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The desperate crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech in Canada
1.1k Plays1 year ago
Law professor Joshua Sealy-Harrington joins host Duncan Kinney to discuss how universities and police forces across Canada are cracking down on pro-Palestinian speech and the serious effects these actions are having on Canada's very broken and barely functioning democracy.
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Transcript
Introduction to Critical Race Theory
00:00:13
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Amiska Chihua, Skuygen, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the mighty Kasa, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today is Joshua Seeley Harrington. Joshua is an assistant professor at the Lincoln Alexander School of Law at
00:00:35
Speaker
Toronto Metropolitan University, which you might know was a university formerly known as Ryerson. Joshua teaches law students and can actually explain what critical race theory is. So if you're ever actually like running into people who are like, what the fuck?
00:00:52
Speaker
Yeah, go read some of what Joshua has written about it. It's actually quite clear and awesome. Josh is also not just a legal scholar. He has been lead counsel on cases before the Supreme Court of Canada.
Is Pro-Palestinian Speech Under Siege?
00:01:03
Speaker
According to his TMU bio that I am drawing from for this intro, a majority of his legal practice involves pro bono and low bono work for nonprofits and individuals
00:01:12
Speaker
promoting human rights and social justice, just the kind of lawyer that we like to see. He is even an Alberta connection. Joshua grew up in Calgary and got his JD from the University of Calgary. And I found out actually in our little pre-interview that Joshua is an alum of both the same junior high and high school as myself. So Joshua, welcome to the pod and go Trojans. Yeah, go William Abraham Trojans.
00:01:42
Speaker
Uh, don't very happy to be on the pod and in conversation with a fellow hashtag eight babe. Oh yeah. Shit. Yeah. Yeah. That was a good one. I feel like we got Abe as the like short form of the high school, but we really, in my adulthood, I only refer to William Abraham as Bible bill. And I feel like Bible
00:02:03
Speaker
I feel like Bible Bill High could have taken off if I had known who the hell William Eberhart was when I was 17 years old, but that is the way youth goes sometimes. Well, and I imagine the administration at William Eberhart probably wanted to suppress its namesake for its own reputational considerations.
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah, a bit of a crank, a bit of an anti-Semite, bit of a bad person. But yeah, this show is not here to talk about William Abraham. Hi, or anything that William Abraham may have done. We are here to talk about something that's actually quite serious and something that is sweeping the nation, unfortunately, which is suppression. Sweeping the world. Sweeping the world, yeah, that's fair to say, which is the suppression
Case Study: TMU Student Suppression
00:02:48
Speaker
of pro-Palestinian speech. There's, you can call it a new era of McCarthyism, you can call it just, you know, anti-Palestinian kind of like
00:03:06
Speaker
I don't know if a term has been coined for it yet, but essentially anyone or any institution here in Canada that is expressed support or solidarity with Palestinians as they undergo kind of the ruthless slaughter from the Israeli state in that conflict, they are, people are getting fired, people are getting censored as we saw with Sarah Jama.
00:03:30
Speaker
all sorts of consequences. People are being arrested. All sorts of consequences are being meted out by the powers that be when people out there express kind of pro-Palestinian solidarity. And so there's two kind of big vectors of battle here that I think we want to talk about.
00:03:53
Speaker
on this pod, and that is universities, and that is the criminal charges, the criminal courts. We're going to leave the criminal courts for later in the pod. Why don't we start with the universities? And I think the scandal that you've been dealing with at your university, Joshua, it really does show, is really a good example of this kind of like anti-Palestinian
00:04:16
Speaker
kind of suppression in action. Why don't you walk us through kind of what's been happening at TMU, especially even in your faculty, in the Faculty of Law? Yeah, no, I'm happy to talk about that. And I'll say at the outset you said earlier, you're trying to, you're grasping at, you know, what do we call this? And have people been trying to develop an understanding of what to call it?
00:04:41
Speaker
And there's actually a really good report from the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association on anti-Palestinian racism that goes into detailing what it is and how it's used and its history and its current practices. So that report is really a helpful thing to go to for talking about it. But yes, we've been witnessing at my own law school an archetypal example of anti-Palestinian speech suppression.
00:05:07
Speaker
Essentially, there was a group of students who shared a letter with the senior administration making demands of the administration against the backdrop of its relative silence on Palestinian liberation in the context of Israel's illegal siege on Gaza. An important thing to know about my law school, TMU, or Lincoln Alexander, it's a law school that specifically markets itself to the public in relation to racial justice.
00:05:36
Speaker
And I imagine that's something that informed the students' frustration with how the administration was responding to what was going on in Gaza. And so they shared a letter with the senior administration. That letter was leaked outside of the university and that precipitated a rapid series of events, which fits quite neatly into this idea of
00:05:59
Speaker
the suppression of speech in solidarity with Palestine. There's essentially a massive right wing harassment campaign of doxing of many students at TMU. And shortly thereafter, the senior administration released a statement unequivocally denouncing what is effectively one sixth of the student body's anti-Semitic
00:06:20
Speaker
by virtue of the statement that they released. And that, of course, further facilitated more harassment of the students. They've lost jobs. There's an absolute climate of suppression of pro-Palestinian speech at the university. And now more recently, the Central University, as opposed to the law school, is launching an external review, or it's bringing in a private investigator to essentially, I guess, analyze whether he considers the students pro-Palestinian statement anti-Semitic, and then what
Misinterpretation of Resistance
00:06:50
Speaker
punishments the students should receive, why a university would hire a private investigator to tell the university how to interpret its own code of conduct is beyond me. But that is the current situation that's happening right now. And yeah, the reprisal against students, against pro-Palestinian faculty has been monumental. Yeah, like I've seen Howard Levitt, like a prominent conservative lawyer,
00:07:17
Speaker
Essentially, I think he had an open letter as well. It was competing open letters for a while there where he got a bunch of people to sign on.
00:07:25
Speaker
paraphrase what he said, it was like, any lawsuit and who signed this lawyer won't get a job with me or anyone who thinks like me. And that kind of like threat of like cancellation of future employment is serious. That's a serious threat from a powerful established lawyer in the field. And then, you know, and then and then not not only is there that threat, but then there's also
00:07:54
Speaker
just what's been happening to the people who did sign the letter. You're talking about the harassment, the doxing. Maybe it's worth a minute to just talk about what the letter said. It is not hateful, nor is it anti-Semitic. What did it actually call for? And what criticisms did it make of Israel? Yeah, so the letter by the students, it included
00:08:19
Speaker
I mean, so the letter includes a lot of things. There's two passages in the letter. Well, let me put it this way. There's two components of the letter that results in the opposition that some have presented to it. One aspect of the letter is that it's a validly anti-Zionist. So the letter's very critical of the Israeli state, very critical of
00:08:49
Speaker
its occupation of apartheid, of genocide. And so there have been actually a lot of people just grabbing, you know, especially in right wing media who have been grabbing on to statements from the letter criticizing Israel or characterizing Israel, but also Canada as ultimately settler colonies. And so there's been some people grabbing onto that. That's simply the students' anti-colonial perspective and their critique of
00:09:17
Speaker
Israel's violation of Palestinian human rights.
Anti-Zionism vs. Anti-Semitism
00:09:22
Speaker
Another component of the letter is there's a passage in the letter that refers to support for all forms of Palestinian resistance. And this too is being very uncharitably misinterpreted by a lot of people engaging with the letter. If you read the letter as a whole, which I would recommend lawyers do, as that's part of how we do legal interpretation,
00:09:47
Speaker
The letter includes a reference to Hamas's attack on October 7th and describes that attack as a war crime. I'd say pejorative way of describing what happened on October 7th. But the letter still says that it stands in support of all forms of Palestinian resistance. And so how do you reconcile the description of October 7th as involving war crimes with support for Palestinian resistance? You do that by understanding.
00:10:14
Speaker
if you understand Palestinian resistance and how it's existed in the context of 75 years of occupation, as having drawn on multiple forms. There are diplomatic forms of resistance. There are economic forms of resistance, like BDS. And yes, there's also military or violent forms of resistance. We're currently witnessing tanks from the IDF wandering down into Gaza.
00:10:38
Speaker
And you're seeing violent resistance. You're seeing Hamas responding, not with diplomatic calls, but they're meeting the violence of the Israeli state with their own violence. And it's important to know that in the context, even of international law, that there is a right to resist. That's not an unqualified, right? It's not that, you know, you can commit any violence against anyone without any form of scrutiny. But to interpret the student's letter, which supports all forms of resistance and which simultaneously calls October 7th the war crime,
00:11:08
Speaker
as saying they just support any violence committed in any context by anyone is a ruthlessly uncharitable interpretation. It totally evacuates the term resistance of meaning. And I'd say that interpretation is actually itself racist, right? Taking a statement from a group of students, predominantly racialized students, many Arab, Muslim, South Asian students who are saying they support Palestinian resistance and saying they must support any violence committed anywhere by some abstract brown person.
00:11:38
Speaker
is itself trading on Orientalist tropes. And I think what we've been seeing in the interpretation of this letter is a lot of racist interpretation of what the students were calling for, which is for a ceasefire and for an end to the genocide that's being committed in Gaza. Yeah, like what we're going to see in this example and all of the other examples we're going to discuss is the constant and on purpose conflation of anyone criticizing the state of Israel of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism.
00:12:09
Speaker
And so when actors, especially Zionists or just powerful people, bow to this kind of interpretation of what antisemitism is, that has knock-on effects. That it is bad. That when
Media Distraction Tactics
00:12:29
Speaker
you kind of seed the ground of any criticism of Israel is antisemitism, then we're getting into scary territory.
00:12:40
Speaker
Well, it's territory which is, I want to be very clear on this, which is bad for everyone. It's bad for Palestinians and their allies. They certainly want to be able to talk about and critique even intemperately the actions of the Israeli state. The fact that we're having so much conversation about this right now in the midst of genocide is part of what's just been mind boggling. We have unquestionably
00:13:08
Speaker
the material conditions of incalculable violence happening in Gaza. And the legal profession in Toronto has been very heavily concentrated on the wording of this statement in opposition to that genocide as opposed to the genocide, which by the way, the Canadian government is economically, diplomatically and militarily supporting. So, you know, as one problem, we are so absurdly focused on the wrong thing that we need to be focused on.
00:13:36
Speaker
So obviously, you know, Palestinians and their allies are going to oppose a definition of anti-Semitism that conflates as anti-Zionism. There's a lot of Jewish opposition to, you know, what's termed the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anti-Semitism, precisely on account of it collapsing anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. And the reason for that is very clear and basic.
00:14:03
Speaker
It's that if you empty antisemitism of meaning, your ability to challenge actual antisemitism is made all the more complicated. And so principled opponents of antisemitism don't want to empty it of meaning. What they want to do is they want it to be defined rigorously and clearly so that it can be challenged in tandem with supporting Palestinian liberation. There's actually no conceptual or philosophical need
00:14:31
Speaker
to put these groups against one another. You can support liberation of all different racial minorities. And the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is premised on the opposite of that, that to ever advance Palestinian rights is necessarily to act in a racist way against Jewish people. And that's simply not true. And all of the Jewish organizations that exist, of which there are many that are leading marches across the world against what Israel is doing,
00:15:00
Speaker
who are adamantly opposing the Ira definition of antisemitism, those speak to the obvious fact that you do not have to protect the state of Israel in order to oppose antisemitism. There's simply two different things. Yeah. And when it comes to the media and the Toronto legal community and the eyeballs and the column inches and whatever kind of metric of attention that you want to put,
00:15:30
Speaker
or one I focus on when it comes to this story, it certainly is advantageous for, again, the people you mentioned, the government of Canada, the military industrial establishment, that we're all focusing on an open letter that some fucking university students wrote, rather than the fact that the state of Canada is complicit in the ongoing genocide of 15,000 to 20,000 people in Gaza.
00:15:54
Speaker
with that number set to go up again once this short ceasefire ends. And honestly, that number is probably going to go up the more people they find buried under buildings. And, you know, university students are a very easy distraction that the stories are easy to write, but it does not actually reckon with kind of Canada's involvement in that. Like we have soldiers there right now. There's special force guys, JTF2 guys in Israel at this very moment, right?
00:16:21
Speaker
No, of course. And I mean, there's a famous Toni Morrison quote about the serious function of racism being distraction. And the last month and a half has been an emblem of that. It's been unbelievable how much inability there has been in Canadian public discourse to do basic triage in our analysis. Like just basic prioritization.
00:16:48
Speaker
of what we are talking about and how we are talking about it. I feel like the National Post is releasing like two articles a day on these 76 students at TMU who spoke out against genocide.
Consequences of Online Mobs
00:17:02
Speaker
It's frankly outrageous. And part of why that distraction is needed is because if you look at what's happening in Gaza, it is indefensible.
00:17:12
Speaker
Yeah, whatever you do, don't look too hard. You will start bawling. You will be affected. No, no, exactly. That's also why Israel is killing so many journalists in Gaza. It's very clear that if you are looking at what is happening in Gaza, there is no defense of it. Even if you have a variety of different political perspectives on Israel and Palestine, I certainly have my own views. But regardless of those views,
00:17:42
Speaker
to look soberly at what's happening in Gaza and say that it is proportionate or defensible or even roughly aligned with a basic conception of human dignity is impossible. And so of course we're talking about university students, right? Of course we're talking about all of these other things as opposed to the very obvious and overwhelming crisis, genocide that is unfolding in Gaza.
00:18:10
Speaker
Yeah. And we had our own version of this story, this university, the kind of level story that happened in Toronto here in Edmonton. Here in Edmonton, a woman named Samantha Pearson, the executive director of the University of Alberta Sexual Assault Centre was fired on a Saturday afternoon by press release after she allegedly signed a petition that expressed solidarity with Palestine. And the signing of that petition, she not only signed it or allegedly signed it,
00:18:37
Speaker
as well as the name of the Sexual Assault Center. And this signing, alleged signing, attracted the attention of an online Zionist mob who were very mad at the fact that the, again, the like 800 words of the petition mentioned the quote, unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence. And that was, again, not reading the whole text, not reading anything, just saying, oh yeah, that one sentence means that this person who works at a Sexual Assault Center is essentially saying that all sexual violence committed by Hamas didn't happen.
00:19:07
Speaker
And that, of course, again, a very uncharitable reading. And this story kind of went quickly international, right? The Daily Mail, the Times of Israel. Did this kind of break into your media bubble as well, Joshua? No, no, it did. I've been I mean, I've been primarily as as a rare and avowedly pro-Palestinian voice on my faculty. I've been mostly preoccupied with the attacks on my students, but I've been
00:19:35
Speaker
I've been generally following the wave of suppression, including what recently happened at the University of Alberta.
00:19:43
Speaker
So a bit of context about the firing of Samantha Pearson that you won't find in the news coverage that was out there primarily about this is that the same online mob of Zionists who got Samantha Pearson fired also forced the U of A sexual assault center to delete an Instagram post about a week earlier that referenced a pro-Palestine walkout. So like this organization was kind of already
00:20:07
Speaker
under watch and kind of people, uh, these, these online Zionists had already kind of like known about it. Um, here's a big one, a bit of context that I never saw reported anywhere. Samantha Pearson's name was spelled wrong on the petition. Um, I don't know how often you spell your name wrong, but I don't spell my name very often.
Context in Political Battles
00:20:25
Speaker
Um, uh, anyone can sign a Google form position. Uh, this was like a Google form petition. Like this was like, uh, there was no like identity verification done.
00:20:34
Speaker
Samantha Pearson herself has issued no public statements about this. As I mentioned earlier, Pearson was fired on a Saturday afternoon after the online mob kind of reached a fever pitch with the publishing of a Daily Mail article as well as a post media article. And the university has not answered any of my questions on how they verified that it was Samantha Pearson who signed the petition.
00:20:53
Speaker
And like, leaving aside the content of the letter, which I don't really want to get into, we already kind of like, again, kind of fisking these letters and what online Zionists find wrong with them is probably not worth our time. But like, the letter, I will just say this, that like, the letter itself is fine. And that like, the IDF has over and over lied about what happened. And that like, while sexual violence like, happens in war and conflict,
00:21:21
Speaker
uh, what the mob and what was kind of taken front of her statement was again, an extremely uncharitable, uh, you know, one sentence out of a thing that like a person that, that a person may or may not have signed. And so that's, that's, that's that, but all that aside, Joshua, is all that context that I referenced and that was missing from the other, um, from the online reporting on this, was that, is that interesting to you at all? Do you think that's relevant potentially?
00:21:46
Speaker
Yeah, so there's been such an interesting fixation on context in the current moment with my students and the context of what you're describing. As a leftist scholar, context is always interesting to me. I'm actually interested in understanding the world, not blanket denials or condemnations that stifle analysis. And so, yeah, I am interested in context. I am interested in reading documents as a whole.
00:22:15
Speaker
I'm interested in the past and the present and future. What we've seen recently, especially in the context of October 7th and the ensuing siege on Gaza, is I've literally read tweets where people describe context as itself anti-Semitic. The desire to understand why something happened as anti-Semitic. The way that this is done is through a very specific rhetorical maneuver. The idea is,
00:22:45
Speaker
to inquire into context is to excuse or justify what happened, which is just not what words mean. Let's say, I think many people have some reservations about what happened on October 7th. And so if you oppose what happened on October 7th, on what planet could you not want to understand what led to that?
00:23:10
Speaker
The reason why so many Zionists are opposed to that context is because it's 75 years of brutal military occupation. That's the reason why they don't want to analyze that context. It's a context that's not sympathetic to Israel. And so in the same way we're talking about my students as opposed to the siege in Gaza, it's a desire to obfuscate the very obvious political context for all of what is happening right now, which is not sympathetic to Israel.
00:23:38
Speaker
And you can do the same thing with this signing of this petition at the University of Alberta, right? A lot of what you're seeing in recent attacks on pro-Palestinian statements is very small excerpts, little passages, closets, even in the context of the TMU student letter, right? There is literally a passage two paragraphs later contradicting the interpretation that so many people are putting onto the document.
00:24:04
Speaker
But that doesn't matter, right? Grab the one passage and then run that passage off a cliff in order to make the political point. And so I think that's happening here too, right? When you look at reports of sexual violence in the context of October 7th, there is a lot of mixed reporting, right? We're dealing with a military that is well known for misrepresenting what happens. And so the idea that some skepticism around Israel's reporting or the IDF's reporting about what happened
00:24:33
Speaker
especially when that reporting is directly related to its putative justification for the genocide it's currently committing in Gaza, is something which is reasonably subject to analysis and critique. And so I just don't think, right, I think we're seeing a similar pattern here as we're seeing with the TMU student letter.
Legal Tactics Against Activism
00:24:54
Speaker
We're seeing what is ultimately a political battle over what Israel's doing in Gaza.
00:25:00
Speaker
and people trying in every possible way to obscure actual engagement with what is happening in order to permit implicitly or explicitly Israel's continued siege on Gaza.
00:25:13
Speaker
Yeah. And these are just two examples of kind of like post-secondary pro-Palestinian speech being suppressed. We could have picked out a half a dozen others. I think there's so many. They're all, they're all over. Yeah. And, and they are just, again, they do, they do follow this pattern that you talked about. And, and I think if I was to kind of like, just have a closing thought on these universities that are trying to shut down pro-Palestinian speech is that
00:25:38
Speaker
All 11 universities in Gaza have been bombed by Israel. Some of them are in absolute ruins, like we'll have to be rebuilt from scratch if they are ever rebuilt. Nearly 90,000 post-secondary students in Gaza are unable to attend university due to the ongoing siege that is happening there. You know, while Zionists are concentrating on getting people fired,
00:26:03
Speaker
here in, you know, in universities in Canada, the very concept of post-secondary education is being eradicated by the Israeli state for Palestinian people in Gaza. And I think that is an important point to remember when we were talking about university students saying Palestinian things. No, no, for sure. And to me again, right, the gross disproportionality
00:26:33
Speaker
of what Israel is currently doing in Gaza. The unquestionable collective punishment that the civilian population in Gaza is currently experiencing is something which basic humanity should absolutely unite around. Name the group and it should be opposed to what's going on. As you said, every university in Gaza pond, yeah, universities should be speaking out from the standpoint of academic freedom,
00:27:03
Speaker
free inquiry, the safety of students, easy call, right? Look at all the hospitals that have been sieged. Doctors should be obviously speaking out. It shouldn't even relate to the idea of one's granular politics on Israel and Palestine. If the Israeli state is devastating the medical infrastructure of a captive population, it should not be complicated for doctors to come out against that.
00:27:29
Speaker
If you're a feminist, there's a recent statement signed by a bunch of feminist organizations in Canada. The nature of violence and devastation against women and children in Gaza is unbelievable. It should be very easy to sign a statement in support of a ceasefire from a feminist standpoint. Regardless of your politics and the different issues that you prioritize, we are literally witnessing a genocide. The whole point of the idea of genocide
00:27:59
Speaker
is it's categorical in defensibility. And I think that's why we're seeing such an aggressive McCarthyist campaign, right? What is happening cannot be justified. And so how do you beat it? You cannot beat it on the train of ideas. You cannot justify genocide in Gaza on the train of ideas. You justify it through silence. And that is what we are seeing. We're seeing an attempt to not allow people to talk about what is going on in Gaza.
00:28:25
Speaker
And the fact that it is a political maneuver is so apparent based on how it is enacted, right? Grabbing these thin phrases out of context and then amplifying them and repeating the line over and over and over again until people are either convinced or confused and then don't know how to engage with what's happening. And so I think these are simply examples of that indefensibility and the only maneuver you have left, which is silence.
00:28:53
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, what you described is exactly why I have such seething contempt for the profession of which I'm a part of journalism, where, you know, the Israeli regime is just murdering journalists left, right and center. Exactly. Western journalists can't be bothered to say, Oh, this is a bad thing. And it's like, well, this is one, it's a similarity between journalism and law, right? Is notions of objectivity, right? Like, like what you see in both
00:29:22
Speaker
you know, professions or industries is the idea of how important it is to be objective. And what you see in the context of something like the genocide in Gaza is the weaponization of notions of objectivity, right? You're seeing journalists in newsrooms all over the place who want to talk about or even simply name a Palestine being labeled as biased, right? What's happening to my law students at TMU? They come out with a forceful statement against the genocide in Gaza. They're labeled anti-Semitic.
00:29:53
Speaker
This process of labeling, of bias of anti-Semitism against people merely speaking in support of Palestinian liberation, or even Palestinian resistance, which is legitimate, it is doing that exact work. Whether or not it's in journalism or law, the idea is you wield objectivity to silence people when in actuality, the objective analysis is that it's a genocide. That is actually what's happening and people should be speaking out against it.
00:30:20
Speaker
Yeah. And it's not just at universities where pro-Palestinian speech is being policed. The police are literally arresting people and putting people in prison over pro-Palestinian speech here in Calgary, where we both grew up. We have
Freedom of Expression Challenges
00:30:35
Speaker
the case of Wasam Cooley, who also goes by the name of Wasam Khaled. He is an organizer with Justice for Palestinians, the Calgary branch. He was the co-organizer of a march, a pro-Palestinian march in Calgary in November.
00:30:49
Speaker
and him and several of the other organizers met with the Calgary Police Service in advance of their event to say, hey, Zarrar, if we say, you know, the chant from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. You know, the CPS assured him that it was, you know, Wesam was kind of the MC for the event. And in the video that we have of him saying it, he even talks about this conversation with the cops. They like, they said it was okay for me to say it. And then he, you know, he screams it. He leads the crowd at the chant.
00:31:15
Speaker
And then after the rally, he is arrested by the Calgary police for disturbing the peace and not just disturbing the peace, but disturbing the peace with a hate crime modifier attached, which is unique and like usually not announced kind of right away, but the Calgary police are a special bunch. And then of course, less than a week later, the charge was dropped after a Crown prosecutor actually got to look at the case.
00:31:43
Speaker
Uh, Joshua, yeah, thankfully, uh, thankfully there is a good end to this one. Unlike some of the other cases that we were talking about. Joshua, you're the lawyer here. Uh, what charter rights did the Calgary police violate here and should they have known better? Right. So, I mean, yes, one, they should obviously know better. Um, and, and this, this, uh, I mean, there's a lot of charter rights that you can bring up in the context of this arrest. Uh, but.
00:32:09
Speaker
the two that I'll concentrate on. One is Section 2B on free expression. And this is an easy case, right? This is a very simple analysis. You're not just talking about expression in the abstract. You're talking about political expression against ongoing war crimes that are diplomatically, economically, and militaristically supported by the Canadian state.
00:32:38
Speaker
The idea that it is criminal to participate in anti-war chants is like the absolute core of what free expression is about. Free expression as a charter right relates to many other forms of political expression, many other forms of expression as well, but political protest, so much of the jurisprudence and scholarship around the idea of free expression as a constitutional right is based
00:33:05
Speaker
in the context of political protest, which is exactly when, and political protests in the context of war, which is exactly when the state will jettison individual rights for its own interests. So we're looking at a very clear case of state repression of exceedingly legitimate political speech. So that's one charter right. Another charter right,
00:33:33
Speaker
which is implicated as section 15 or equality. From the river to the sea is a call for Palestinian liberation. And so this isn't just about, at one level, we're talking about speech that relates to critique of the Canadian state and its complicity in Israeli war crimes. At another level, we're talking about a statement of significant symbolic, rhetorical, political,
00:34:03
Speaker
spiritual significance to Palestinians and their allies, right, to Arab nationalism more broadly. And what we're seeing in the context of this arrest is not just suppression of anti-war speech, but racist suppression of speech that specifically advances the interests of a demonstrably persecuted racial minority. Given that context, we're also looking at not just inappropriate police conduct, but racist police conduct.
00:34:32
Speaker
In the same way that my students and their announced support for Palestinian resistance is being, through an Orientalist lens, interpreted as their support of any violence in any context whatsoever, which is absurd, this statement is being interpreted as some call to violence, when if you actually attend a rally or read a book on Palestinian resistance and Palestinian organizing and protests,
00:35:02
Speaker
then you know that this statement in the vast majority of context and in its calls recently in North America relates to Palestinian liberation, right? Relates to an end to occupation apartheid and now genocide in Gaza. If you cannot chant in support for basic dignity for the human rights of Palestinians, right, that's an affront to the constitutional rights that were meant to have within Canada's liberal democracy.
00:35:30
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, and in a darkly hilarious turn, the next week at the next protest, the Calgary Police, who were perhaps more than a little embarrassed over the situation, took out their frustration on pro-Palestinian marchers
00:35:47
Speaker
who had kind of like separated out from the main group and there is video of cops ripping off a hijab and throwing a pregnant woman to the ground on top of numerous other acts of police brutality all because this like little splinter group was blocking a road for a short period. You know I wrote and reported on this extensively and
00:36:08
Speaker
In my coverage, I was really the only journalist to discuss that this isn't the first time that the Calgary Police had charged a racialized person with a hate crime, only for it to be trot quite quickly, actually, once a prosecutor saw it. Not just a racialized person with a hate crime, but a racialized political activist with a hate crime.
00:36:28
Speaker
Only for a different time, quite quickly. Because back in the summer, Adora Nofor, the president of BLM Calgary, was charged with a hate crime after an incident, after a pro 2SLGBTQ protest outside of a Catholic high school.
00:36:44
Speaker
Again, like in the Wissam-Kaled case, the Crown Prosecutor dropped the case quickly. The CPS kind of hilariously called it a clerical error. But the thing about this case is that very unfortunately, Adora Nofor and her friend and colleague, Taylor McNally, are facing, still facing many, many charges, three charges for Adora Nofor, 16 charges in two separate lawsuits by Calgary police officers against Taylor McNally.
00:37:09
Speaker
This is commonly like the the rally or the campaign to have this kind of like have these charges drop is called stop the stack. And they're making the point that like what is happening to these two black women who do a lot of important anti police organizing in Calgary is that this is charge stacking. And can you maybe explain kind of what charge stacking is and why the police and prosecutors use it in cases like these?
00:37:34
Speaker
Yeah, so this relates to all the different things we're discussing, all relate to this theme of gross disproportionality, right? Whether or not it's students releasing an open letter and then facing extremely harsh reprisal, whether or not it's what we're seeing literally in Gaza and the collective punishment that we're seeing, this response, this totally heavy-handed response is tactical, right? It's meant to intimidate. It's meant to complicate the defense
00:38:04
Speaker
It's meant to encourage a plea deal. So charge stacking in the context of criminal punishment is exactly what these two are experiencing, where you have what in the ordinary course might result in a couple of charges. Instead, you get way more put on. What does that do? It increases the gravity of the circumstance facing these activists. They're dealing with more charges, potentially a greater sentence, a more complicated defense that they have to mount.
00:38:30
Speaker
It just looks more intimidating, right? It's intuitive that if you're charged with one crime or 16, that 16 looks bad. It looks more, right? It's a scarier thing to confront. And so what we're seeing is the Canadian state in context of radical activism, acting out, and what I would argue is attempting to intimidate these forms of activism, right? We also saw this with, I know we're gonna talk about it later in the context of the
00:38:59
Speaker
in the context of the Indigo bookstore, but there too, we're seeing really harsh, unusually aggressive response from the Canadian state because it doesn't want to see this activism, right? And how do you do that? You make people afraid. It's the same, it's very similar, it's different, but it's very similar to what's happening at my law school. If there's really strict reprisal against student political expression, how are other students going to feel about future political expression?
00:39:25
Speaker
The legal profession has spoken. My senior administration has spoken. People are now afraid. And so what you see as actually, this is performing an overarching disciplinary function. It's getting people in line so that they don't act out, so that they are more compliant with
State Overreach in Activism
00:39:44
Speaker
the state. And I think all of these different circumstances that we're talking about are ultimately part of that broader state project. We're in the midst of a genocide, which Canada is complicit in,
00:39:55
Speaker
Of course, it is clamping down all across the board because it's going to see lots of popular opposition to what is happening. Yeah, and you mentioned the Toronto Indigo case. Let's get into it because we're recording this on Friday afternoon.
00:40:12
Speaker
November 24th, and just today an incredible piece of journalism from the breach came out that detailed essentially how much resources were put into arresting the several people, I think 11 people total, with mischief over 5,000 and conspiracy to commit an indictable offense over the alleged vandalism of a Indigo bookstore in downtown Toronto.
00:40:35
Speaker
These Indigo bookstores essentially had pieces of paper glued on the windows and I believe red paint splashed on the windows and on the sidewalk. Yeah, the details are disturbing. I'm just going to read from the from the breach story here. Please do.
00:40:52
Speaker
Because these were no-knock raids. On Wednesday at 5.30 AM, Sharmeen Khan woke up to a police officer in her bedroom, shining a flashlight in her face. Soon there were several officers in her hallway. Order to get up, police watched her and her partner get dressed before she was handcuffed. The apartment of the Toronto bookkeeper and educator was then searched in ransacks, drawers emptied, laundry dumped on her bed, dozens of posters removed from poster tubes and scattered around the apartment.
00:41:17
Speaker
Across the city, a half dozen other people were also having their homes raided. Front doors were broken, computers and cell phones were confiscated, and anyone present was placed in handcuffs, including the elderly, leaving disturbed and distressed family in their wake. This is like a no-knock drug bust or gun bust type approach that was taken to arresting these folks. This is not me reading from the story. This is my own editorializing on this type of operation.
00:41:43
Speaker
But again, these people are not drug kingpins. There was no violence in the alleged crime that they committed. They plastered posters and splashed paint onto the windows of a bookstore. This is what I mean about gross disproportionality. This is a type of police intervention that is typically reserved for an entirely different type of
00:42:13
Speaker
of crime, right? This is a literally traumatic experience, right? Like waking up to someone in your bedroom that is usually reserved for, or that is putatively justified on the basis of the seriousness of what is being investigated and the tactical necessity of this type of police intervention. Totally out of proportion with posturing and washable paint on a book conglomerate.
00:42:42
Speaker
The only way that you can, again, explain what's going on isn't a reasonable or rational calculus of what was going on. It is the Canadian state's desire to actively and aggressively suppress pro-Palestinian discourse. We're seeing it in the universities. We're seeing it at the Sexual Assault Centre. Here we're seeing it with the police in Toronto. There's a very obvious pattern that's happening. And when you understand its ultimate seed,
00:43:11
Speaker
is the Canadian state's desire to obfuscate its complicity in international war crimes, then it all comes into focus. There's just no other justification for this outrageous use of public resources.
Are Hate Crime Laws Misused?
00:43:25
Speaker
Yeah, like the amount of people you have to get to coordinate like six or seven different raids all at once, all at the same time across the city, all the warrants you have to get, millions of dollars is what was estimated. In their release, the Toronto Police Service said, quote, the investigation remains ongoing and is being treated as a suspected hate motivated offense.
00:43:50
Speaker
And then later on in the release it says, quote, members of the hate crime unit will provide assistance and support to the divisional investigators in seeking the attorney general's consent to lay these charges if applicable. These charges are often laid at a later time. Essentially the TPS are threatening or heavily intimating that they will be charging these people with hate crimes later on. And it's worth getting into the actual specifics here. So the posters that were put up
00:44:19
Speaker
were a picture of Heather Reisman, the CEO of Indigo. It's a mock book cover featuring a picture of Reisman with the words funding genocide printed on it underneath our, what are obviously a fake quote, where it says, I'm happy to use the profits from your purchase to fund the Israeli military and bomb civilians.
00:44:40
Speaker
Again, there's no mention of the fact that Heather Reisman is Jewish. There's no mention of her religious identity. It simply says that she is funding genocide and she does. She has been the subject of a boycott campaign for over a decade because Reisman is the founder and principal person of a charity that provides cash, straight up cash for people to go serve in the Israeli army.
00:45:03
Speaker
And again, this is the Toronto police directly conflating criticism of Israel, criticism of Zionism with antisemitism with again,
State Suppression Patterns
00:45:19
Speaker
serious, the potential for serious knock on effects here. No, no, exactly. Well, this is why, this is why, right? Lots of critical and radical scholars, myself included, have a lot of skepticism when it comes to, um,
00:45:34
Speaker
you know, the expansion of criminal punishment, even in context where it's supposed to be, you know, quote unquote progressive, right? Like, you know, I think criminal punishment just in general is an ultimately non-progressive exercise, but for those who are more comfortable with it, the idea of hate crimes can be appealing, right? Like it's, oh, we should punish people who are using violence or speech to harm vulnerable minorities.
00:46:03
Speaker
and that that's something that we care about. The problem here is that we're in the upside down, which is what constantly happens in the context of Israel and Palestine. These are people who are speaking truth to clear, overwhelming power in the context of Canadian foreign policy. It is not hateful conceptually to critique Israeli war crimes. It is not hateful to boycott organizations that are complicit
00:46:32
Speaker
in those war crimes, and yet this is what happens. You have something like hate crimes institutionalized within the criminal code, and then it's used to go after paradoxically vulnerable groups. There's a similar maneuver in the context of terrorism, right? In the context of terrorism, when you expand the scope of what terrorism can apply to, who is it generally targeted towards, right? Generally indigenous land defenders, right?
00:47:01
Speaker
not the white supremacists and the violence that they commit, actually quite rarely applied in those circumstances. And so what you see here is actually an outrageous extension of what is termed hate crimes, right? Critiquing, you know, the racist violence that Palestinians are experiencing couldn't be further from hate crimes. And that brings us back to what I was saying earlier about empty and anti-Semitism of meaning, right?
00:47:29
Speaker
This is bad for the Palestinians experiencing genocide in Gaza. It's also bad for Jewish people. This is why there are many Jewish organizations who are opposed to this interpretation of anti-Semitism and who are opposed to this overextension of hate crimes. Because again, it makes it harder for us to actually target and stop anti-Semitism, which is a very bad thing. But it's not related to critique of the Israeli state.
00:47:53
Speaker
Yeah, and the Toronto Police Service have announced that they are dramatically increasing the size of their hate crime unit. They are reassigning so many people from other units that, in fact, they are pausing other police work. That's what the literal chief of police is saying in press conferences right now. And this trend of seeing hate crimes units being used to go after political activists, typically racialized political activists, this is a real trend.
00:48:22
Speaker
you know, I'm policing is a inherently political exercise. And, you know, the powerful will not hesitate to use the broad power afforded to them by having, you know, a militarized police force to go after speech and protests and activists that they don't agree with. This is what these actions demonstrate, right? Like, all kind of like head nodding and acknowledgments of the kind of like liberal
00:48:46
Speaker
notions of the separation of these powers is kind of out the window. And this is also one of the many, many reasons that I am a police abolitionist. But I think we're coming to the end of our chat here, but is there anything that you think people need to walk away from this conversation knowing, especially about this kind of confluence of police, hate crimes units, and police going after political activists here in Canada?
00:49:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that I think it's really important for people to interpret or like, you know, to look at what's going on in very clear terms, right? What we're seeing, whether or not it's the protester in Calgary, whether or not it's the protesters in Toronto, we're seeing extraordinarily aggressive and disproportionate state persecution of anti-war protesters and not just anti-war protesters in general.
00:49:45
Speaker
anti-war protesters in the context of an ongoing genocide in which Canada is directly complicit, right? What does that mean? That means if you care about free expression at all, you are appalled by this conduct, right? If you care about racial justice at all, you are appalled by this conduct. And I also just wanna note, as you said, this is an outrageous use of public funds, right? I am also a police and prison abolitionist,
00:50:16
Speaker
What a wonderful invitation for reflection on defunding the police, right? Like these people papered and put washable paint on not some small local bookstore, although if it was funding genocide, I would support that too. But on, you know, add an indigo, right? In terms of harm, in terms of safety in Canadian society, what an outrageous use of resources. And actually, this is what police funding is routinely spent on.
00:50:46
Speaker
whether or not it's the Black activists that you mentioned before or the Palestinian activists, this type of excessive funding investment and what is ultimately meant to be used as a form of intimidation is a catastrophic waste of money. All of this focus should be on obtaining a ceasefire. What we should be writing about, thinking about pursuing is an end to the terroristic
00:51:16
Speaker
destruction of Gaza by the Israeli state. And all of this theater around protests and student letters and chants,
Call to Action for Solidarity
00:51:26
Speaker
right? All of that is because I very genuinely believe if we actually had a sincere and good faith conversation about what's happening in Gaza, everyone would know what is required, which is an end to that genocide. And so we are talking about so many different satellite discussions because the actual discussion will
00:51:44
Speaker
unequivocally be won by Palestine. Thank you for that. Yeah. I don't have much to add, but I just want to remind anyone listening to, you know, stay safe, take care of yourselves and your comrades and just never, ever, ever talk to cops unless you absolutely have to. Correct. I endorse that message. Yeah. And so, um, yeah, that that's the end of our time here. Uh, now's the opportunity I give to all of our guests to kind of plug your pluggables. You know, how can people follow along with the work you're doing and what you're up to? What's the best way?
00:52:13
Speaker
Yeah, I have a Twitter account at Joshua Sealy. So I do some public engagement and communication there. And I have, well, it depends on what kind of stuff you're interested in. My scholarship is, most of my scholarship is posted on SSRN, so you can find that there too. But I mean, honestly, right now, just go follow every account right now that's posting from Gaza and attend marches and
00:52:43
Speaker
go stand in support of Palestinian solidarity. I think that's what everyone needs to be doing right now. Absolutely. And folks, if you like this podcast, you like this conversation, I got a simple request for you. You just need to join the 500 or so other folks who help keep this independent media project going.
00:53:00
Speaker
There will be a link in the show notes, but you can also go to the progressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card, become a monthly contributor. Jim and Jeremy and I would really appreciate it. Also, if you have any notes or thoughts or comments that you think I need to hear, I am very easy to find. You can email me at the dunkenk at progresselberta.ca and like Joshua, I too am.
00:53:19
Speaker
on Twitter.com. I'll continue to refer into that no matter what Elon Musk says. With my handle being at Duncan Kinney. Thank you to Jim Story for editing. Thanks to Cosmic Family Communists for our theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.