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Global Research Fundraising: Stop the Pentagon’s Ides of March

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The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs is assigned the status of a charity by the government of Canada.

The CIJA is now engaged in trying to prevent Canadians from embracing the International Court of Justice’s ruling on the “preventative measures” needed to address the plausible genocide being conducted by the Israeli Government. CIJA calls the ICJ’s ruling “bogus.”

The CIJA’s effort has been to try to persuade the Canadian people to make the Canadian government more complicit in genocide than it already is by licensing arms sales to Israel. This kind of lobbying for a foreign power does not seem like the appropriate business for a registered Canadian charity.

The CIJA has been promoting outright contempt of the ICJ ruling by calling it “a morally obscene anti-Israel campaign led by South Africa.” Who is being morally obscene here? How is it a crime to interpret what we see with our own eyes as “making a mockery of actual genocides past, present and future.” See this.

How can the CIJA’s assertion be taken seriously when it asserts that “the IDF has gone to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties;” that “Israel is fully compliant with the Genocide Convention.” This Convention declares that the Convention is being violated when

“the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such [through] (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”

At the very peak of this tumult over Israel, genocide and the ICJ ruling, the Canadian government is appeasing the Israel Lobby by pressing forward Bill C-63, the so-called Online Harms Act. 

To me, even tabling this absurd and menacing enactment represents nothing short of a treasonous move on the part of the Bill C-63’s protagonists. Commentator Bob Metz explains it well when he asserts

“The proposals contained in Bill C-63 are so bizarre and outrageous that most would dismiss them outright. Like something out of a science-fiction horror fantasy, the bill allows the government to convict, fine, and imprison ‘for life’ people who have not committed any speech offence, but who may do so in the future.” See this

Author Margaret Atwood compared the Hate Bill to some of the most repressive and open-ended enactments of the Soviet Union during its most repressive era and to the actions of the murderous monarchy when it was fighting for its life in the French Revolution.

Fleshing out  Metz’s condemnation of Bill C-63 as a “science-fiction horror fiction,” Atwood agreed with this characterization by describing Trudeau’s latest abomination as “Orwellian”. See this.

References to life imprisonment or house arrest for supposed thought crimes and speech crimes belong in the outer frontiers where police state thuggery thrives. 

To me the text of Bill C-63 can be viewed in the light of the murderous recriminations of the Bolsheviks whose largely Jewish Cheka police notorious killed many millions of Russian Christians in a little discussed genocide. 

Its time to put a spotlight on the Bolshevik genocide of Russian Christians. It is a fitting comparison to help illuminate the radical extremism of Bill C-63, clearly an initiative embodying the menacing preoccupations of the Israel Lobby.

Once one is flirting with life imprisonment as punishment for hate speech, how far are we away from empowering arbitrary murder by the arbiters of what can be thought, what can be said, and what can be published.

Canada’s CIJA is following in the wake of the Soviet Cheka and the “hate speech” preoccupations of the notorious Anti-Defamation League. As described by Valdis Bell

“The category of crime called “hate crimes” was virtually invented by the ADL. The purpose of such laws [originally was] to add extra penalties for acts which were already crimes under existing statutes — like murder, assault, etc. — if the perpetrator can be shown to have held prejudiced or “hateful” views which might have motivated his actions. Under “hate crime” laws, American citizens would receive different sentences for the same crime, depending on whether or not their thoughts are “Politically Correct” on issues relating to homosexuality, race, nationality, and politics. That such laws might have a chilling effect on free speech — for a thoughtful person would now realize that his every utterance on “sensitive” topics might someday be used against him in a court of law, should he be required to defend himself with force someday or even have an argument with a member of a “protected class” — was probably the ADL’s intention all along.” See this.

According to the famous Prof. Noam Chomsky during his glory days at  MIT in Cambridge Massachusetts, the ADL is

“One of the ugliest, most powerful pressure groups in the U.S… Its primary commitment is to use any technique, however dishonest and disgraceful, in order to defame and silence and destroy anybody who dares to criticize the Holy State (‘Israel’)…” “[The ADL is] engaged in surveillance, blacklisting, compilation of FBI-style files circulated to adherents for the purpose of defamation, angry public responses to criticism of Israeli actions, and so on. These efforts, buttressed by insinuations of anti-Semitism or direct accusations, are intended to deflect or undermine opposition to Israeli policies…” (Ibid)

The CIJA is acting a lot like the ADL these days. The photograph below shows Shimon Koffler Fogel at the podium during the prelude to the Online Hate Speech Act.

Why is there no Canadian flag on the stage where the Canadian Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition Conservatives stand at attention behind Fogel. Fogel plays a major role as Israel’s representative to many Deep State intelligence committees in Ottawa. As the CEO of the CIJA, Fogel stands for the following principles:

Shimon Koffler Fogel at the Podium with with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Opposition Leader, Pierre Poilievre, and Irwin Cotler at His Back

“Antisemitism is flourishing online and across Canada. 

Statistics Canada data show that, year after year, Jews are the religious minority most targeted by hate crimes and the second-most targeted group overall. One of the main environments in which Jew-hatred flourishes unencumbered is online. As Jews know all too well, what happens online does not stay online. It affects our community, our children, in real life. 

On Monday, February 26, the Minister of Justice, Arif Virani, tabled the long-awaited Bill C-63, otherwise known as the Online Harms Act.  

This is concrete action from the Government of Canada to combat antisemitism, online hate, and online terrorist content – which has been allowed to fester on the internet for far too long. It protects vulnerable communities from the disproportionate amount of hate they receive online, while respecting freedom of speech.  

Given the dramatic rise in antisemitism, this legislation has come at a time when it is needed most by Canada’s Jewish community. 

Tell your local Member of Parliament that you want them to support the Online Harms Act. ” 

How does Fogel know that Jewish Canadians support the Online Harms Act? Has some sort of referendum directed specifically at Jewish Canadians taken place? Why does CIJA suggest that the Online Harms Act is primarily about protecting Jews from Hate Speech? The mainstream media has not described it in that way.

What about the targeting of many Christian churches that have been destroyed through arson? What is going on there? What about the woke preoccupation with the racist stigmatization of White people? Are Ashkenazi Jews White people?

It seems that Palestinians need protection from much more than hate speech at the hands of those conducting the occupation of the lands of the Indigenous peoples subjected to the invasive incursions of Israel’s settler colonialism. Palestinians, especially in Gaza and the West Bank, need protection from mass murder by the IDF, an institution the CIJA applaud for going to such “great lengths to avoid civilian casualties.” What a gross violation of truth! The lies, it seems, go on and on.

As we can see, the CIJA does not educate Canadians. Rather the CIJA misleads Canadians.

Until the government of Israel starts to respect the ICJ ruling and adhere to the provisional measures aimed at preventing genocide, many in Canada do NOT see this as a moment when we should be strengthening Canada-Israel friendship. We should not be making ourselves complicit in genocide by befriending the genocidaires.

There are certainly some Jews for whom Israel does not play a central role in their identity. The CIJA cannot dictate to Jews what role Israel should or should not play in their lives. Right now the CIJA’s apologia for Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank does not “enjoy cross-partisan support.” In fact it is the subject of much cross-partisan opposition. Moreover I find the CIJA support for life sentences for supposed thought crimes or supposed speech crimes totally radical and unacceptable.

The CIJA does not speak for all the Jews in Canada, a large number of whom want our country to embrace the ICJ ruling. Certainly Israel at this time can make no valid claim that its government speaks for all the Jews of the world. This Zionist claim shows contempt for the principle of self-determination for Jewish individuals throughout the world

CIJA is not a charity that meets the criteria for giving out receipts for tax exemptions. CIJA should be made to register as a lobby for a foreign government.

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Dr. Anthony Hall is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).