Actions and Demands and Law-Breaking have Consequences

"It's past time they're shut down."

"We hope this is a strong message for the other encampments on campuses across the country."

"Too often we've seen antisemitic harassment, discrimination, and hateful speech and actions connected with many of these encampments."

Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) 

"Unfortunately the encampment remains in place in violation of Waterloo policies and the law."

 "We have said repeatedly, the right to protest does not mean people have the right to endlessly occupy a shared university space"

"The behaviour of encampment members has crossed the line to intimidation and harassment, making their ongoing presence untenable."

Vivek Goel, University of Waterloo president

"[It is] incredibly shameful [that the university administration decided] to sue their own student body that's protesting the university's complicity in a genocide that's almost nine months in and has claimed the lives of over 40,000".

"We remain undeterred and committed to our cause and people. History will absolve us. But you admin, how will you be remembered?"

Occupy UWaterloo statement

Photo by Ryan Remiorz /The Canadian Press

In its recently announced lawsuit against the group Occupy UWaterloo, the University of Waterloo is suing anti-Israel encampment protesters for $1.5 million in damages. According to a social media post by Occupy UWaterloo, the lawsuit brought against them is "incredibly shameful". They claim to be lawfully exercising their right to free expression. Even if it revolves around slandering the Jewish state, expressing their antisemitic sentiments, harassing Jewish students and faculty professors in the process, in their entitlement as protesters.

"History will absolve us" their post @Occupy UW states with complete assurance. The  university, on the other hand, wants its main campus back. Claiming that the protesters have occupied the university's private property illegally, beginning on May 13, reflecting a court document published on the university's website. The damages of $1,500 million is slated to represent trespass, damage to property, intimidation and ejectment.

 

Seven Occupy UWaterloo members are named in the lawsuit, citing their involvement in establishing an "indefinite encampment" adjacent to the Graduate House on the main campus of the University of Waterloo. Occupy UWaterloo is being requested by the university to remove encampment materials, including obstructions that have been erected, and to "remediate" the property to its original condition at the time of the encampment establishment.

 

 

Related issues included in the document are demands that members of the encampment are not to rebuild, and must agree to refrain from University Senate interference, including the board of governors and all activities related to teaching. Conditions are outlined in the document for the Waterloo Regional Police, and the Ontario Provincial Police, inclusive of any police service tasked with removing the encampment and arresting the participants.

A trespass notice was issued by the university on June 21. It was disseminated both in person and online to all participants in the encampment. According to the document, it was subsequently rejected. Ahmad Kamal, named as one of the defendants in the lawsuit, wrote "Again: I ain't reading all that. Free Palestine", on the posted trespass notice where it appeared on the encampment wall.

Encampment leaders had called on the university to divest from companies appearing on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions list. They also demanded an "academic and cultural boycott" of Israeli Companies and universities, demands which were published in the Waterloo Region Record. 

 

These 'human rights' supporting students feel complete entitlement, vindicating their mission while rejecting claims by the university. It is Israel, and Israel alone responsible for the death of Palestinians in Gaza, not the Gaza Hamas leaders that brought death and destruction to Israel, compelling it to embark on a mission to destroy the group whose purpose is its extermination and that of Jews everywhere...

The University of Waterloo and the members of a pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus are set to enter mediation talks. The members of the Occupy UWaterloo group held a press conference on Friday to share their reactions to being sued by the university for $1.5 million in collective damages. CBC

Slandering Israel of "Catastrophic Palestinian Starvation"

"The available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring."

"The IPC [Integrated Food Security Phase Classification] acute food insecurity analysis conducted in February 2024 projected that famine would likely occur in the northern governorates [of Gaza] by the end of May, based on the assumption that conflict would persist with the same intensity and humanitarian access would remain very low."

"While the use of assumptions and inference is standard practice in IPC generally, the limitations of the available body of evidence and the extent of its convergence for northern Gaza in April leads to a very high level of uncertainty regarding the current food security and nutritional status of the population."

Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report

Bustling street markets filled with produce in the Deir al-Balah camp in central Gaza on June 21, 2024. Photo by Majdi Fathi/TPS-IL

The arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court naming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, accusing both of leveraging the "starvation of civilians as a method of war", levied in May, based its warrants on the warnings issued by the IPC's early reports and those of the UN's World Food Program, both warning that northern Gaza was under a "full-blown famine" in May. Just as the IPC's and UN's warnings were without credibility, so too the ICC's warrants.

Aided and abetted by international media which themselves relied on IPC projections in reporting the conflict, the allegations of war crimes committed by Israel at war with Hamas, gave credence to the public relations campaigns vilifying Israel on behalf of the Hamas propaganda machinery, while selectively bypassing Israel's assurances of efforts during an intense time of conflict, of making every effort to alleviate the food insecurity of ordinary Palestinians.

 

Lorries with aid loads for delivery into Gaza arrive at Larnaca Port, Cyprus, June 26, 2024. REUTERS/Marinos Meletiou

 

While Israel opened corridors with the full knowledge that in so doing, it ran the risk of assisting Hamas leadership and operatives escaping the consequences of the atrocities they committed in southern Israel. In the same token, while Israel was doing its utmost to still international criticism holding Israel to standards never imposed upon other countries forced to defend themselves from gratuitously savage violence, the world looked the other way when evidence arose of Hamas looting humanitarian food and goods convoys meant to sustain Palestinian civilians.

After months of dire warnings of "famine is imminent" in the Gaza Strip, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification released a snapshot report published on June 25. Funded by a number of Western countries such as Canada, the European Union and he United States the new report explains that its revision was occasioned partially from earlier reliance on "assumptions and inference" to "address major gaps in publicly accessible evidence". 

The report's conclusions inspired David Adesnik of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies to characterize the IPC's admission of errors as "one of the greatest slanders of the last eight months", obliquely referencing the beginning of conflict in October stemming from the Hamas invasion of Israel and revelations of the terrorist group's inhumane indulgence in sadistic savagery of horrific proportions that included group rape, mutilation and bloody mass slaughter.

A convoy carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza on its way to the Rafah crossing last month as looted. Photograph: Khaled Elfiqi/EPA

 

"After months of hearing that Israel was blocking the delivery of sufficient aid to Gaza we now see that Israeli authorities facilitated a massive increase in shipments of both aid and commercial goods, alleviating shortages in Gaza while Israeli forces continued to prosecute the war against Hamas."

"This is a decisive rebuke to malicious claims that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war against the people of Gaza."

David Adesnik, senior fellow, director of research, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Canada's Notorious Residential School System for First Nations Children

"This report has caused renewed grief and dismay in Indigenous communities, especially for those who attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School and for intergenerational survivors."

"Many of those grieving are devout Catholics who, with others, are seeking solace, affirmation, and accountability from the Catholic Church."

Tk-emlups Ngyuen report, May 27, 2021

"[The GPR survey was] very preliminary [in reference to] initial horrific findings of what potentially could be ... they are very preliminary ... there could very well be children beneath the surface."

"This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites that are, to our knowledge, also undocumented."

Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Nation chief Rosanne Casimir

Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir on Thursday, September 30, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

In May of 2021, Canada was horrified to be informed of the news that an unproven legend among First Nations, was true, where it was found -- mostly Catholic-church-operated residential schools for Canada's First Nations children -- that large numbers of children died after being mistreated by nuns. Schools where children were forbidden to speak their native language, were given insufficient food, were physically assaulted, persecuted, and required medical attention withheld. The word was out, that in Kamloops, B.C. close to one of those notorious schools, a 'mass grave' had been discovered and in that unmarked grave hundreds of First Nations children were buried.

 

Soon enough, where other residential schools operated across Canada, tribes chimed in with their reports of 'unmarked graves', after years of intake of thousands of First Nations children to be educated for the purpose of 'taking the Indian' out of them; inculcating in their impressionable young minds the values and the culture of white Europeans. As the tales of the horrors inflicted on helpless children taken prisoner to a scheme the government of Great Britain initiated in the first half of the 19th century forward to the early era of the government of Canada up until the end of the 20th century, excuses such as their purpose being to teach children the three Rs, and self-management to enable them to take their place advantageously in the larger society were ignored.

When some former residents of the schools came forward with their personal stories of having benefited from the curriculum, enabling them to further their educations independently after graduation from the schools, and reaching professional status in employment, they were ignored. The misleading announcement of May 27, 221 that informed the world "the confirmation of the remains of 215 children" were discovered adjacent to the long-since-closed Kamloops Indian Residential school was broadcast widely to Canada's shame.

A survey using ground-penetrating radar had led to the announcement. The radar results merely suggested that the ground had been disturbed at some time in the past; there was no suggestion that human bodies were buried in the area in question. Yet the uncertain statements of children's bodies having been surreptitiously buried went unquestioned, no affirming evidence or action was involved, simply an assumption. Suddenly a "mass grave" had been discovered.

 

Shoes, toys and more were a set up around the Centennial Flame on Parliament Hill in Ottawa June 2, 2021 in recognition of what's believed to be the discovery of children's remains at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. (Brian Morris/CBC)

 

A story picked up by international media where the headline in the New York Times read: Horrible History: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada. Criticism of China at the time over its treatment of its Muslim Uyghur population led Beijing to sneer at a Canada that would slaughter its First Nations children. CTV News reported: "The discovery of the mass grave is gripping the nation tonight..."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau required no evidence of the truth of the allegations to move him to regret that 'genocide' occurred in Canada, calling for a period of national reckoning. A committee for nation-to-nation reconciliation was struck to investigate past claims of Canada's indigenous populations to institutional racism. Chief Casimir of the Tk'emlups in Kamloops attempted to emphasize that her original charges of deaths at the Kamloops residential school were speculative, with no basis in fact.

Justin Trudeau, however, was 'way ahead of her, declaring that the Canadian flag would be lowered to half mast on Parliament Hill; any Canadian flags flown anywhere, across the country or at diplomatic missions abroad were to be lowered to half-mast in grief over Canada's genocidal past. And there they stayed for months. Wherever residential schools were operated, local Indigenous groups averred their intention to dig up the grounds where suspected children's bodies lay mouldering.

 

 And then reality intruded. The disturbed ground was likely the results of sewer pipes' installation, irrigation ditches, trenches cut by backhoes for utility lines, anything but mass graves. The estimated 1,300 children whose lives were lost to maltreatment and pathological racism disappeared in a poof of investigatory revelations. It was accepted that during mass infections where children in the general community died, so did aboriginal children who were more susceptible to infectious disease impacts. Children were buried in established community cemeteries.

 

 

But before the rebuttal of realities kicked in, a rampage of church burnings took place. Shrines were desecrated and vandalized, many burned to the ground. Indigenous Catholics were dismayed to see that activist First Nations protesters saw fit to destroy their Indian reserve churches. Riots ensued, statues were brought down, and anti-Catholic criminal acts took place. No authorities in government felt it suitable to condemn these criminal acts, nor to investigate the perpetrators and bring them to justice. As far as they were concerned, 'justice' was being done by the 'protesters'.

 

They were acting out to proclaim their resentment and hatred toward the white colonialists who had attempted to destroy their history, their culture, their beliefs and their values. Even if they had set out to do no such thing. Now, it is acknowledged that residential-school era 'missing children' are no longer missing. The Catholic Church apologized to First Nations. The Pope made his apology on behalf of the Church he leads.

Chief Casimir was given an independent site-inspection report dated 2022, suggesting that whatever 'anomalies' the original GPR (ground-penetrating radar) survey had detected, they were in all likelihood the result of ground disturbances going back decades. And while it has been declared for years that excavations could finally clear matters up to the satisfaction of First Nations, and funding from the federal government was provided to do just that, no such excavations have ever taken place.

A child’s dress is seen on a cross outside the former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., on June 13, 2021. Photo by Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press