Photo: ActiveStills Palestinian youth protest Israeli occupation in the West Bank.
From February 4th to the 6th the peoples commission network will be holding a popular forum called Whose security? Our Security!, to bring activists, social justice organizers and communities together, in order to broaden the movement against Canada’s National Security Agenda. Whether it be the criminalization of social justice movements, national security measures that target immigrant and migrant communities, will all be discussed during this two day popular gathering here in Montreal.
The importance of such a gathering as it relates to Palestine solidarity is intrinsic. In terms of the ongoing work towards solidarity with Palestine through the growing Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign to end Israeli apartheid. It is critical for those who work on the question of Palestine to also build an analysis and a challenge to the way in which national security has been used by the Conservative government as a means to show its continued support for Israeli Apartheid, through the discourse of the war on terror and to delegitimise both the Palestine solidarity here and the struggle for self-determination and justice in Palestine.
Tadamon! supports candidacy of Dru Oja Jay for membership on the Board of Directors of Mountain Equipment Co-op in 2011.
We agree with the many goals that Dru would like to achieve, not least his desire to strengthen MEC’s commitment to ethical sourcing. In this regard, what is especially important to Tadamon! is Dru’s goal to build on ongoing efforts to convince members of the Co-op to vote to prohibit the sale of products made in Israel at MEC stores in Canada.
This is in keeping with the call from Palestinian civil society in July 2005 for an international campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) in order to pressure Israel to end its policy of apartheid, its illegal occupation of Palestine, its war crimes and its human rights violations. As Dru puts it: “you can benefit from war and occupation, or you can be considered an ‘ethical supplier’, but not both.”
As the world remembers the Israeli bombardment of Gaza at the turn of 2009, the Palestine solidarity movement continues to build the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israeli apartheid. Social justice networks globally are moving in unprecedented ways to back the growing BDS campaign, launched in occupied Palestine by civil society organizations in 2005.
Recently in La Plata, Argentina, the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) held their 10th international conference and voted to join the global BDS movement.
This month, the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) have discontinued sales of Ahava cosmetic products. Ahava is an Israeli company that has been a target of the Palestinian campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
On January 21 2009, the Ontario Progressive Conservative Campus Association (OPCCA) held a series of workshops advising young conservatives on how to dominate campus discourse, take over student government, and attack their campus public interest research group (PIRG). In the following weeks, similar workshops were held at Carleton and Wilfred Laurier University.
Recordings from the Toronto session were released on WikiLeaks in March of that year. The speakers from the recording are Ryan O’Connor and Aaron Lee-Wudrick, both of whom were active in student politics, and their Conservative Party campus chapter, at the University of Waterloo.
Canada’s tax system currently subsidizes Israeli settlements that Ottawa deems illegal, however, the Conservative government says there’s nothing that can be done about it.
In June of last year, Guelph activist Dan Maitland emailed Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon concerning Canada Park, a Jewish National Fund of Canada initiative built on land Israel occupied after the June 1967 War. Three Palestinian villages (Beit Nuba, Imwas and Yalu) were demolished to make way for the park.
Global Day of Action for Jawaher Abu Rahmah & Palestinian Popular Resistance
