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Baby’s First Synagogue Protest: A Review

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Mar 142024

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Yeah, it’s a fucked up title, I know!

But it’s a fucked up world, isn’t it?

THE FACTS

On March 2, there was a real estate event in Thornhill, a suburban community within Greater Toronto. The event took place at a synagogue, and people were there to buy properties in Palestine. So there was a protest. One guy, who I guess we can probably call a Zionist, showed up with a nail gun, shot at people, and landed a few hits. Apart from this guy, there was representation by the Jewish Defense League (a brand strongly associated with the politics and thuggish approach of its progenitor, the rabbi Meir Kahane) in the security detail for the synagogue.

Basically the same event happened on Tuesday, March 4, at Montréal’s Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, starting in the afternoon. I came to the neighbourhood of Côte-des-Neiges (not my usual part of town) for this event; this was the first time in my life that I have ever personally gone to any demonstration targeting an event at a synagogue.

It was a day after another small crowd, on Monday, March 3, just across MacKenzie King Park from the synagogue, blocked access to “a building that also houses Montréal’s Holocaust museum” (as some have been putting it) for a few hours. What was happening there was a talk by IDF reservists that the local Israeli and pro-Israeli activist cohort had initially planned to have happen at Concordia University.

This is a Jewish neighbourhood. In response to the demonstration, which sought to prevent access the building, a counterprotest formed. Dispersing and on the way to the métro station on Monday, there was a physical confrontation instigated by pro-Israeli protesters, in which a banner or a flag was seized; this devolved into a situation where some people were arrested. The next day there was more shit. A presumably mostly Jewish crowd with a bad sound system faced off with a Palestinian and pro-Palestinian crowd with a good sound system, starting around 3 pm. Nearby Jewish schools were shut down early. Nothing stabby happened, but a small crew of proto-JDL goons were present to do security, liaise with the SPVM, etc., and there were certainly many opportunities for some kind of ugly incident to happen on the sidelines – in the park, or at an intersection nearby – especially once the Sun had set.

By now, Memri TV has circulated its supercut of some of the worst lines from the Tuesday event. I want to note that, while obviously this is manipulative, the vibe is not entirely wrong. It’s not taken out of context. You never know with a hasbarist, but I presume they wouldn’t be so bold as to provide blatantly false subtitles for the Arabic.

On Thursday, as I began to write this article, another synagogue in Thornhill was the target of a demonstration. Arrests were made, and I don’t have the details, but I have been told they were pro-Israeli folks. The synagogue was the venue for yet another real estate event, this time, like the event on Tuesday in Montréal, selling properties in the West Bank. The event on Sunday had been mistaken for this one, where none of the properties on sale were in territories occupied by Israel after 1967; that event had gone ahead, however, because the demonstrators also reject the legitimacy of properties in Tel Aviv being sold.

LIKE, MY OPINION OR WHATEVER

I don’t think it’s worth much time second-guessing the actions of others. To everyone in the pro-Palestinian movement right now who isn’t ready to hear this criticism, fair enough. Maybe it doesn’t apply to you – and fuck, you’re certainly dealing with a lot of criticism right now that is bad faith and concern trollish, so I get why your defenses are up.

Although I can’t speak to its tactical execution or to the individual politics of every person who showed up (I wasn’t there), I think that what happened on Monday night, in Montréal, was entirely appropriate. The same building was the target of an occupation of the lobby in 2014, that time by a crowd of actually Jewish activists who, in the context of uneven exchanges of bombardment happening then, opposed the Federation CJA’s (that is, the local Jewish community council’s) position on, and indeed support of, the occupation of Palestine.

But what happened the next day was pretty fucked up. Not for the asinine reason that it is never appropriate to protest at a synagogue as a non-Jewish person, basically for any reason you want to, but because of who was on the mic and how the danger dial got turned up yet again, and this time for no strategically good reason.

I am not involved in these organizing group chats, but what I understand is that, after the events of Monday evening, which were already being widely reported (and to be be sure, lied about), there was a general sense in a large section of the local pro-Palestinian movement – for instance, in both the Palestinian Youth Movement and Independent Jewish Voices – that something needed to happen to oppose the real estate event at the synagogue, but it would have to have very different “optics” than what had happened at the Federation CJA building. This was supposed to look like a “Jewish-led event”. Incidentally, one had already been planned on Tuesday for several days before Monday, since the synagogue was not willing to cancel the real estate event.

What happened, however, is that another group apart from the PYM and IJV, called Montreal4Palestine, swooped in and organized their own event for when the real estate event was actually going to happen, at 3 pm. Their event brought a predominantly Muslim crowd, along with a handful of mostly silent, sign-holding Neturei Karta guys, to the area in the afternoon. I only knew about the IJV event, which started around 6 pm, because I don’t follow Montreal4Palestine’s Instagram account and I hadn’t checked local news.

I do not know what thought process, or lack of thought process, brought this about. I suspect the personalities who operate the Montreal4Palestine didn’t even know that IJV had planned this thing. If they did know, I can imagine one good reason for organizing something earlier in the day, which is that, if the event is happening at 3 pm, there is no possibility of a blockade or a disruption – as had happened on Monday – if the opposition is only showing up at 6 pm.

Beyond that, though – what the fuck?

Sorry for the run-on sentence, but it’s the same vibe as some of what I heard from the mic on Tuesday. At least one of the guys on the mic had some mixed up ideas about the Jews who were living in 7th-century Medina that he got from his religion (who, the hadith tells us, were very bad Jews indeed), modern-day conspiracy theories about Jews “colonializing” Germany that he probably got from YouTube, and some kind of half-baked version of an anti-colonial counterhistory – when he mentions that Jews that “oppressed” and “colonialized” South Africa, this is true insofar as a countable number of individual Jews were broadly speaking involved in or complicit with the consolidation of a settler-colonial and/or apartheid state in South Africa, but of course in a subsidiary and second-order role, as has also been the case with the colonization of Turtle Island (where, so far at least, you don’t see people outside of gurdwaras or in Chinatown bringing up the true fact that Sikhs and Chinese people, or certainly countable numbers thereof, are complicit in the Canadian colonial project) – and I have to ask, Why the fuck does this guy have the mic?

A full discourse analysis isn’t worth anyone’s time, but obviously a lot of what Memri TV highlighted isn’t that bad, in isolation. To offer another opinion: the guy in the keffiyeh who spoke the most in their supercut definitely has some weird ideas, and he clearly let his impulse to be provocative drive him to say a few fucked up things that, well, go beyond his expertise (for instance, when he spoke about who is “the true Jewish”). But whatever, he’s just one guy, and I have no doubt in my mind that in situations where adversarial social movements face off one with another, people are going to get hyped up and say stupid shit.

The question, for me, is why do this sort of thing at all. There was never any realistic possibility of disruption; the SPVM were in force in the neighbourhood by 2 pm, as any dedicated Montréal anti-systemic street activist should have expected. Hence a brawl of any kind over access to the synagogue – which I don’t think would have been a good idea, in the same way that I think that showing up to Montréal’s palais des congrès on April 21, 2012, wasn’t a good idea – would have been resolved decisively in favour of the pro-Israeli side in every respect.

This is not Concordia University, e.g. a downtown battleground, and neither is it a building somewhere in one of Montréal’s industrial parks where work is being done that will materially aid the Israeli war machine. It’s not the port, out of which something might be shipped to Israel. It’s not a lab that collaborates on weapons development with a lab in Israel somewhere. Except insofar as police resources may have been drawn to Côte-des-Neiges, which perhaps somewhat diminished the capacity of the police to respond to new events elsewhere in the territory of Montréal (I do not know of any anti-systemic action that took advantage of this during the hours of the opposing Tuesday rallies), it is clear that this did absolutely nothing to materially advance the struggle for a free Palestine.

Instead, it has rattled some of the shakier solidarity with the movement for a free Palestine that exists in local Jewish communities in a way that the events of Monday had not, and led to all sorts of capacity-diminishing soul searching and anguished exchanges on social media and over text.

There are some who will not be bothered by losing fairweather allies, but this is short-sighted. Whereas the Neturei Karta guys will probably stick with the free Palestine movement through thick and thin, they are also never going to actually do anything. Jewish anarchists, on the other hand, have a range of beliefs, and they might even be willing to hold to their opinions no matter how much you say that that’s kind of a colonial or privileged attitude. It is possible that they won’t be stoked by chants of “Judaism yes, Zionism no” in the full context of other shit that was being said. So perhaps they’re sensitive snowflakes and demanding brats – maybe. What Jewish anarchists (and their friends!) bring to the table, however, is an at least occasional willingness to do direct action that is actually useful, that generates productive conflict, rather than capacity-diminishing mutual acrimony that the police don’t even need to stoke themselves, of the kind that Tuesday’s events brought into being.

In the proper circumstances, like for instance a blockade, I am willing to hold my nose to work with people who don’t think exactly the same way as I do. Anyone who has spent any time in an Occupy encampment or at an indigenous-led blockade has had to deal with someone who believes in run-of-the-mill conspiracy theories, the false dream of international law, or some other kind of distracting inanity – and in the crucible of conflict with a more important adversary, like the SPVM or the RCMP, these differences of ideas don’t amount to much.

But the protest at the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue on Tuesday was different. There was no conflict that the SPVM did not have well taken care of. Even if we took the police out of the equation, and there had been direct conflict with “the Zionists”, I think it is worth asking whether or not it was a good idea to oppose them on their own turf, in a neighbourhood where they are thick on the ground, where the most hormonal, virile, and stupid as well of their youth go to school. Personally, I think that this is not worth it – certainly not a day after another action that was successful, and which therefore, in the logic of the forces of order (who very much still have a handle on things in the local context), cannot be allowed to be repeated the next day.

Of course it would have been a bad thing to let the real estate take place entirely unopposed, but that would have not happened. Yes, the Jewish-led event, scheduled for 6 pm (which, as an outsider, I have to insist was a mistake, it should have been scheduled for earlier), would have been wholly symbolic – but there is clearly some value in anything that creates fissures within the Jewish community of default sympathy for the Zionist cause, that demonstrates the non-identity of Jew and supporter of Israel in a way that cannot be ignored.

That didn’t get to happen. Sarah Boivin might have said some real shit, but the Jewish-led event effectively did not happen at all because Montreal4Palestine had swooped the earlier time slot. And the M4P folks did not cede the mic at 6 pm, either; a number of people who had been speaking in the hours earlier continued to say some dumb shit. A very rusty anti-oppressive framework, sorry heritage of the QPIRG scene and a cliché version of what well-salaried scholars tell us we were supposed to learn from the struggle of Black people in the United States, suggests that this is as it should be – Jews as mere auxiliaries to a Palestinian-led movement, the oppressor class submitting to the leadership of the oppressed.

As anarchists in Montréal, though, I want us to finally catch up with comrades in some other cities’ anarchist scenes and start and identifying this half-baked claptrap as not fucking good enough. Not fit for purpose, if it ever was. These are not ideas that uphold revolt, insurrection, revolution, or “positive change” of any kinds; they uphold the management of those energies that could otherwise produce graffiti, food given away for free at the corner, upside-down cruisers with their windshields smashed in, and disrupted supply chains, including those chains that sustain the Israeli national project.

Every social movement benefits from individuals freely associating, developing their own capacities to struggle, and establishing an independent range of action that doesn’t tie them to the bad decisions of other elements of the movement – for instance, those that content themselves with symbolic actions, lazy provocations, and predictable maneuvers. Like what happened on Tuesday.

Refusing to say these things publicly, out of fear of “throwing our allies under the bus”, is also not a good idea. Anyone who isn’t myopically committed to the growing power of the social movement, which is heterogenous and therefore mostly bad and not good (because fuck this pseudo-Trotskyist “multitudes” bullshit, we need influential minorities and not every asshole we can round up), should be able to come to their own idea about Montreal4Palestine, about how much the crowd as a whole should wear the worst excesses of certain speakers that Memri TV thought it was worth it to highlight, and so on – but they would need to know the story of what actually happened. The public statements available so far, crafted by activists using a consensus process over group chat, have not been up to task of letting people reach their own conclusions.

THE FUTURE OF LOCAL SYNAGOGUE PROTESTS

On Wednesday, March 6, a judge has banned protests for 10 days at the synagogue, the Federation CJA building, and a few other Jewish institutions in the same radius of a few blocks. It expires Saturday, March 16.

On Thursday, March 7, at a small pro-Palestinian event held in another part of town, a certain fellow whose name I shall not disclosed positively mentioned the website of Yves Engler, who is at a minimum annoying as hell, and promoted Assad regime supporter Aaron Maté’s speaking event at Concordia’s Hall building on the evening of March 15, a day when there is pretty much only one evening event in Montréal that’s worth promoting.

This same man, in his pontificating, told everyone gathered that they should oppose the Zionists and defy the injunction.

Personally, I have defied a bunch of injunctions like this over the years, and I generally think it is a good thing to do, because fuck the authority of the courts. But following this idiot once again into the breach – that is, once again into the Jewish neighbourhood around MacKenzie King Park – not even to protest any particular pro-Israeli event that the injunction protects, but simply the injunction itself, is plainly a waste of time and resources. A crowd of angry Jews will form, and some of them will probably be provocative in their own way. The stupidest person in the pro-Palestinian crowd will say or do something fucked up at some point (like how at least one person yelled “Death to Israel, death to Jews” in Arabic during the Monday action), and then a thousand stupid people on the internet will say that what is predictable, what is frankly very human, was definitely just a hasbarist fabrication, an AI-generated deepfake, etc., rather than a real racist thing that a real person really said.

Of course the police, empowered by an injunction and feeling more sympathy with Jews (Zionists, Israelis…) than Palestinians (Arabs, terrorists…), will probably crack heads. They will do so with no discrimination for whichever young well-meaning Concordia University student is there for their very first direct action.

Fuck this shitty plan offered up by this dusty campist.

If actions for a free Palestine continue happening in this corner of Côte-des-Neiges over the next week (or for however long the injunction is extended), or in any other conspicuously Jewish area of Montréal, anarchists should note that – but mostly to note that police resources will be tied up in that area at that time, indicating that perhaps we should be somewhere else, doing something else. Whether that something else is related to Israel, the war, or anything else “on theme” is an entirely different matter.

And people ought to get a fucking clue: we need to fight in our own neighbourhoods; otherwise, we need to fight at sites of production and at logistical hubs; we don’t need to follow the leader when the leader is an idiot (and in fact we should maybe shut him the fuck down); and things are far too serious to let ourselves lose a grip on what we’re trying to do and why we’re trying to do it.

New Sabotage Against Northvolt – No Capitalist is Safe

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Mar 082024

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

This week marked the return of migratory birds to the Montérégie region and the start of nesting season for several species. The Northvolt worksite is now racing against the clock to fill in as many wetlands as possible by March 10, before being prevented from doing so by federal regulations protecting migratory birds. While deforestation work has been completed on the Saint-Basile-le-Grand side (8700 trees cut down), similar work is now underway in the eastern part of the land owned by McMasterville. This section contains the last remaining intact woodland, perhaps preserved from felling by the repeated spiking that took place there.

To stop the destruction of natural habitats, activists have targeted the Michaudville group’s Mont-St-Hilaire quarry, which to date has been responsible for filling in over ten hectares of marshland essential to the survival of vulnerable species such as the least bittern, the spiny softshell turtle and the eastern red bat. As a result of land artificialisation and urban sprawl, only 5% of wetlands remain in the watershed today. Not only will this industrial project do nothing to decarbonize our economy (as our ministers claim), it will also be carried out at the expense of local biodiversity. Let’s not forget that the ecological crisis is not just a climate crisis, but also an equally threatening biodiversity crisis. It’s thanks to our relationships with other species that we live, eat and breathe. We are entirely dependent on these ecosystems.

At the beginning of the week, around a hundred studded devices were spread along the road leading to the quarry to target the trucks transporting the earth and gravel used for backfilling. Over the past few weeks, more than a hundred return trips have been made daily, with a truck passing every 3 minutes. Any action that disrupts traffic and obstructs the only access road to the quarry will cause financial losses and affect the profitability of the project. Every hour of work lost is a victory for Northvolt’s opponents.

The Northvolt project will never be green. With the battery industry, the CAQ government is taking advantage of climate change to do business. While the government is currently injecting billions of dollars to save the automotive industry, these investments force us to ensure, for decades to come, the growth of an economic sector just as destructive as the fossil fuel economy. The massive electrification of transport and the car-centric model require the multiplication of mines in the Global South and on First Nations territory. Everywhere, farmland, waterways and the populations that depend on them will be poisoned by toxic waste. Entire forests will be laid waste, mountains torn open. The ecological crisis is insoluble under capitalism: our only way out is through mutual aid, the creation of resilient communities and degrowth.

To the companies that work with Northvolt: no one is safe!

A Call to Gather

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Feb 282024

Anonymous submission to North Shore Coun ter-Info

This morning, the Washington Post published an article about US Air Force serviceman, Aaron Bushnell, who set himself on fire outside of the Israeli consulate in Washington, D.C. this week. The first sentence of the article reads:

Less than two weeks before Aaron Bushnell walked toward the gates of the Israeli Embassy on Sunday, he and a friend talked by phone about their shared identities as anarchists and what kinds of risks and sacrifices were needed to be effective.

It seems, Bushnell, was a comrade.

It says he grew up in a religious cult and, when he got out, he felt called towards defending those more vulnerable than himself. He was radicalized during the George Floyd protests and started reading and made a commitment to opposed state-sanctioned violence of any kind. He had recently moved to Ohio to take a course for servicemembers who were transitioning out of duty as he had decided he would not return to the Air Force after his term was over early this year. He had started doing solidarity work with unhoused people and wanted to find a way to work part-time and organize.

Said of him by his comrades:

He is one of the most principled comrades I’ve ever known,” said Xylem, who worked with Bushnell to support San Antonio’s unhoused residents. “He’s always trying to think about how we can actually achieve liberation for all with a smile on his face,” said Errico.

On Sunday, 25 year old Bushnell sent a copy of his will to a friend and put on his uniform. He walked down to the Israeli consulate, doused himself in gasoline, and live streamed his own self-immolation.

His last words were as follows:

My name is Aaron Bushnell. I’m an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide.

I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

As the flames consumed his body, he managed to scream FREE PALESTINE over and over until he collapsed.

Bushnell was an anarchist and he deserves an anarchist send off.
Organize in your communities to honour his memory.

And maybe finish it off with some karaoke, which he apparently loved…

… Some of Bushnell’s friends, including Barboza, said they last saw him in January at his going-away party in San Antonio. It was at a karaoke bar. He belted out song after song, many of which were from “Les Misérables,” which he was known to love. And one was Mandy Moore’s “Wind in My Hair” from the TV series based on the movie “Tangled.”

REST IN POWER, AARON BUSHNELL

AGAINST EVERY STATE EVERYWHERE
FREE PALESTINE

Let’s Attack Northvolt, Always, Everywhere

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Feb 282024

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Anarchists again attacked the capitalist machine of destruction at the Northvolt site. Steel spikes were placed on the various paths used by the machinery. In addition, new nails were put into trees, this time without identifying them, to maximize the potential for destruction on the ecocidal machinery. The people who did the action are not afraid of getting caught. Even if they did, they would ask to be judged by their peers. By the spiny softshell turtles, little bitterns and copper redhorses. By all the species that die because the destruction of the planet is profitable as hell.

Indeed, to maintain capitalist economic growth, it takes bigger and bigger pitiful suburban bungalows and bigger and bigger cars. Meanwhile, we close our eyes and let ourselves be lulled by the nursery rhymes of capitalists who claim that electric cars reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Under the hypocritical pretext of environmental protection, the State and its friends of industry are attempting a desperate rescue of the automobile industry. For it to survive after 2035, the time when the feds will ban the sale of gas cars, they are replacing gas cars with electric cars. Governments then manage to reduce the price of electric cars, through direct and indirect subsidies, so that they remain accessible to the middle class. In short, the battery sector is the plundering of green funds by governments to finance economic growth, to allow the automobile industry to survive the climate changes it has caused. The development of the battery sector is so that we continue to live in noisy, unpleasant, dangerous cities, where city centers have been transformed into highways and parking lots. Anarchists want no part of this world, and that’s why they wanted to grind an extra shovelful of sand into its gears.

And we must remember that it is only in the city that the electric car can claim to be green. All around, there are mines, always on indigenous lands, all over the world. It’s the toxic Rouyn-Noranda refinery. It’s the extensions of ports along the St. Lawrence River. From Africa to South America, it’s executions of trade unionists and defenders of nature carried out in the name of Canadian mining companies. By defending nature here, we do not risk death. Using our privileges to defend the most vulnerable means taking action here. This is a problem caused by white people, and it’s about time we took responsibility.

It was a sad time to take action. At the Northvolt site, barely a few trees remain, including those that were identified as having been the target of spiking last time. This shows that direct action works. Indeed, these nails have probably done more for the protection of biodiversity than COP15, and the whole string of other COPs. We clearly see in action the ridiculous compensation mechanisms for biodiversity: on the one hand, mass deforestation, while in 4-5-6 years, or when they have time, they’ll plant a monoculture of black spruce on 20 hectares, an army of small trees in rows that will be cut down – enough to make toilet paper barely strong enough to wipe yourself with — don’t ask why your fingers go right through it. On the one hand, backfilling wetlands, while in 4-5-6 years, or when they have time, they’ll dig a hole in a patch of sand and put two or three fish and algae there, and give themselves a pat on the back. They’ll create a pond somewhere else for the animals that have already been lost. Dead animals in a puddle are a soup at best and can never compensate for a living ecosystem. And that is if there is actually compensation, because it is the first thing that will be cut if profitability is threatened.

The fight against Northvolt has only just begun. There are still 2 years left before the plant enters service. The profit margins will not be extravagant. Security, public relations and crisis management costs are already starting to pile up. Already, the company’s image is seriously damaged, and it’s a safe bet that investors will become disillusioned. There are still 2 years left to fight, and the enemy is vulnerable. We can still enter the property like a sieve: they cannot protect over a square kilometer with some rusty fences and a stationary security guard playing 2048 and sleeping in his car. Subcontractors risk reconsidering their relationships given the dangers involved. We must not let them go. The Northvolt site had been ransacked for the CIL factory, but nature took back its rights. Let’s continue the fight until life returns.

A Night of Experimentation

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Feb 232024

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

In order to function, capitalism and green industry need infrastructure pretty much everywhere, and it is often easy to access. Near the end of December 2023, we set fire to a charging station for electric cars in Mile End. Because these little boxes don’t open as easily as it may seem, we used a mix of gasoline and motor oil that we poured on the rubber charging cables. Unfortunately, when we returned to check the damage a few days later, the station was still, or again, in service. Maybe our technique wasn’t the right one. In any case it was an exciting night between friends that we count as a joyful night of experimentation.

We’ll be back!

Anarchists

Sabotage on the Northvolt Site: Arming the Forest

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Jan 222024

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

One of Montéregie’s last natural environments is in jeopardy! The planned construction of the Northvolt battery plant in Saint-Basile-le-Grand is an ecocidal disgrace. If this project goes ahead, 1.4 square kilometers of wetlands and woodlands will be razed to the ground, serving the greenwashing strategy of our governments, and doing so with public funds.

The area is home to a diverse fauna (bats, birds, amphibians, turtles, snakes, etc.), including several species classified as “threatened” or “endangered”. There are even 142 species of birds that frequent the site! At the same time as public transport companies are undergoing a wave of budget cuts, the provincial and federal governments prefer to give $7.3 billion to the private sector to perpetuate the “car culture”. Instead of investing in more environmentally-friendly collective solutions (trains, buses, car-sharing) in the city and the regions, the governments are perpetuating our dependence on the car, hand in hand with polluting industries and the wealthy.

The Saint-Basile-le-Grand plant project is an integral part of “Projet Saint-Laurent”, an economic development strategy championed by François Legault that aims to transform the St. Lawrence Lowlands into a kind of Quebec Silicon Valley, focusing on “innovation zones”. Northvolt is therefore part of a capitalist approach to ecological transition, just like other projects such as the Littoral Est project in Quebec City, the REM or the Ray-Mont Logistiques transshipment platform that citizens in Montreal’s east end are fighting against. Under capitalism, the energy transition, i.e. the move away from hydrocarbons, means the multiplication of open-pit mines, particularly in the global South, to extract the metals used to manufacture batteries, the construction of new hydroelectric dams on First Nations lands, the establishment of mega-factories on the banks of our waterways, not to mention the ambition of many countries to increase nuclear power. Against these false solutions that threaten the ecosystems we mobilize, Northvolt is a project of capitalist capitalism.

We have taken the initiative to oppose this deforestation by inserting steel bars and nails into the trunks of trees endangered by the plant. While having minimal impact on the health of the trees, these pose a significant risk to heavy machinery.

The harvesters currently employed in the field will be severely damaged if their heads come into contact with the metal objects when cutting*.To stop Northvolt, we need to multiply our tactics and hit where it hurts: causing economic risk and uncertainty. Contrary to Minister Fitzgibbon’s claims, we didn’t come across any “three-eyed fish”, but rather were accompanied by birdsong and were able to walk the countless paths made by the animals that inhabit the woodland. We gave the forest weapons to defend itself!

Spiking is a proven method of direct action. It was used in the early 1980s by Earth First! to prevent the felling of redwoods in the US Pacific Northwest, and was popularized by the book “Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching” written by Dave Foreman, one of the founders of the environmental group (the book is available online here).The method was also used against the clear-cutting of primary forests in Clayoquot, British Columbia. This mobilization culminated in the summer of 1993 in the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, before the Fairy Creek blockades in 2021, where the method was once again used by activists. In May of this year, activists from Soulèvements de la Terre did the same to protect oak trees in the Bord forest east of Rouen in France.

Today, we are calling for a broad mobilization against the destructive Northvolt mega-plant project. We must attack this destructive machine for crushing life by targeting its weak points. Let’s sabotage the equipment, block the construction sites and harass the industry’s elected representatives. The environmental movement must redouble its efforts.

*Similarly, when cutting, if a chainsaw hits a nail, it will damage or break the chain. The chain will have to be resharpened – a waste of time – or even replaced, and the felling operation resumed at a slightly higher level to avoid hitting the nail again, in the hope of not encountering a second one. Deforestation will be all the more painful, costly and potentially dangerous.

P. S. We are in no way hostile to workers: we are against those who profit from the destruction of the living and who put profit above all else. In this sense, the working class is exploited by our economic system in the same way as the earth, animals and plants that make the land thrive. To ensure that the people hired to clear the forest are well aware of the risks involved, we’ve marked the studded trees with an aerosol-painted S sign, and added posters explaining our tactics. We hope the workers will enforce their rights and stay away from the marked trees.

Solidarity Against Repression – Action Against Indigo

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Jan 142024

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

In the early morning of January 13th, we took an action in solidarity with the arrestees of November 23rd, 2023, in Toronto. The Toronto police poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into breaking into homes, handcuffing the elderly, sacking personal belongings, and terrorizing families. Parents were handcuffed in front of their children. One person arrived home to find their door broken down and a patio chair throw into the front garden. Another family was told not to speak in their mother tongue. The arrestees had allegedly taken a normal action of postering an Indigo bookstore and splashing paint on its facade. The action targeted Indigo founder and CEO Heather Reisman, who funnels Indigo profits into the HESEG Foundation, which provides education grants to individuals who emigrate to Israel to enlist in the IDF, aiding and abetting international recruitment for the Israeli military. Reisman is a core proponent of Canadian support for Israeli settlement and military operations. To further punish the activists, to terrorize others in the Palestinian solidarity movement, and legitimate their persecution, the police encouraged a media narrative that these were antisemitic hate crimes. As the vileness of these raids illustrates, if the police were actually interested in stopping hate-motivated attacks, they would have only to simply not go into work.

The police are not able to protect the advocates and accomplices of genocide everywhere or at all times. We used a fire extinguisher filled with red paint to redecorate the interior of the Indigo store in downtown Montreal, after breaking the windows. No one was arrested.

We have taken action to show there is a movement which will not tolerate ruthless political persecution. We want to call attention to these arrestees so that they are not forgotten. Both the police and capitalists like Heather Reisman cannot be allowed to freely terrorize expressions of resistance. Clearly, the law is not our safety and we need to be agents of our own justice.

We are anarchists. We refuse to support any government or party whether it be ethnonationalist, islamist, fascist, colonial or liberal democratic. We deny that the world’s problems boil down to the fault of ethnicity or religion, be it Jewish, Arab, or Muslim. We are for the freedom and happiness of everyone. The governments, media, and capitalists of Israel, Canada, and the US see the siege on Gaza as a chance to grow their own power, wealth, and privilege, and their profiteering disregard for the value of human life, which causes so much outrage to anyone watching, becomes clearer with every slaughter in Gaza. This is clear even to the people living in Israel who have lost their rights to protest or dissent, and to the families of hostages (three of whom had loved ones waving white flags shot dead by Israeli troops), who have seen that even Jewish life is meaningless to the Israeli government’s campaign of collective punishment and land seizure. We have tuned out and ignore the media cycles and their expectations for obedient protests.

We have taken action because it is so easy to cause damage. Our goal is to undermine all acts of political persecution and to build an offensive front against government and capitalists. We hope that this action becomes popular so that others follow us. As these actions spread, whether we are hidden by the night or found in a large crowd, our ability to change the future grows radically. There is no savior waiting in the wings. And we will not wait for nothing to happen. No one asked us to do this action. This is the kind of resistance we want to see so we moved forward with it. If you are reading this, unless you are a cop or a capitalist, we encourage you to learn what our ideas are, how to dress anonymously, and how to act without a digital trace.

Rail sabotage in ‘BC’ – in solidarity with Palestine and Wet’suwet’en

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Jan 012024

Anonymous submission to BC Counter-info

At the end of October 2023, in the quietest hours of the night, a small group quickly secured a blockade to the CN rail lines in “bc”, near the Hope area.

The blockade consisted of a 100-pound iron work table vice – whose jaws were tightened directly to the rail – topped with a several hundred pound pile of chain and scrap metal.

On one side of the gigantic work-table vice was painted “FREE GAZA” in red. On the other side was painted “CGL OFF THE YINTAH”. The blockade was secured to a curving stretch of rail in the forest, near no residences. CN freight trains churn through this area multiple times per hour. The blockade was fixed immediately after a train passed, to give the most time for safe work.

Only two rail lines carry the entire freight system in so-called “bc” – CN, and CP. Their routes overlap in a large area in Secwepemc territory, between hope and kamloops. referred to by officials as a ‘choke point’ for the government’s freight system – its resource extraction supply lines. If both of these lines are disrupted or shut down simultaneously, the whole rail freight system in the ‘province’ shuts down. Let us get to work.

Please dump stuff on the rails. The more trash, broken glass, and scrap litters the rails, the more gummed up the works will get.

[See this text for methods permitting to avoid causing a derailment. –MtlCI]

While we are taking the steps to send this anonymous communique – we wish to encourage tactics beyond boycotts. It is great to stop giving genocidal companies our money. Now it is time to take another step, and start taking money from these companies. The recent mass food reclamation at a Whole Foods in occupied Lenapehoking, so-called New York, is a great example.

You’ve stopped going to starbucks – now start going back to starbucks to steal and destroy their merchandise. Disrupt their profits in increasingly direct ways. Taping the edge of a small razor blade to a credit card can make the tool inconspicuous, and small hidden razors are great for cutting open coffee bags, tearing up products, while appearing to simply handle and peruse the wares.

Containers of used cooking oil are great to pour on books / paper products in stores that support genocide. Oil up your local Indigo for example – target the most expensive wares possible. Carry the oil around in a fancy looking reusable water bottle or coffee cup, or in tiny vials that fit in the palm of your hand.

Stop throwing out old food scraps, especially meat – make stink bombs instead. Put the food in firmly sealed containers and let them rot in heat. When ready, subtly dump the contents indoors in businesses you want to disrupt.

get together, get creative, and get out there

A Look Back at the “Defend Trans Youth” Counter-protest

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Nov 292023

From P!nk Bloc

On October 21st, more than a thousand people acted on a call to counter-protest for the defence of trans youth’s rights and inclusive sex ed, called by a coalition of queer and antifascist groups including the Pink Bloc. This call was officially endorsed by more than fifty organisations, including unions, student associations, teacher associations, feminist groups, militant collectives, community sector organisations, and more.[1]

The goal of this action was to block the path of a demonstration organised by the transphobic, homophobic “Ensemble Pour Protéger Nos Enfants” (“Together to protect our children”) group in response to a canada-wide call from 1MillionMarchForChildren. The political agenda of this demonstration and its associated groups includes censorship of queer and trans subjects in schools, forcing educators to out trans youths to their parents, and the broad removal of trans healthcare for young folks. Through their statements, they claim to want to protect children, but even the most basic research will show you that these groups want to reinforce parental control on youth, and to give parents the ability to prevent their children from expressing themselves how they want, and from being themselves.

This negates the right to youth self-determination, to freedom of expression, and to safety and security.

In the weeks leading up to their demonstration, political and personal infighting broke out between the groups and individuals involved in their organising,[2] creating division and confusion in their ranks which greatly diminished their turnout.

On our end, we saw a panoply of movements, groups, and individuals join our struggle and decide to form a common front against hate and exclusion!

By 9am on October 21st, we had occupied the space outside 600 Fullum Street with canopy tents, music,[3] and food. By 10am, we had already formed a large crowd despite the rain and the cold, and occupied the whole block on Fullum Sainte-Catherine to Notre-Dame. Across police lines, towards Notre-Dame, around a hundred anti-lgbtq demonstrators had gathered by around 11am. These demonstrators were dissapointed by their low turnout and were kept far away from their planned meeting point in front of 600 Fullum.

Although the struggle is never over, we can all collectively congratulate each other for our enormous success. We succeeded in completely dispersing the demonstrators and were able to declare total victory at 1:30pm, all while ensuring a secure and festive space at the heart of our counter-protest. Our mobilisation efforts in the community and union sectors were unprecedented for this type of action. This resulted in bonds of solidarity that will be crucial in the long term, and allowed us to develop strategies and resources for counter-protestors which will be indespensable in our future mobilisations.

This was a beautiful show of solidarity by and towards our community, affirming that protecting children also means protecting trans children and teens by offering them a safe environment and defending their rights to self-determination.

Young trans folks are able to evaluate their situation, their identity, and their relationship with the world, and to make decisions to improve their lives, whether or not these decisions please their parents. We are the queer and trans youths of yesterday, who affirmed ourselves throughout the years, and who grew into adults who are comfortable in the bodies and identities that represent us. No one has the right to deprive today’s youth of this.

Going forward we will continue to develop and form solidarity bonds, notably with struggles against islamophobia, in opposition to homonationalism and pinkwashing which use lgbtq+ rights as an excuse to justify attrocities,[4] and with mobilisations for Palestinian liberation.

Congratulations to everyone who was there on the 21st, and thank you to all who supported us!

We hope to not have to organize another counter-protest for a long time, and we will see you in the streets in solidarity with Palestine!

1. List of organisations that endorsed our call to counter-protest

2. See https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/fr/nouvelle/2018688/identite-genre-guerre-israel-hamas-gaza for context

3. In light of comments we’ve received concerning the inclusion of Disney songs in our playlist, we would like to mention that in no way do we support Disney. Playing copyrighted music is a frequently used tactic to ensure livestreams are taken down by social media platforms, and Disney is known to be particularly strict in enforcing their copyrights. Livestreams are frequently used by far-right actors to doxx our comrades. We unequivocally support the BDS movement and calls to boycott Disney for their support of Israeli apartheid, and we will be sure to select different copyrighted music next time.

4. We will soon publish an article developing this idea further

Report-back from the October 21st Counter-demonstration in Defense of Trans Youth

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Nov 272023

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

Saturday, October 21 in Montreal saw a face-off between a shrinking coalition of religious conservative transphobes and a counter-protest in defense of trans youth. TL;DR: trans defenders won.

Called as a Canada-wide day of action by “1 Million March for Children”, with the group “Ensemble pour protéger nos enfants” (hereafter EPPNE; “Together to protect our children”) leading the Montreal event, it was the follow-up to the clashes on September 20th in front of McGill University. That day, an unexpectedly large crowd, mostly composed of Muslim families, with children holding signs reading “I belong to my parents” and shouting transphobic and homophobic insults, confronted an underprepared counter-protest and succeeded in marching through downtown Montreal, leaving trans defenders and their queer and antifascist comrades shaken.

EPPNE called their demonstration in front of 600 Fullum, the address of the Quebec Ministry of Education, to whom they address a series of demands concerning school curriculums that is but a pretext for seemingly limitless transphobia. We recommend checking out Montréal Antifasciste and P!nk bloc for more detailed perspectives on the developing political context, including the impact of war in the Middle East (it turns out the advocates of one genocide can be divided concerning another). This report-back will emphasize the tactical dimension of what we observed on the 21st.

The EPPNE protest was called for 11am, and the counter-protest was announced for 10, with the intention of occupying the area first. Predictably, it was barely past 8am when the dedication of a small group of early arrivals allowed us to claim the street in front of 600 Fullum and relegate the EPPNE organizers, who arrived at 8:15, to a patch of grass between the south side of the building and the bike path running alongside the highway. Dozens of police were already on site, and they cordoned off a segment of the roundabout at the bottom of Fullum with police tape to create a buffer zone between the two groups, informing counter-protesters that crossing the tape would be considered a criminal offense.

If we gathered in front of the offices housing the Ministry of Education, it was not as defenders of the education system, which, as a general rule, seeks to turn children of all genders and sexualities into docile subjects of settler-colonial capitalism, respecters of democratic authority, workers and consumers with the ability to ask questions but not too many. Rather, holding the space where the transphobes planned to be denies them the visibility they crave and demonstrates that we will stand in their way, wherever they may try to organize publicly.

Both sides arrived to a scene that had been covered in antifascist, pro-trans, and pro-Palestine graffiti the night before, with the ministry building, construction machinery and nearby walls bearing tags including “YOUTH LIBER(A)TION [&] TRANS LIBER(A)TION NOW!”, “Dykes for Palestine” and “Fuck transphobes”. Together with the rapid setup of five canopy tents directly in front of 600 Fullum, which would serve as a logistical base camp for the counter-protest and provide us occasional shelter from the rain, it could not have been more clear who controlled the space where the transphobes had intended to gather, or that our fight extends beyond the liberal defense of a tolerant social order.

Our numbers gradually then more quickly swelled as 10am approached. The arrival of a sound truck (a couple powerful speakers strapped to the bed of a pickup) helped to introduce a festive vibe. And newcomers were dispatched to one of two mobile units, color-coded pink and black (people with mobility restrictions or who just preferred to hang out around the base camp could do so).

One note concerning mass media cameras: a CTV News cameraman was spotted wandering the crowd in front of 600 Fullum, filming counter-protesters from close range. Guidelines published in the lead-up to the 21st had encouraged attendees to wear masks and watch out for mass media and livestreamers, but we’re not aware of planning around making sure journalists couldn’t freely explore our infrastructure, in areas where some people would be having private conversations or inevitably removing masks to eat or drink. Comrades took the initiative to confront the CTV crew and physically expel them after they refused a verbal request to leave. While banners and umbrellas can work well against media approaching our hard lines, we need to also be able to repel those who find their way into areas like those for welcoming newcomers. We think a team dedicated to this task is probably the best move going forward.

Around 9:30am, the pink unit moved north on Fullum to begin blocking the street at the top of the block, just south of Sainte-Catherine. They would hold this position, allowing new arrivals of our side to enter and denying entry to transphobes, for the remainder of the action. Because this intersection was the main access point for protesters who were arriving from Papineau metro or from street parking to the north, the pink unit blockade succeeded in turning away numerous anti-trans protesters, who left thinking the EPPNE protest had been cancelled or completely overwhelmed by the counter-protest.

Shortly after 11am, the black unit set off to try to make its way around the police lines protecting the anti-trans protest at the bottom of Fullum. After turning left on Ste-Catherine from Fullum, there was an altercation with a lone fascist wearing a t-shirt reading “Kill All Pedophiles”, who was knocked to the ground. About one-hundred-strong and protected by multiple side banners, the black unit moved two blocks west, then turned south on De Lorimier, before being blocked from turning east on René-Lévesque towards the EPPNE grouping by a line of riot police. For about 45 minutes, they held the intersection of De Lorimier and René-Lévesque, not able to advance closer to the transphobes, but blocking another possible access route from the metro to their gathering point, and blocking the way toward the Gay Village and downtown for any march (national 1MM4C organizers had called for marches at 1pm).

Outnumbered roughly tenfold under pouring rain, gradually being encircled by multiple groups of counter-demonstrators, and their march route to downtown blocked, the EPPNE crowd was visibly demoralized. Some vented their frustrations on their Facebook Lives, telling (and showing) viewers how much better organized our side was and reprimanding theirs for not showing up. One remarked on Whatsapp that their opponents were “only 0.33% of the population. But very smart and evil.” And we can only take that as a compliment.

Close to noon, the black unit met up with a group of reinforcements at the corner of Ste-Catherine and De Lorimier and set off again southward, with a plan. Upon reaching René-Lévesque, one contingent stopped and faced the line of riot police like before, forcing them to stay in place, while the rest of the group, about a hundred people, continued south, then cut east through the gap between two buildings. Despite these movements being slowed by some general confusion, the SPVM appeared completely on their heels for the first time that day, their plans for protecting the anti-trans protest at risk of breaking. Police vans sped around the corner, and a half-dozen riot cops moved in, shouting at the contingent to reverse course, as one made a show of loading his rubber-bullet gun and others brandished pepper spray. This intimidation succeeded in holding the crowd back for long enough that a number more riot cops and bike cops could arrive and form a proper line. Hopefully, these experiences with coordination in the streets will nourish our tactical imagination and help us prepare even better for next time.

The following map shows the final positions of the transphobes, counter-protesters and police:

Shortly thereafter, as the black unit regrouped on De Lorimier, word spread that EPPNE had called the dispersal of their protest, confirming their defeat by not even attempting to march and needing to instruct their attendees on safe routes out of the area.

There was so much going on in different places across the multiple city blocks spanned by the counter-protest on the 21st that it would be impossible to give a comprehensive account in one report-back, though we want to send a specific shout-out to everyone who ensured the delivery of food or served it and to everyone who held banners for hours on end.

While the logic of counter-protest can place us on the defensive, intuition tells us that we can move beyond a purely reactive posture — that we have something to gain — when we get organized on a basis of solidarity and put our faith in each other rather than media, law or the police.

Until next time,
– some anarchists

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