Today, I and author/activist Yves Engler disrupted Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau at a press conference in Montreal. (The videos of our disruptions are posted below.)
Minister Marc Garneau has never missed an opportunity to lavish support on Israel, a serial human rights abuser.
In 2014, when Minister Garneau was the foreign affairs critic for Canada’s Liberal Party, he joined Canada’s radically neoconservative Foreign Minister John Baird in a pro-Israel rally while the Israeli military rained bombs down Gaza, which Norman Finkelstein has aptly described as the “world’s largest concentration camp.”
Ultimately, Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza resulted in the deaths of over 550 Palestinian children.
During its 2014 assault on Gaza, Israel repeatedly attacked United Nations schools whose coordinates had been provided to the Israeli military, prompting the then-Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, to denounce Israel for committing “a moral outrage and a criminal act.”
In 2018, Minister Garneau concluded a new air transport agreement with Israel which greatly increased commercial airline traffic between the states. At the time, Minister Garneau stated “Canada is a true friend of the State of Israel and we are grateful for their deep support.” Four months later, a sniper of Canada’s “true friend” gunned down Canadian doctor Tarek Loubani as he led a team of medics who were tending to victims of Israel’s carnage in the Great March of Return.
As pro-apartheid lobby group B’nai Brith Canada has highlighted, Minister Garneau has been to the ‘Middle East’s only democracy’ four times. On his last visit, he toured an Israeli drone factory and then told the world how much Israel’s drone technology impressed him.
A few months later, and as reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a secret Israeli report confirmed that an armed Israeli drone had murdered four Palestinian children playing on a Gaza beach in the 2014 assault on Gaza. (Two of those children appear in the photograph above.)
For these and other reasons, I encourage all Canadians who care about human rights to let Minister Garneau know how they feel about Israel’s abominable regime.
These are the videos of our disruption today of Minister Garneau’s press conference in Montreal:
[wpvideo JZpwrS79] [wpvideo 7PMhMlOQ]
Kudos to Lascaris & Engler, reminding us all of our (Canadian) complicity in Israel’s criminality and the cruel dispossession of the Paalestinians.