Amira Elghawhaby, the Trudeau government's Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia. claimed the 'Globalize the Intifada' event had peaceful intentions
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This week yielded near-universal condemnation from Canadian politicians regarding a Saturday rally on Parliament Hill that openly endorsed the Hamas-led massacres against Israel on October 7.
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“Our resistance attacks are proof that we are almost free. October 7 is proof that we are almost free. Long live October 7. Long live the resistance,” said an official announcer to cheers from several hundred attendees massed outside 80 Wellington Street, the office of the Prime Minister.
The chant was captured both on official livestreams of the protest, and on video captured by Ottawa-based protest-watcher Chris Dacey. As of this writing, videos of the chant have been viewed nearly four million times on X.
"October 7th is proof that we are almost free. Long live the resistance, long live the intifada."
Anti-Israel demonstrators on Wellington St set off smoke grenades, make reference to October 7th terrorist attacks on Israel and call for intifada, all in front of @OttawaPolice. pic.twitter.com/0RcIVVNFOb
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the chant “hateful intimidation” in an X post and called it “unconscionable to glorify the antisemitic violence and murder perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th.”
But in all of Ottawa, probably the most robust official defence of Saturday’s events came from Amira Elghawaby, Canada’s special representative on combatting Islamophobia.
In a lengthy social media post, Elghawaby referred to the chant as “a few individual protesters engaged in problematic speech” — and said that it was “patently false and harmful” to insinuate that the chant was representative of the protest as a whole. Most protesters, she said, were peacefully trying to stop the “decimation of an entire population in Gaza.”
The right to protest is a cornerstone of our democracy.
For the past seven months, hundreds of thousands of Canadians have been peacefully calling for an end to the ongoing death, destruction, and decimation of an entire population in Gaza.
This past weekend, however, a few…
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But Saturday’s extremism was not an anomaly. As has been meticulously detailed by National Post and others, Saturday’s protest was a routine occurrence for a movement that has been open from the beginning about its support for violence, its sympathy for terrorism and its ultimate goal of destroying Israel.
Below, a cursory look at the overt extremism of Canada’s anti-Israel coordinators.
Every major organizer openly celebrated October 7
The Parliament Hill event that featured the “long live October 7” chant was a 2 p.m. demonstration officially advertised to participants as Globalize the Intifada. It was one of two protests held that day; the first being a 1 p.m. “die in.”
Globalize the Intifada’s official posters featured the logos of six organizers: Samidoun, Toronto4Palestine, Montreal4Palestine, Ottawa4Palestine, Palesign and Canadians4Palestine.
PaleSign and Canadians4Palestine are both relatively new organizations (federal documents show that PaleSign incorporated as an Ontario-based non-profit in November). But the other four were active when Canada first received news on October 7 of Hamas-led massacres of more than 1,200 civilians in Southern Israel.
Without exception, their response was jubilation. Montreal4Palestine handed out bubble gum and Tootsie Rolls on October 7, declaring on social media, “The Journey has begun!!”
Samidoun — a group with close ties to the Gazan terror group PFLP — greeted the news of October 7 with a celebratory statement claiming that “the promise of liberation is closer than ever before.” Samidoun’s statement was also one of the first to cite the attack’s official name (Al-Aqsa Flood) as well as its architect, Hamas commander Mohammed Deif.
The massacres were also cheered by Palestinian Youth Movement, another perennial anti-Israel organizer that helped promote the Saturday Globalize the Intifada event. The PYM organized All Out for Palestine rallies across Canada on the day of the attacks, declaring in Facebook posts that “Gaza’s resistance against the occupation has taken to new heights.”
Protest literature has repeatedly endorsed “intifada” and calls for Israel’s elimination
An Ottawa4Palestine web video promoting the Globalize the Intifada protest included the slogan “back the resistance.” But Saturday’s protest was far from the first event to employ the word “intifada.”
An Arabic word meaning “shaking off,” intifada is the word that Palestinians have used to refer to prolonged periods of violent uprising against the State of Israel. The five-year Second Intifada, most notably, was characterized by a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings targeting Israeli cities.
A post shared by Palesign | پاليساين (@pal.esign)
Just before Christmas, “long live the intifada” could be heard chanted by a crowd of hundreds attending a Toronto4Palestine rally in Downtown Toronto. The month before, a Toronto4Palestine and Palestinian Youth Movement demonstration in Toronto featured a child given the microphone to lead chants of “there is only one solution, intifada, revolution.”
Another word that shows up frequently in protest literature is “martyrs.” This Sunday, in fact, will see a “Glory to the Martyrs” demonstration in Oakville, Ont., organized by Palestinian Youth Movement and Toronto4Palestine. “The blood of our martyrs will continue to fuel the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation against injustice and colonial occupation,” reads the event’s official Instagram page.
But one of the most common chants at Canadian pro-Palestinian protests has been, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
While it may sound innocuous to the uninitiated, the chant is very deliberately calling for the total elimination of the State of Israel. The chant references the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea; two geographic features that roughly comprise the east and west borders of modern Israel, respectively.
While a chant of “Free Palestine” could be interpreted as a mere call for Palestinian sovereignty, the “From the river to the sea” preamble is a rejection of a “two state solution,” which is why its utterance since October 7 has yielded hate charges in Europe.
A post shared by Montreal4Palestine (@montreal4palestine)
Invited speakers have frequently endorsed violence and parroted Hamas propaganda
A Samidoun event outside the Vancouver Art Gallery featured activist Natalie Knight calling the October 7 attacks “amazing” and “brilliant.” Former head of the BC Civil Liberties Association Harsha Walia used a similar event to say “how beautiful is the spirit to get free that Palestinians literally learned how to fly on hang gliders” — a reference to Hamas’s use of paragliders to massacre music festival attendees on Oct. 7.
Radical imam Adil Charkaoui used a Montreal4Palestine-sponsored event to lead a prayer calling for the eradication of “Zionist aggressors.” “Allah, count every one of them, and kill them all, and do not exempt even one of them,” he said.
Natalie Knight, who led illegal anti-LNG roadblocks in early 2020 in Vancouver resurfaced at today’s pro-Palestine rally in Vancouver. She called the Hamas terrorist attack on Israelis “amazing, brilliant.” (📹Bryton’s Thoughts/YouTube). #vanpoli #cdnpoli #October7massacre pic.twitter.com/JYDuWXG7Bk
These were not cases of a random attendee spouting extremism from the sidelines. These were figures who were invited to speak from centralized public address systems, they were not cut short when they veered into extremism, and they did not spawn apologies or denunciations from organizers.
In some cases, the speakers are the organizers. Earlier this month at an Al Quds Day demonstration in Toronto, Samidoun co-founder Charlotte Kates urged attendees “to live up to the example” of Hamas and the Houthis, whom she called “the brigades” the “Yemeni marines” respectively. In November, Toronto4Palestine coordinator Moe Jaberi could be seen using the microphone to repeat the Hamas demand that Israel hostages should only be released in exchange for “political prisoners” — a term Hamas often uses to refer to any Palestinian in Israeli custody, including members held on terrorism charges.
A post shared by Oakville-Halton 4 Palestine (@oakville4palestine)
One of the only examples of an organizer distancing themselves from the statements of an attendee, in fact, occurred earlier this month after a Toronto demonstrator was charged with incitement of hatred. At an April 7 pro-Israel vigil held outside Toronto City Hall, a PaleSign-organized counterprotest included a sign reading “Hamas=Palestinian Resistance Movement” and a man addressing Jewish children through a megaphone, telling them that their parents “rape and murder children.” The alleged speaker, Razaali Awan Bahadur, was charged five days later with public incitement of hatred.
It was after that charge was laid that PaleSign issued a statement reading “even though the individual who made these remarks does not represent our organization … his remarks have been wrongly attributed to us.”
The organization confirmed that they had indeed marshalled counter-protesters to a vigil for Israeli hostages, but that they did so merely to “confront racist and genocide enabler politicians.”
Saskatchewan’s decision to simply stop paying the carbon tax (which is against the law; you’re generally supposed to pay taxes) has yielded a pledge from Ottawa that Saskatchewanians will … continue to receive carbon rebates anyway. Earlier this year, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe announced that he would refuse to remit carbon taxes owed to Ottawa on natural gas consumed within the province. Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault called the decision “immoral,” but that appears to be the extent of the consequences that Moe will face for unilaterally ignoring a federal tax requirement. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Tuesday, “we’re going to continue to deliver the Canada carbon rebate to families right across Saskatchewan despite the fact that Premier Moe is not sending that money to Ottawa right now.” Given that other provinces are also flirting with the idea of not paying carbon taxes (including NDP-led Manitoba), it remains to be seen how this new policy of “you’ll get rebates anyway” will go over.
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