Victor MacDiarmid, a University of Toronto student from Kingston, Ontario, spent the first part of his summer vacation working with the International Solidarity Movement, a non-violent Palestinian organization resisting Israeli occupation.  That was before the Israelis expelled him. 

As a witness to the happenings, he went to Nablus, where the Israeli government had issued warrants for the destruction of a mall and a girls’ school, for their relationship to Hamas.  The mall was targeted to be destroyed in August, because the owner of the land was associated with Hamas.  However, there are some 120 small merchants operating in the mall.

Victor went to the girls’ school, which had been completely destroyed.  Books and homework were torn up.  Chairs and desks were broken.  Then the Israeli military went next door to the medical clinic, for which they had no warrant.  They destroyed it as well, throwing the medicines on the floor.  They stole all of the patient medical files as well as $300 which they took from a safe that they had blasted open.  All the furniture was destroyed.

He witnessed occasions where soldiers shot at children as young as nine or ten.  Sometimes they were throwing stones and sometimes they were doing nothing at all.  While he was awaiting his forced departure, he received a phone call from a Palestinian student with news about a ten-year-old shot in the head by an Israeli soldier, killed on his family’s farm.  The Israelis had strung barbed wire across the farm field to stop Palestinians from approaching the separation barrier, and the family was cutting the wire.  According to the account he was given, the soldier took aim and shot the boy without warning.  (On August 3, military police arrested a border police officer in connection with the killing.)

In another incident, Victor saw a senior citizen arrested by Israeli forces for violating curfew.  During curfew, with no one on the street and nothing happening, he witnessed Israeli soldiers entering Na’alin.  They began shooting at houses at random. 

Three weeks ago, teens in Na’alin threw stones at Israeli soldiers.  They responded by shooting at teens indiscriminately, stone-throwers and others.

It was not just the soldiers who were engaged in violence.  He was also told of a four-year-old boy who rode his tricycle near a Jewish settlement.  A settler punched the child in the face.

After his education this summer, it’s back to school in the fall.

 

Another Canadian jailed in Syria

 

Another Canadian citizen is now in a Syrian jail.  The Maher Arar case made headlines on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, and Canada awaits a report from a judicial investigation of the cases of three other Canadians who survived Syrian imprisonment and torture, to establish what part, if any, Canada played in their imprisonment.  Now we are learning about Baharddine Succarie.

Succarie has been in a Syrian prison since April, 2007.  A Lebanese who obtained Canadian citizenship, he returned to Lebanon in 1993, where he operated a school in Tripoli to teach computer skills and English.  His arrest came while he was visiting Damascus.

Succarie is a member of Hizb ut-Tahir, which he joined in Toronto in the late 1980s, according to his family.  The organization, which claims to eschew violence, favors the creation of an international Islamic state ruled by sharia law, beginning with a caliphate to rule over all Muslim countries.  It would leave violence, such as the destruction of Israel, to the caliphate.  While it opposes Hamas, it is illegal in the West Bank, as well as in many countries, both Arab and non-Arab.  It favors the overthrow of existing governments by local élites.

Succarie’s family was able to visit him in prison.  They are unaware of any charges against him.  Meanwhile, Ottawa officials are tight-lipped about the case.  They may be engaged in quiet diplomacy on his behalf, but the family is skeptical about both the Canadian government’s efforts and its intentions. 

 

Israel expels two Canadians

 

Israel is wide open for tourists, with some exceptions.  Norman Finkelstein has been informed that he is not on the welcome list, and if you want to go to the West Bank to help the Palestinians you are also not welcome.  Two Canadians learned that from personal experience. 

Harmeet Singh Sooden, a Canadian citizen living in New Zealand, was one of four members of the Christian Peacemakers who were kidnapped and held captive in Iraq before three of them were rescued by British forces.  Tom Fox, the fourth, had been killed by their captors.  Sooden attempted to enter Israel on June 14, planning to go to the West Bank to serve as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian organization committed to non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation.

Sooden was taken into custody on landing, and when Israeli agents attempted to board him on an out-bound plane, he engaged in non-violent resistance.  Typically, that would mean going limp.  The agents responded by physical abuse and name-calling.  The pilot, who witnessed some of this, refused to fly with him on board.  Eventually he was deported and returned home to New Zealand on June 20.

More recently, Victor MacDiarmid, a 23-year-old University of Toronto student from Kingston, Ontario, was shown the gate.  He had been working for a month with the ISM in the West Bank, when he was arrested by Israeli troops on July 23.  At the time, he was filming a demonstration by Palestinian women against construction of the separation wall which will cut off farmers of the village of Na’alin from their land.  The International Court in the Hague declared that the barrier is a violation of international law.  ISM volunteers placed themselves between the Palestinians and the Israelis, as a measure of protection for the Palestinians.

MacDiarmid, who during his work with ISM, had been hit twice by rubber-coated bullets fired by Israeli soldiers, was taken into custody for “taking pictures in a closed military area,” according to Adam Taylor, a British ISM volunteer.  “He reported to us that for twenty minutes they were punching, kicking, and spitting in his face.”  He arrived home on July 30. 

 

Gen. Dallaire denounces Prime Minister

Dallaire

Senator Roméo Dallaire was the U.N. general in Rwanda whose plea for more troops to stop the genocide went unheeded.  Now he is engaged in another battle.  He is taking on Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper over Harper’s refusal to intervene in the Omar Khadr case.

On July 31, Dallaire met with U.S. congressmen to seek Khadr’s return.  Khadr is the last Western prisoner in Guantanamo.  Dallaire accused Harper of failing to uphold Canada’s commitment to the U.N. protocol on child soldiers, to which Canada is a signatory.  Khadr was 15 when captured in combat in Afghanistan. 

 

Sensitivity training for customs officers

 

The Canadian government will provide cultural sensitivity training for customs officers at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport beginning in September. 

In a move saluted by Arab and Muslim organizations in Canada, the six-month program is hoped to deal with concerns that Arabs and Muslims have expressed about being unfairly targeted by customs officers after 9/11.