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.