After Samidoun was roundly condemned for chanting “death to Canada” at a Vancouver rally celebrating the one-year anniversary of the October 7 terrorist attacks, the anti-Israel group has doubled down on the slogan, saying it’s an accurate representation of what it intends to do.
“We acknowledge that the community was shocked by the phrase, and the burning of the Canadian flag that came after the march was concluded. Yet, we at Samidoun stand by this phrase as the call to action that it is,” wrote the group in a lengthy statement posted to Instagram.
Samidoun’s official Instagram account was delisted in June for violating the site’s rules against promoting terrorism. As such, the statement was posted to Thawra Vancouver, an account consisting entirely of Samidoun-affiliated statements and livestreams.
Last Monday, Samidoun led a mass rally outside Vancouver Art Gallery on the anniversary of the Oct.ober 7 attacks in Israel. The demonstration had been advertised as a commemoration of “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s official name for the operation that murdered more than 1,200 civilians in an area of Israel known as the Gaza Envelope.
“We are Hezbollah and we are Hamas,” an unidentified female speaker told a cheering crowd at the event, before leading a chant of “death to Canada, death to the United States and death to Israel.”
Five masked organizers — one of them wearing a green, Hamas-style headband — then burned a Canadian flag.
Samidoun confirmed that the “death to Canada” chant was led by a member of its organization and accurately reflected its goal of destroying the “colonial, capitalist state of Canada.”
“We are not just fighting against the zionist state, we are fighting against imperialism,” read the statement.
It then praised the perpetrators of Al-Aqsa Flood, and promised to echo their example in Canada. “We see it as our duty to escalate the resistance here,” it read.
This kind of rhetoric was in line with earlier Samidoun statements. At the rally itself, the group handed out pamphlets detailing the risks and benefits of “complex coordinated terrorist attacks” in pursuing political aims.
In the wake of the rally, the Thawra Vancouver Instagram account posted images of a Vancouver SkyTrain station graffitied with the words “GLORY 2 AL-AQSA FLOOD.”
A caption praised the “brave resistance fighters” who committed the October 7 attacks, and said that in tribute, “autonomous activists in so-called ‘Vancouver’ took to the streets early this morning, graffitiing on skytrain stations, targeting complicit businesses, to remind residents that despite the lies of the Occupation and its Western allies.”
Last week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre cited the “death to Canada” chant in calling for the Trudeau government to list Samidoun as a terror entity. He was joined in the call by B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad.
In The Netherlands, the Dutch government responded by actually doing so. On Oct. 10, the Dutch parliament voted 100 to 50 to designate Samidoun as a terrorist organization.
Although the group is headquartered in Vancouver, it has been active in organizing extremist anti-Israel events throughout Europe. Last year, Samidoun was similarly banned in Germany after it led a series of rallies celebrating the October 7 attacks that, according to German authorities, “showed an absolute lack of regard for human life in an especially abhorrent way.”
Poilievre’s chief argument against Samidoun is that it serves as a front for a group that is already a listed Canadian terror organization, the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Samidoun was founded by a top PFLP member, Khaled Barakat, and makes no attempt to conceal its links to the PFLP, which remains an active Palestinian terror organization. Samidoun’s various social media feeds are used to circulate PFLP propaganda, the group has organized North American speaking dates for PFLP members, and they even celebrate PFLP birthdays and anniversaries.
The “death to Canada” chant was condemned by politicians ranging from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to B.C. Premier David Eby, although they stopped short of calling for sanctions against the group.
Samidoun has been at the centre of the Canadian anti-Israel movement since the October 7 attack, helping to coordinate hundreds of blockades, boycotts and demonstrations in cities across Canada.
It was a Samidoun rally held in the immediate wake of the massacres, for instance, that featured former B.C. Civil Liberties Association executive director Harsha Walia indirectly praising the mass murder of more than 300 attendees at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel.
“How beautiful is the spirit to get free that Palestinians literally learned how to fly on hang gliders,” said Walia in apparent reference to the paragliders that Hamas gunmen used to ambush the music festival.
Charlotte Kates, the wife of Khaled Barakat, has repeatedly praised the October 7 attacks in public speeches held everywhere from Vancouver to Toronto to Madrid.
For all this, Samidoun has retained its official non-profit status, with one of its only government sanctions being a temporary ban against Kates making public appearances in Canada — although she’s been free to travel abroad. That ban expired on Oct. 8.
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