for our media to report honestly on what these rallies and marches are really all about and who is behind them.
Finally, it’s time for our elected officials at all levels to act and put a stop to this.