Judy Rebick's blog

My heart was breaking this morning reading the report on Omar Khadr's decision to fire his lawyers in protest over the horrors he is being subject to in what he considers to be a rigged trial.  "He is a young man who has lost all faith in the process," said Dennis Edney, one of his Canadian lawyers.  And no wonder.  Tortured as a teenager, imprisoned without conviction for years, the sole remaining prisoner in the disgraced Guantanamo Bay prison camp, 

Below is a statement that you are being asked to sign.   We believe it is urgent to get as many signatures on a call for a public inquiry We believe it is possible to shift the terms to debate, and to shine a spotlight on the abusive police practices during the G8/G20. But we need your help to do that.

 Please sign on and circulate the call widely to friends, colleagues, allies and networks who might be willing to sign.  

Email TheTorontoCall@gmail.com  and with your name, affiliation and which category you prefer to be placed in (trade unionists, faculty, students, community activists, legal workers, teachers, cultural workers, arrested and detained)

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The police response to the protests against the G8/G20 in Toronto was the largest mass arrest in Canadian history, surpassing the 1993 Clayoquot Sound logging blockade.

It constituted the most far-reaching single assault on political
rights in the Canadian state since the War Measures Act of 1970.

For people sitting at home and watching TV news last night, Toronto was burning.  The same police car on Queen St W. burned and blew up over and over again.  The same image of a young man very violently smashing Starbucks windows appeared over and over again.  Windows smashed all along Yonge St.  None of us had ever seen Toronto like this.  It was shocking. 

Lucas Oleniuk, Toronto Star

This morning police raided a Toronto home and arrested four organizers.  No doubt this is an example of preventative detention yet another tactic in the arsenal of repression known as the Miami protocol that has turned our city into a police state. 

Last Friday I walked along the security fence and felt like I was in a concentration camp and that was before thousands of police officers occupied our city.  That's how it feels now, a city under occupation.  No-one has rights now.  Two friends from Vancouver were having a snooze in the park at 9 am in Kensington Market and woke up surrounded by 10 cops searching their bags.  When they asked what the cops thought they were doing, the reply was "you are sleeping in the park.  That's illegal."  At 9 am?

 Today, the House of Commons formed a virtual lynch mob demanding  the resignation of NDP MP Libby Davies' resignation for saying that the Israeli occupation began in 1948.  She was punked by a phoney blogger who was trying to trap her into saying something unacceptable.  Libby has been an outspoken critic of Israel since she visited Gaza and saw the horrors that Israel is inflicting on the people there.  In her usual quiet courageous way, Libby is one of the few membe

Ever since I have been at Ryerson, I've been wanted to establish an activist school and now we have finally succeeded.  On June 28, if we can get enough people registered, the Gindin Chair and the Chang School for Continuing Education will co-sponsor an activist school called Community Engagement Course.

I woke up at 3 am today for some reason and looked at my blackberry twitter feed. I couldn't believe my eyes. Israeli Defense Forces had just attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla killing human rights activists and trying to defend it by some cock and bull story about lynch mobs. I haven't felt that kind of horror since I heard about the massacre in Sabra and Shatila in 1982, not because the death toll is as high but because of the understanding that the Israeli government will stop on nothing. Please go out to the protests in your town. List follows as does a statement from the Alternate Information Center, a Palestinian/Israeli group in Israel.

This is an excellent argument against the fire bombing of an RBC branch in Ottawa in protest of the RBC 's financing of the Olympics and the Tar Sands, and one of the best critiques of "diversity of tactics" that I have seen.  Originally published The Bullet, published by Socialist Project