[antiwar-van] [Fwd: NOII-Van statement on Toronto Arrests]

[Harsha]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [Noii-announce] NOII-Van statement on Toronto Arrests
From:    "No One is Illegal-Vancouver" <noii-van at resist.ca>
Date:    Fri, June 16, 2006 12:29 pm
To:      "noiilist" <noii-l at lists.resist.ca>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

No One is Illegal-Vancouver is an anti-colonial grassroots movement in
full confrontation with Canadian colonial border policies, denouncing and
taking action to combat racial profiling of immigrants and refugees,
detention and deportation policies, and wage-slave conditions of migrant
workers and nonstatus people. In response to the recent arrests of
seventeen young men in Toronto, we would like to emphasize the following
points:

We assert that the men must be presumed to be innocent, both in the court
process and in public consciousness. Media sensationalism, government
statements, and public commentaries have revealed that the men are being
considered and treated as guilty terrorists. This is despite the fact that
no clear allegations have yet been put forth- - Rocco Galati, defence
lawyer for two of the men, calls the charges against his clients
"absolutely vague". Disproportionate police and militaristic force, which
includes sharpshooters and sub-machine guns, further fuels public fears.
The mainstream corporate media has also played a crucial role in stirring
public frenzy by uncritically parroting government rhetoric such as
“homegrown terrorists” and “Jihad generation” and that the suspects were
"inspired by Al Qaeda”, without providing any evidence to substantiate
such a claim.  Such stigmatizing statements will have a permanent damaging
effect on the men and their families and their “guilt” will surely
continue even if the charges are dropped or the men are acquitted.

At moments of such public hysteria, we must avoid succumbing to historical
amnesia. Three years ago in 2003, over twenty South Asian- predominantly
Pakistani- Muslim men were arrested in Toronto in a sweep called
"Operation Thread", in which the men arrested were allegedly “an Al-Qaeda
sleeper cell in Canada.” This incident received widespread international
media coverage with the men being branded as “terrorists”. None of the
allegations were proven to be true and not one of the men was ever
formally charged, let alone convicted, yet most were deported and their
lives destroyed by the unsubstantiated allegations linking them to
terrorism (http://threadbare.tyo.ca). This is reason enough to remain
vigilant.

The reports of hate-crimes and anti-Muslim backlash reflect the deep
hypocrisy of racism and racial profiling. As we have asserted before,
racial profiling is a hateful double standard by which individual members
of communities are considered responsible for every action (or alleged
action) of other individuals in their community. In contrast, white
Christian middle-aged men aged 18-45 did not suffer the indignities of
suspicion, bitter diatribes, or massive profiling after the bombings of
Oklahoma City. Their “ability to integrate” or their positioning within
North American society was not challenged. Despite the fact that the men
all have citizenship, the questioning of their “Canadian-ness” reveals a
shallow multiculturalism and reinforces the racialized national space.

These arrests will provide further justification for the policing and
security apparatus, which since 9/11, has already resulted in the passing
of legislation granting intelligence and law enforcement agencies much
broader powers of intrusion into the private lives of people, pervasive
government and media censorship of information, the silencing of dissent,
and increasingly exclusionary and racist immigration policies. Legislation
such as the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and the Anti-Terrorism
Act has strengthened the false association between terrorism and
immigration.

These arrests will also have an impact on the public mobilization that has
advocated for the abolition of Security Certificates and the
Anti-Terrorism Act over the past five years. These arrests occur at a time
when the constitutionality of Security Certificates goes before the
Supreme Court of Canada and the same year that the Parliament is reviewing
whether to allow extraordinary provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act to
expire under a five-year sunset clause. At this particular juncture, we
remind our friends and allies that it is more important than ever to
assert that such security mechanisms are an attack on fundamental civil
liberties, are profoundly discriminatory, and do little to ensure the
safety of our communities.

The discourse of the War on Terror is rooted in a deliberately-cultivated
fear and paranoia, which reduces our capacity to think and debate
critically. In the past few months, Canada has re-invented itself as an
aggressive and crusading Western imperialist power with an increasing
presence of occupation forces in Afghanistan. While Harper would like for
us to believe that “We are a target because of who we are and how we live,
our society, our diversity and our values” the historical and present
reality is that Canadian state policies have been far from peaceful and
Canada is far from being an innocent victim. The foundational values of
the Canadian state are self-evident through events such as the “None is
too Many” policy against Jewish refugees, residential schools, the
Komagatamaru incident, the Indian Act, Japanese-Canadian internment,
forced sterilization, the Chinese Head-Tax, Ipperwash standoff, and
countless other colonial realities.

We commit ourselves to continuing to defend our communities against the
demonization of being “The Enemy Within” that is justifying increasingly
repressive and racist policies, and to fight for the elimination of all
forms of oppressive violence and terrorism waged against the peoples of
the world, particularly the never-ending War on Terrorism which in the
current context is bringing the greatest degree of terror and fear in the
lives of the world’s majority.



-- 
No One is Illegal-Vancouver
To subscribe to low-traffic email annoucement list email noii-van at resist.ca

web: http://noii-van.resist.ca
email: noii-van at resist.ca
(604)682-3269 x 7149
Office 714, 207 West Hastings, Vancouver BC V6B 1H7

The No One is Illegal campaign is in full confrontation with Canadian
colonial border policies, denouncing and taking action to combat racial
profiling of immigrants and refugees, detention and deportation policies,
and wage-slave conditions of migrant workers and non-status people.

We struggle for the right for our communities to maintain their
livelihoods and resist war, occupation and displacement, while building
alliances and supporting indigenous sisters and brothers also fighting
theft of land and displacement.

_______________________________________________
Noii-l mailing list
Noii-l at lists.resist.ca
https://lists.resist.ca/mailman/listinfo/noii-l