Comments Off on L’espoir c’est la lutte: Reflections on the Night Demo of July 19th
Aug012024
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
On July 19th, under a calm night sky, over 60 people assembled in downtown Montreal to march for Palestine. The demonstration was publicized without using social media, resulting in no police presence visible at the gathering location. The account that follows comes from a couple of participants in the demo. We hope to share an understanding of what went down for those who weren’t there and make some suggestions for next time.
Around 10pm, the march set off, a front banner announcing “L’espoir c’est la lutte” alongside a circle-A, and a banner reading “Liberation to the people, liberation to the land” bringing up the rear. Snaking through streets beneath skyscrapers and chanting, the energy in the crowd gradually rose as we acclimated to the strange reality: no bike cops, no riot cops, no cops in front, in back, or on the sides, just us and our friends and comrades, and their friends and comrades, and theirs, our black bloc and keffiyeh bloc protecting us from the hundred or so surveillance cameras that would inertly record our stroll.
The march lasted sixteen minutes. Fireworks were set off upon reaching Square Victoria, site of the Al-Soumoud camp, dismantled two weeks prior. Demonstrators quickly began breaking bank windows, hitting a CIBC and Scotiabank. Heading against traffic on Saint-Jacques, we were greeted ecstatically by Friday night party-goers, who stepped into the street to cheer, and drivers who rolled down their windows to high-five black-gloved militants. Some supportive passersby began excitedly following the demo as it continued towards the Caisse de Dépot et Placement du Québec (CDPQ). The CDPQ, which had been singled out by the Al-Soumoud camp a block away, has $14 billion invested in companies complicit in the genocide in Palestine. Though its windows appeared challenging to break, several were tagged, several others shattered, and a smoke device was tossed through an opening into an office space, hopefully setting off sprinklers and causing water damage.
Police sirens could be seen and heard from multiple directions, but before SPVM commanders understood what was happening, the crowd dispersed and disappeared into the night. There were no arrests, and no one was injured.
While corporate media ignored the demo, video showing the march and direct actions circulated widely on social media, including on an arabic-language account with hundreds of thousands of followers.
The local struggle in solidarity with Palestine has seen a fair variety of tactics tested in short order over the past nine months. Night demos organized without inviting the police are a new one in this context. We may want to consider doing more of them.
A week earlier on July 12th, the SPVM sent riot cops to flank both sides of a small night demo announced on social media following the dismantling of the McGill camp. The cops entered the street alongside the march and pre-emptively attacked a side banner, ripping the banner out of people’s hands, swinging batons and deploying enormous quantities of pepper spray. The crowd’s tenacity was impressive, but it was not possible to overcome this degree of police violence and begin transforming the march into something greater. One role that a night demo without police can play is to respond to events like these, tending to our militant spirits and repairing our confidence, while showing that the SPVM is putting its units in danger for nothing by intimidating and brutally repressing demos, because our targets will get smashed regardless.
We also want to reflect on how different forms of demonstrations make it more or less possible to reach beyond our existing networks. What is striking in the interactions with enthused passersby on July 19th is how the normal police presence at a combative demo would have rendered these interactions impossible. Police doing traffic control typically redirect all vehicles away from a march, and the scale and aggression of police units on all sides of a demo is extremely intimidating, limiting the possibilities for action in the minds of onlookers – and objectively. No unprepared civilian in their right mind would try to join us. Without the separation imposed by the police, we can imagine doing more in the future to enable willing passersby to take the street with us. This could look like bringing a supply of masks to distribute to people, explicitly inviting them to join, and quickly sharing any important safety information in a friendly way with joiners.
A number of windows on the demo route unfortunately withstood the blows of hammers and rocks. This raises a question of tools. Chunks of porcelain as projectiles are more effective at breaking windows than either hammers or rocks. They’re also harder to source (ask a comrade), and more care must be taken when throwing to avoid injuring anyone. In the future, perhaps “hammer teams” could make the first attempt, and if a target proves too challenging, hand it off to a “porcelain team”.
The enthusiasm for this new tactic shows that the community is looking for a new format for demos. Beyond shattered windows, exploring what autonomous groups can do within demos without police suggests new horizons. We can test new tactics and mixes of old ones, or even police response times around different strategic areas in the city. We can also improve our speed and comfort level employing different tactics so we are not attempting things for the first time with cops breathing down our neck.
With the challenges of the past few months in demos announced on social media, even in contingents, perhaps this new format can also be seen as a mobilizing strategy. If we play our cards right, we can use it to speak to the public, spreading anarchist ideas and practices, so when we show up as a contingent in a public demo our orientation is known to those around us and they might be more encouraged to join us in actions. Hopefully, it will allow us to strike a balance, to be ready to raise the stakes and be strategic in enacting a successful plan, as well as being ready to respond combatively to police violence in bigger public demos alongside hundreds or thousands of others.
Friday raised morale, built confidence and strengthened bonds of complicity. We need to find opportunities to achieve wins even when they are small and celebrate them. The same tactic can be utilized at strategic moments like a major event in the city, or to achieve strategic goals on short notice, or in response to significant police repression.
As the zionist entity’s siege on Gaza enters its ninth month, the now-dead People’s Circle for Palestine at UofT joins the ashes of Northwestern, McMaster, and numerous others as an exemplar of liberal cowardice in the face of a livestreamed genocide. Not only did this encampment fail to deliver on its stated goals of disclosure, divestment, and termination, it betrayed both the people that made it possible as well as the movement at large. Far from opening up new terrains of escalatory struggle, the organizers of this People’s Circle spent the sixty-three days of its existence working tirelessly to make it a remarkable case study in defanging and dismantling the budding militancy of the local movement. It perverted its own promises, violated every principle of liberatory organizing; it wasted multiple weeks sabotaging the efforts of its own comrades while thousands in Gaza continued to be murdered. It turned something that could have been revolutionary for the city’s organizing scene to a summer camp that years on will likely be remembered with nothing but shame. It was a disappointment and a disgrace.
Red flags had existed right from the moment it was launched, but one could be forgiven for having been optimistic back when the encampment was still within its infancy. For many in the city who were disillusioned by months of pointless rallies and hungered for more, there had initially been a few things to be optimistic about. By Toronto’s unfortunately low standards, breaking open the fences of an enclosed privately-owned space to set up camp while multiple banner-wielding crews physically blocked the police from interfering was pretty damn militant. Yet this sole act of breaking and entering, it soon became clear, was where the line was drawn. In the two months following the breaching of King’s College Circle’s fences, UofT saw not one single large-scale escalation for Gaza: no building occupations, no disruptions of Board of Governor meetings, not even convocation ceremonies were meaningfully targeted. In fact, forget escalation: even simple attempts to strengthen the encampment’s defenses were constantly shot down. Autonomous actors were repeatedly prevented even from building barricades and had to defy the organizers in order to reinforce the preexisting fences, and the tactics trainings independent crews had started in the camp were forced to a halt halfway through.
While encampments all across the world were courageously confronting police forces and taking on their universities in ever more creative ways, the organizers of the so-called People’s Circle chose to abandon the very possibility of a principled defense or strategic escalation, not only failing to build a movement that could sustain such a struggle but actively ensuring any elements that were interested in doing so were killed off. Rather than focusing on building up the community’s material capacity to defend itself and keep on escalating, the organizers focused on pandering to corporate media, on ‘deescalating’ confrontations with the pigs, on preventing any autonomous actions that might make them ‘look bad’ or ‘invite’ police repression. They devoted their time not towards principled resistance but towards crafting an image that portrayed them as ‘peaceful’ and ‘nonviolent’ in a futile attempt to initiate ‘good faith dialogue’ with a system that understands no language but violence. Instead of focusing on what they could do to continue targeting the infrastructures sustaining this genocide, they focused entirely on whether what they did remained legal, and whether it looked good on camera. And their flimsy excuses for taking this approach – namely that the risks of continued escalation were ‘too high’ to be worth it and that their priority was ensuring the continued ‘safety’ of all participants – remain precisely that. Flimsy excuses, rooted in an illusory liberal notion of ‘safety’ built on centuries of corpses.
Because there is no safety to be found in abiding by the laws of the state, nor is there safety to be found in pandering to its propagandists. It does not truly matter if an action is legal or not, because the law is fundamentally a weapon of the oppressor. If the armed swine that are supposed to enforce it are inclined to inflict violence, there is no law that will stop them. What can, however, is our own ability to evade capture, or to fight back. To defend ourselves not by appealing to the laws of our enemies but by the strength of our own ability. In the same vein, it does not matter if it looks good on corporate cameras – because for starters, no matter how legal and peaceful our actions are, it fucking won’t. Almost a year of witnessing corporate media’s relentless vilification of Palestine and her allies is more than enough proof that its sole raison d’être is to manufacture consent for genocide. Any positive press possibly gained by painting our actions at ‘legal’ and ‘peaceful’ comes at the cost of legitimizing the perceived necessity for legality and nonviolence – yet no act that poses a genuine threat to the state and its interests can ever remain either. Any ‘safety’ built upon seeking recognition and approval from the apparatus of our enemy is a ‘safety’ built on sand – and any ‘safety’ that disavows the praxis of genuine resistance is a ‘safety’ paid for in blood. Liberal notions of ‘safety’ within the imperial core are contingent upon our refusal to take the risks needed to end the continued slaughter of thousands of Palestinians. They are contingent upon letting people continue to face the ever increasing violence of manufactured poverty, of police and carceral brutality, of eugenicist policies, and of ongoing settler colonialism, right here in our own communities. We do not keep us safe by letting others be thrown under the bulldozers and tanks of colonial violence. No, as our friends at Palestine Action US tell us – and as the cowards within OccupyUofT refuse to understand – we keep us safe by escalating.
Yet OccupyUofT’s destruction of militant efforts within the encampment wasn’t merely a result of their deference to optics and legality, nor was it simply a matter of their own refusal to escalate. Organizers, after all, can be ignored, marshalls punched, and cameras smashed. For these liberal tendencies to make a dent, the rot had to go far deeper. The so-called People’s Circle’s steady dismantling of militancy was rooted ultimately in its deeply exploitative relationship to everyone outside its limited organizing circles, to the community at large, and particularly to so-called ‘outside agitators’. For some background, the People’s Circle was launched immediately after the academic year had ended, right as thousands of students were wrapping up with their exams and leaving the city. It could never have been sustained without the critical support of hundreds of local community members unaffiliated with the group and the university. It relied on ‘outside agitators’ since the beginning – yet said ‘outside agitators’ were unsurprisingly neglected at best, and vilified, isolated, assaulted, and forcibly driven out at worst. Organizers constantly demanded unending amounts of labor, love, and logistical support from the community, consistently exploiting people’s goodwill and commitment to the cause to sustain this summer camp, while reciprocating with neither care nor solidarity nor even basic respect.
Rather than empowering people to take independent initiative and do what needed doing, organizers consistently acted on arrogant, authoritarian tendencies, acting not to distribute power but to consolidate it among themselves and the select few they approved of. They withheld crucial information from others, refused transparency with regard to finances even though every cent of their funds was drawn from community donations, and created an internal culture where nothing could be done without asking for permission from the Right People. They refused to listen to criticism, acted as though they knew everything, and repeatedly patronized multiple people with far more experience in organizing. They demanded people trust them yet refused to reciprocate – not granting others any meaningful ability to participate in collective decisionmaking, while also simultaneously trying to sabotage autonomous organizing and telling people they have no right to make ‘unilateral decisions’. This so-called ‘liberated’ zone was marked foremost, therefore, by the almost immediate imposition of a hierarchy between the organizers and everyone else. Not an exit from the social order imposed upon us by those in power, but the recreation of the same within a microcosm that openly – and falsely – branded itself as revolutionary.
Every hierarchy, of course, requires the violence of its maintenance. It is thus entirely unsurprising that the range of tactics OccupyUofT employed to maintain this power structure, in several cases, was nothing short of abusive. Finding a number of natural allies amongst the liberal factions of large orgs like PYM Toronto and Toronto 4 Palestine, they and their extended network of liberal marshals and ‘deescalators’ subjected people to endless tone-policing, shut them off by invoking a supposed need for ‘maintaining unity’ and ‘centering Gaza’, weaponized identity politics even against Palestinians, and if those tactics didn’t work, harassed folks into either shutting up or leaving. They deliberately exposed people to police and Zionist violence, spread rumors about multiple individuals, publicly named comrades who’d explicitly said they did not want to be identified, and recklessly shared around people’s sensitive personal information without ever asking for their consent. Organizers relentlessly badjacketed and even copjacketed several militants, labelled them as ‘wreckers’ who shouldn’t be worked with, and in atleast one instance forcibly kicked them out of the camp after a sustained days-long witchhunt. They created a space that was not only against militant actions but actively hostile to militant presence, isolating, alienating, and traumatizing dozens of our city’s most experienced and committed organizers into no longer wanting anything to do with the encampment.
Perhaps the most powerful weapon in their arsenal of anti-militant tactics, however, was the way the organizers enabled various forms of oppression against the very people whose circle it was supposed to be. OccupyUofT deliberately excluded unhoused comrades with far more experience in encampment defense by enabling repeated instances of harassment against them, denying their offers of organizing support, and in many instances even very explicitly refusing them entry. They tolerated and enabled tokenization and disrespect against the very indigenous aunties whose land they camped on, compelling several land defenders into leaving, dismantling the sacred fire, and denouncing the encampment. They threw around racist slurs at Black and South Asian people; dehumanized queer and trans people, particularly trans women; and perpetuated an ableist culture that treated people as mere disposable bodies worth little more than their labor. They failed to keep out predatory ‘leftist’ organizations with well-documented histories of enabling sexual abuse, and they failed to adequately address instances of sexual assault and harassment when they did occur inside the encampment. They enforced a ‘campers only’ food policy that denied everyone except those staying overnight access to food – all while throwing heaps of perfectly edible meals into the compost every single week.
In other words, the organizers spent multiple weeks shutting down militant actors in the name of keeping the community ‘safe’, yet actively endangering many of its most oppressed members – while sparing no effort whatsoever, of course, in portraying themselves as welcoming and inclusive and even liberatory to their thirty thousand Instagram followers. Over the course of two months, they reduced the word solidarity to a hollow caricature of itself, a performance that meant nothing more than statements and instagram story-posts. They failed utterly to realize that the saying ‘all our struggles are connected’ isn’t some meaningless feel-good platitude, but a material reality – a reality that cannot be ignored if we are to set anyone free. In effectively reducing their efforts for Palestine to a ‘single-issue’ struggle, in alienating, excluding, and actively harming entire groups of potential comrades, in focusing entirely on posturing and performance instead of doing the actual fucking work, the organizers of the People’s Circle deprived the movement of building up its true collective power. Because the fact of the matter is this: liberation starts at home. To paraphrase a recent piece by Dr Ayesha Khan, one worth reading in its entirety: the genocide in Palestine does not exist in a vacuum. It is intricately connected to a global web of violence that includes the daily carnage taking place right at our doorstep. It is this web we must dismantle – and to do so, we must start by pulling at the threads closest to us.
Yet OccupyUofT did none of that. Instead, it operated from a shallow, arrogant, liberal middle-classist framework of organizing that focused almost entirely on political theatre at the expense of any material community- and movement-building. In doing so, it only masterfully engineered its own defeat: by the time the injunction order inevitably came, the organizers found themselves with nearly nobody willing or able to defend the camp, nor were they able to wield the threat of continued disruptions as leverage in furthering negotiations to arrive at a deal they could settle for without looking bad. They can pat themselves in the back all they want, but they know as well as we do that they did not clear out ‘on their own terms’. They did exactly what the university and the pigs wanted, because they had spent the last two months ensuring the very possibility of a principled defense or an escalatory response were rendered impossible. The so-called People’s Circle died the way it did because it had long ceased to be a protest, let alone anything that resembled a liberatory project. That ‘closing press conference’ – that’s right, a fucking press conference – marked only the end of a sixty-three day long summer camp that had all too gladly traded in the very essence of liberatory praxis for the smoke and mirrors of media attention, power-hungry nonsense, and individualist clout building. Its shameful, pathetic, cowardly end was a perfect illustration of the fact that the so-called People’s Circle had been rendered empty of substance long before it was emptied of tents – that all that remained was spectacle.
Yet the encampment is not the movement. As the zionist entity’s genocidal assault on Gaza enters its ninth month, those of us in Toronto that take to heart the phrase ‘by any means necessary’ must not let OccupyUofT’s neoliberal ineptitude demoralize us into inaction. The damage done is immeasurable: far too many of us find ourselves exhausted, traumatized, and isolated from a disintegrating community unable to do anything but watch our networks get torn apart while Gaza continues to be bombed. Betrayed by the callousness and cowardice of those that were supposed to be our comrades, far too many of us feel more hopeless than ever in this fight against the global war machine. Yet hope or no hope, we know this: there is no future for any of us within this existing order, and nothing to be done except to fight. If short-sighted and self-interested actors have harmed our collective ability to do so, we must find ways to nurture it back. We must build the infrastructure necessary for sustained, meaningful, material disruptions against every institution where the hydra of zionism and imperialism rear their ugly heads, and we must start doing so now. There is no other choice. We have never been exempt from the struggle – our task, too, is Intifada, and Intifada means attack.
Key to this task are of course the principles and praxis of solidarity, mutual aid, and community building, which not only constitute direct action in and of themselves but form the building blocks atop which all other direct action is sustained on. The praxis of solidarity can look like joining a weekly mutual aid distro, or running donation drives for unhoused people, or helping to organize jail and legal supports. It could look like inviting your neighbors over for dinner, or letting friends with abusive families crash on your couch, or sharing gatekept meds with those who need them, or bringing extra N95 masks to the function. It does not matter if’s considered capital-O Organizing. What matters is supporting each other, connecting to and building together with the most marginalized among us, and forging resilient relationships – relationships that can withstand both the unrelenting lure of liberalism and the batons of state repression, relationships that remain rock solid when things go to shit, that can form the bedrock of a movement that, in the face of a livestreamed genocide, can actually shut things down. Setting fire to cop cars or mass-sabotaging arms factories is hardly imaginable when so many of us are far too caught up in the daily agonies of surviving capitalism and barely even know each other, let alone have longstanding networks of support, trust, and care. If we seek to build militancy in so-called Toronto, we must build a culture where militants are cared for and care for each other – a culture where people are cared for and care for each other. Faced against the twin threats of state repression and an activist scene dominated by a hostile liberal rhetoric wedded to farcical nonviolence and privileged safetyism, this is a foundation we simply cannot do without.
Rebuilding our communities and support networks is the only first of many steps: we must also push back against both liberal anti-militancy rhetoric and state intimidation, we must equip ourselves with the skills we need to actually disrupt business as usual, and we must foster the radicalization of new militants. We need agitprop, education, training. We need one-on-one conversations, we need zines, we need teach-ins, we need wheatpaste and stickers and spray paint, we need weekly self-defense practice – as our friends at CUNY put it, we need escalation trainings. We need to claim ground against the pervasive rhetoric of nonviolence and stop feeding the cowardly illusion that freedom can ever be won by merely appealing to the moral sense of the oppressor. We need to build a broader collective understanding of what it truly means to support resistance, of why it is imperative for our movements to develop teeth if we hope to even leave a scratch upon the leviathan body of imperialism. We need to remember that pigs and politicians are just as mortal as us plebeians. We need to turn cross-movement solidarity into an inviolable principle and a daily praxis instead of continuing to treat it as a bonus add-on, as something to be acted on only when convenient. We need to remind ourselves that we too live under a colonial monstrosity built on genocide, that our most paramount task in the fight for Palestinian liberation will always be to fight for the death of the settler state that exists right here on these lands. We need to teach each other how to dearrest comrades, how to use Tails, how to care for our suicidal friends, how to make unsanctioned street art, how to administer naloxone, how to liberate food from corporate megastores, how to survive a night in jail. We need to do so frequently and consistently, we need to find ways to scale up our projects, we need to bring in new people, and we need to make sure they are supported single every step of the way.
Most importantly perhaps, we need to step the fuck up and practice the things that we preach. The past nine months have shown us that liberals will gladly continue to pat themselves on the back for mindlessly repeating the same useless tactics over and over again while Gaza continues to burn. The past nine months have shown us that there is no critical threshold of livestreamed Palestinian suffering that when crossed will naturally result in worldwide revolt – if as many as two hundred thousand Palestinian martyrs are not enough, nothing will be. The movement will never naturally shift from one of hypocrites shouting ‘shut it down’ while yellow-vested pigs with megaphones make sure the empire is never inconvenienced to one of principled militants actually following through on the promise of the chant. If we want militancy, we will have to build it, and we will all have to do so by actually being fucking militant. And it will have to involve all of us, because every single one of us has a vital part to play. We will need people who are down to confront pigs on the front lines and sabotage infrastructures in the dead of night, just as we will need people to secure logistical necessities and track enemy movements, just as we will need people to support injured comrades on the ground, to organize jail supports in the aftermath, to make sure we’re fed and cared for and ready to fight another day. We’ve waited for too long – it’s time we remember what we’re capable of and start organizing the sustained material disruptions we wish to see in the world. Gaza demands that we escalate – it’s time you and I heed her call.
Our efforts will never be perfect. New challenges will undoubtedly continue to emerge both from within and without. We will face increasing state repression, just as we will face liberal reaction, just as we will face internal conflicts and fractures. Yet we cannot let these challenges keep deterring us. We owe it to Gaza to try, and when we fail, we owe it to Gaza to keep trying. We owe it to Hind Rajab, to Refaat Alareer, to Mohammed Bhar, to Hamza Dahdouh, to Shireen Abu-Akleh, to Ghassan Kanafani. We owe it to Breonna Taylor, to Regis Korchinski-Paquet, to Nex Benedict and to Pauly Likens, to Corrie and to Bushnell, to Tortuguita, to Fred Hampton. To the countless others that have lost their lives in the struggle against zionism and settler colonialism – in the last nine months, the last century, the last five hundred years. We owe it to those still alive – to those that every single day continue to resist against the global industrial slaughterhouse we are all being led towards. We owe it to ourselves to fight. By any means necessary.
Around the world, countless indigenous communities are fighting extractivist projects and infrastructures, such as mining projects, hydraulic fracking, deforestation and pipelines. In the territory occupied by the Canadian state, for example, a huge project is currently under construction: the Coastal GasLink Pipeline, designed to transport gas extracted by hydraulic fracking. This project not only destroys entire regions, but also threatens the Wet’suwet’en indigenous way of life. The pipeline is to be built on their territory, crossing the Wedzin Kwa River, which is essential to their way of life as a source of water and fish. That’s why the Wet’suwet’en have long opposed this project with fierce resistance, defending their land. Their resistance is met with strong repression, but also benefits from great solidarity.
We want to show that the fight against colonization, and therefore against industrialization and destructive extractivism, knows no borders. That’s why we have attacked a company that participates and enriches itself directly on the destruction of indigenous territories: the Bauer company supplies the drilling rigs needed for the Coastal GasLink pipeline. On May 6, we set fire to two of their huge drilling machines at a construction site in Berlin. To do this, we placed incendiary devices, accelerant and a tire on their cables.
The Coastal-Gaslink pipeline is just one of many extractivist projects on stolen indigenous lands in Canada and around the world. Whether it’s oil, gas, coal, gold, lithium or hydroelectricity and wind power (now expected to produce “green” hydrogen in Canada, of great interest to Germany), all these industrial projects are part of a colonial system that destroys the land and eliminates indigenous ways of life.
We stand in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en struggles against the colonial Coastal-Gaslink pipeline project.
Whether in Canada, Chile, Peru, the Hambach forest or northern Portugal, let’s fight destructive extractivist projects and connect our struggles!
Switch off the system of destruction and colonisation!
At around 4 PM, student protesters entered the James administration building of McGill University and disrupted the Board of Governors’ (BoG) meeting to oppose its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. The BoG is the highest instance of the university and decides in which companies its endowment fund is invested, including Israeli, Zionist and arms companies. Hundreds of protesters formed a support rally around the building, with some creating makeshift barricades with fences and furniture. An hour later, on the administration’s request, a strong police presence arrived on campus, including several dozen riot cops. The latter took control of the walkway east of the building and prevented protesters from protecting the north (back) entrance, thus confining them to the south (front) side of the building.
At around 6:30 PM, cops entered the building through the back entrance. They would soon begin arresting the protesters inside, who had tried to barricade the room they were in as best as they could. Simultaneously, cops brutally assaulted the support rally, using their batons, pepper spray and tear gas to disperse the protesters, who did not go out without a fight.
One particularly funny moment captured here is Deep Saini hiding from his students, cowering behind admin staff ushered out
The level of violence from the police surprised some demonstrators, with cops aiming tear gas or rubber bullet guns at people’s heads and intentionally shooting people with tear gas canisters, in addition to using huge quantities of chemical irritants.
At 7:15 PM, a demo started marching from the UQAM (another university) encampment towards McGill. The march symbolized the end of said encampment and had been announced several days prior; it was therefore not in direct reaction to the James building occupation, though its path might have been rerouted for the occasion. Protesters meandered through the Milton-Parc neighborhood to try to reach the administration building, but their attempts were thwarted by police following them and blocking streets. The demo finally tried to break through the police line on Milton street, just a mere hundred metres east of the James building. Protesters were then met with the violence and pepper spray of bike cops, backed up by riot police. In the disorientation that ensued, the protesters ran away and, one way or another, reached the Lower Field.
The UQAM crowd slowly regrouped there, joining forces with the McGill one. Those who were still good to go started marching again, unabated by the torrential rain. The demo meandered through the streets, with riot cops clearly blocking any road that might lead to the James. Once on Sherbrooke, a Scotiabank window was shattered. The protest continued wandering through Milton-Parc and went east, eventually disbanding on St-Laurent.
Some thoughts
The author of these reflections applauds everyone who partook in the occupation or the demos, and hopes the following thoughts are not taken as negative criticisms, but as things to think about, discuss and debate moving forward.
1. On communication: publicly announcing the BoG meeting on social media would have made the James occupation impossible, as the administration would have called the cops beforehand or moved the meeting online. However, I still think it would have been useful if McGill folks had shared the information with trusted UQAM folks. For one, this could have allowed the latter to advance their demo time and thus join the support rally. This would also have facilitated the exchange of knowledge and material, namely rope to allow the occupiers to escape through the windows and things to block the back entrance. On the last point, I think more intel should have been done to make sure every entrance had been dealt with.
2. On meteorological conditions: the heavy rain created unique conditions with some payoffs. While it might have discouraged more people from attending the demo, it somewhat mitigated the spread of pepper spray and tear gas and provided a good reason to bring umbrellas. Of course, goggles and masks still proved useful that day. The wind also made its presence known: there is footage of riot cops teargassing themselves because of it. Weather conditions and terrain geography (elevation, obstacles) still seem to be relatively unexplored areas of demo planning.
3. On objectives: both the march from UQAM and the subsequent one from Lower Field apparently had the goal of reaching the James. Other than its symbolic significance, this objective makes little sense in my opinion, since the cops had already entered the building before the first march was on its way. Also, the long meandering paths taken did not help reach the destination, as the cops could always see where we were headed. Nevertheless, the persistence and temerity of the protesters is worth acknowledging and commending. Older comrades even said the demo reminded them of combative night demos from 2012.
4. On demo formations: the UQAM demo had a few standoffs with the police, who were adamant on preventing it from getting to the James. As explained in the previous point, I still have difficulty understanding that objective. However, there might come a point in time where similar ones prove crucial in achieving wider goals. I will thus share my two cents on two noteworthy standoffs:
– The first one happened with bike cops preventing further advancing on Prince-Arthur street. After stopping for a brief while, protesters started marching again towards the cops, yelling “Bouge!” (Move!) to give them a taste of their own medicine. Some rocks were also thrown (albeit not very powerfully). Despite the comedic value of the whole scene, the cops did not cede, with some deploying pepper spray and others threatening the crowd with their bikes. The demo thus chose to turn away. In my opinion, the demo did not charge fast enough to instill psychological fear in the cops. It is somewhat understandable though, since the protesters didn’t have much in the way of equipment to neutralize the bicycles.
– The second standoff occurred on Milton street, where police vans were spread throughout the street and reduced mobility for both sides. Once again, the protesters faced bike cops, but this time, they made contact, as their resolve had hardened. The first three rows respectively held the following items: banner – umbrellas – flagpoles. The protesters held the line for a while, but fell into disarray after the cops made liberal use of pepper spray and riot cops arrived on the scene. I think that with more training, discipline and experience, the demo could have stayed grouped while the medics attended to those who had gotten sprayed. This would have prevented the ensuing disorganized and individualistic retreat. I also think that expanding the demo onto the sidewalks and attacking by the flanks (while still leaving an escape route for the cops) would have proven strategic.
Another tactic worth thinking about when cops deny entry to an area is the splitting of the demo into two or more groups, provided that they remain big enough. Each would take a different road to try and spread the police force thin. This allows the protesters to increase their surface area, i.e. the number of people directly facing the cops instead of waiting in the middle of a crowd. Needless to say, the successful execution of such maneuvers would require prior training and constant communication between the groups.
5. Be like water: our force stems from our ability to be anywhere and everywhere, whether it be at a protest or other actions. According to many comrades, the riot cops’ priority seemed to be to guard the James building. This limited their range of motion, and other types of cops seemed more interested in following the demo than protecting other potential targets, like the Scotiabank. On a broader level, the events illustrate an asymmetry between the people and state forces: the former, like steppe cavalry, have a harder time defending places, but are more agile; the latter, like heavy infantry, are stronger in direct confrontations (unless at a significant numerical disadvantage), but less mobile. While the police has various vehicles at their disposition, they can be slowed down by dragging objects into the street. Now, I am well aware that habit gets a bad rep because it doesn’t really slow down riot cops and can constitute a tripping hazard for ourselves. That being said, in narrower streets, it proved useful in creating some distance from bike cops and vans and giving protesters some time to regroup after a rout.
What happened that day was more than impressive. A riot emerged spontaneously on the McGill campus in response to police violence and a convergence of forces from the student intifada.
Since the media coverage seems to gloss over the strength of youth resistance that day, it seems important to take a look back at the day’s events.
First of all, a demonstration had already been called by the forces of the Université Populaire Al-Aqsa (UQAM), which ended its occupation earlier in the day. Parallel to this, an occupation of the Mcgill administration building was organized by students from the university. It was around this occupation that the riot was organized.
Following a call for support from McGill groups, a hundred or more activists converged on McGill to support the students barricaded inside the building.
The police on the ground acted with excessive aggression in the face of the fairly strong passivity of those present. Physically forcing the students who were blocking the secondary doors towards the main gathering in front of the front door. Hundreds of police officers were then mobilized to secure the area around the building and allow the police officers inside to intervene and arrest the 13 students trapped inside.
The aggressiveness of the police and their ridiculous effort to arrest a handful of students quickly heated things up. The students on the ground began to prepare for a police dispersal operation. While a small line held the west of the area, the forces converged to the east to hold a line against the massing riot police. Aided by more experienced activists, the students then began to stand in collective defense formations. Shortly afterwards, the police attempted a first charge into the lines. Surprisingly, despite pepper spray, gas, shields and truncheons, the lines held firm. While the bulk of the force seemed to be made up of activists new to street confrontations, the lines withstood a police charge and managed to push back the riot line. Perhaps the escalation of violence that the police have been building up since April 15 has succeeded in completing the movement’s efforts at self-pacification. Whatever prompted the people gathered there to stand firm, their actions were more than commendable.
Some of those present then retreated in the face of the irritants, but many of them returned to reinforce the lines. Lines that held off a second charge (notably using fencing, ramps and other obstacles) before a third charge finally broke through the line of students. The ego-stricken police then proceeded to brutalize as many activists as they could. Instead of demobilizing the group, this violence reinforced the militant rage. They gathered in the middle of the campus.
While these clashes were taking place, UPA forces arrived in support. Taking up positions on the other side of the police force, they threatened to entangle the police with the demonstration in support of the south. The students tried to resist, but were eventually forced to retreat to the south entrance of the campus.
The forces of both groups then regrouped on the edge of Sherbrooke and, under the call of the radical forces within the demonstration, took to the streets.
Motivated to go and get their arrested comrades, enraged by the violence they had suffered and motivated by the strength of their resistance, the students then engaged in a harassment of the police line laid out around the administration building. Although the forces of resistance failed to de-arrest the comrades, they forced the police to withdraw to their position.
As night fell and tension began to mount again, the students abandoned the campus and took to the surrounding streets. The forces of the student intifada learned the language of the riot, bank windows were smashed, police officers were fired upon with pyrotechnics and rocks rained on them, and every available object to form barricades was used to block access to police vehicles as the students took control of the streets for a few hours.
We must learn from this day and ensure that the movement never goes backwards. The intifada must realize its full potential.
A first lesson is to abandon the black bloc in this kind of demonstration. By dispersing into the crowd, experienced revolutionaries were able to blend in and pass on to the people there the practices of resistance to the police. Let’s adopt the movement’s uniform: the kefffiyeh bloc is in with the times.
A second lesson is to address the crowd clearly in demonstrations, ignoring peace police of all kinds. While self-proclaimed leaders, seemingly detached from student groups, were trying to disperse and pacify the crowd, our more experienced comrades and students were out in the field explaining to people how to resist and encouraging them to hold their ground against the cops. Less experienced militants expect those who know how to resist to guide them in action. We can’t continue to act as a force separate from the rest of the demonstration, we need to see in the faces present in the demonstration as many comrades. We must counter the leadership of opportunists, pacifists and other saboteurs.
The final lesson is to seize the opportunity to escalate when it presents itself. When the police make mistakes, when they brutalize and reveal their face, revolutionaries must be among those left to hold the lines and encourage young people to follow us. We also need to put the police on the defensive, attacking them and forcing them to defend specific targets, so as to have free rein in the streets.
Comments Off on Solidarity Means Attack – Fuck France, Free Kanaky
May192024
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
This week, an anti-colonial uprising broke out in Kanaky, an archipelago in the South Pacific. Kanaky was named “New Caledonia” by British colonizer James Cook and has been occupied by France under that name since the 19th century. The Kanaks are black indigenous peoples of the islands whose cultures face genocide from white French “immigrants” who drive them from their lands and impose capitalism. For more general information:
France is a member of NATO, an ally of Israel, the capital of anti-immigration racism in Europe, a nuclear-armed state, etc. By attacking France, we support not only Kanaky’s struggle for freedom but also that of many other peoples, including other French colonies in the South Pacific. and Caribbean.
If you live near a city, you probably live near a French political, cultural or diplomatic institution or a company that does business with them. You probably like under a government which maintains links with France. Targets are everywhere!
Solidarity means attack, the lessons we learned in the fight against genocide in Palestine, Sudan and Congo can be applied at the same time to those pushing for the French-led genocide of the Kanaks.
Comments Off on Northvolt: the poison-tree will fall
May152024
Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info
Let the axe Strike at the root, the poison-tree will fall
On Sunday, May 5th, five incendiary devices were placed at the Northvolt construction site in Quebec. This action was taken to damage machinery and reduce the project’s ability to continue. Unfortunately, these devices failed to ignite. If there is one takeaway to share, when choosing materials consider how weather (high humidity or rain) might decrease the chances of a device igniting. The longer the timer, the longer the device will be exposed to environmental factors thereby decreasing the window of success.
Why choosing to attack and damage property? While Northvolt, a transnational corporation, sells themselves as the leader of the green transition, they are in fact its headstone. The electric vehicles the company plans to provide with their batteries are a false solution to the environmental destruction caused by industrial society; rather this expension of the automotive industry is only allowing the devastating impact of car infrastructure to continue. With this project, Canada’s insatiable appetite for natural resources will only grow. Lithium mining, which is essential in the process of producing Northvolt’s “green” Lithium Ion batteries, is poisoning human communities and entire ecosystems across the land. Lithium is already being extracted from unceded Indigenous territories here in “Quebec”, with many new mines planning to start operating in the next few years. With this kind of mega project, lakes, forests and wetlands will disappear under new roads and pit mines. First Nations will loose access to their traditional territories and with that loss, the ability to practice and sustain their ancestral ways of living and relating to the land. They will be surveilled and harassed by workers and security. The animals of these territories will die or will have to migrate elsewhere as their homes are destroyed.
Has anyone else noticed how quiet the land around Northvolt has become since they chopped down the trees and destroyed the wetlands? It’s eerily silent.
Capitalism and the State are in league, dumping public funds into private corporations that will only worsen the ecological crisis across the globe. This is why we must act, and more often than not, we must act beyond the laws imposed on these lands by governments. The Quebec government has already dropped regulations put in place to protect the environment and looked the other way while Northvolt violates numerous laws and codes. This is because Legault’s government (like any colonial gorvernment), is politically invested in making this project happen. However, the future remains to be written. We still have choices to make. We still can act! We must not be guided by crooked laws, but by the love and care we and others have for the collective health of all beings, the land, the water and the desire for a better world through struggle against colonial structures. Armed with our convictions, let us go into the night and choose to take the necessary risks to fight for a livable future.
In the night of the 29th of April anarchists started a tire fire on the train tracks in St-Henri. The action was done to disrupt train traffic momentarily in solidarity with Palestine and the anti-capitalist 1st of May. We hope this action inspires others to disrupt the economy and the flow of capital across the world.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
Comments Off on Baby’s First Synagogue Protest: A Review
Mar142024
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.
