Canadians launch Legal Centre for Palestine

It was as familiar as that first sip of hot coffee in the morning, and the pinging of emails landing in my inbox. There, among a raft of notes from Independent Jewish Voices and the UN Human Rights Office, a ‘human rights’ alert of a different sort – yet another overwrought message from B’nai Brith Canada, sounding the tocsin about the latest threat to public security and the Canadian Jewish community.

Together with the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (Canada’s AIPAC) and Simon Wiesenthal Center, B’nai Brith Canada works tirelessly to get Palestinians and their allies canceled, fired from their jobs or – in the case of Canadian residents – deported. ‘Antisemitism’ and ‘terrorist’ smear campaigns are its stock and trade.

B’nai Brith Canada describes itself as Canada’s “oldest independent Jewish Human Rights organization,” and a “staunch defender of the State of Israel and global Jewry.”

The target of B’nai Brith Canada’s latest email alert, Khaled Barakat, a Palestinian resident of British Columbia, was scheduled to speak that very evening, June 3, at a community center owned and operated by the City of Ottawa. Barakat, B’nai Brith Canada warned, was a “leader” of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a “designated terror entity” in Canada that has “murdered innocent civilians, butchered rabbis in a synagogue, hijacked an aircraft and who knows what else?”

The PFLP is B’nai Brith Canada’s biggest and most evil bogeyman. It’s been trying to get Khaled Barakat deported for years.  

Stoking B’nai Brith Canada’s alarm, Barakat’s wife, Charlotte Kates, would also be talking at the Ottawa event. Kates works with the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Network, “widely considered to be a front for the PFLP,” B’nai Brith Canada declared in its email.

B’nai Brith Canada had warned city officials about Barakat days earlier. Unhappy with their response, the organization was now calling on its members to email Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson themselves, plus a city councilor and pair of city officials for good measure.

B’nai Brith Canada’s campaign failed. Khaled Barakat and Charlotte Kates both spoke, as scheduled, at the 5th Assembly of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle in Canada, at Ottawa’s Foster Farm Community Centre, to rousing applause.

But free speech and Palestine justice advocates have little cause to celebrate. In Canada, the targeting of pro-Palestinian advocates – especially if they’re Palestinian or allies of color – is relentless, organized and well financed.

In response, a group of Canadian lawyers and human rights activists have formed a legal support group. Incorporated this past January, the Legal Centre for Palestine (LCP) will monitor harassment and intimidation of Canada’s Palestinian community and its allies, and provide strategic training, advice and legal aid. It will also advise decision-makers on Palestinian rights, and help build the capacity to combat anti-Palestinian racism and discrimination.

Anyone can join, through an application and review process.

For LCP co-founder Emilio Dabed, the group’s mission is simple: “We defend the right of Palestinians to exist,” he told Mondoweiss. “We defend the right of Palestinians to narrate; paraphrasing Edward Said … to tell their story and express their views.”

Dabed teaches at Osgoode Hall Law School, at York University, in Toronto. A Chilean-Palestinian, Dabed emigrated to Canada in 2018, following Israeli restrictions on Palestinian university instruction.

“Finally, I will be able to speak my mind,” Dabed recalls thinking at the time, he told Mondoweiss.

He soon learned otherwise.

Dabed’s daughter and her friends set up a social justice club at their Toronto high School, and decided to organize a session on the Nakba. But the principal stepped in, cautioning that the subject was too sensitive. Professionals from both sides of the issue would need to be invited. The students declined, and the activity was cancelled.

In response to this and other experiences – both personal and professional – Dabed and his own friends and colleagues started brainstorming. “Integrated activism” was what they had in mind.

“Law, on its own, cannot liberate Palestinians or Palestine,” Dabed told Mondoweiss. “Law is nothing other than another tool, a complementary tool for a struggle that needs to combine grassroots organization and mobilization.”

The LCP is an “idea whose time has come,” Toronto lawyer and LCP co-founder Stephen Ellis told Mondoweiss. “So many supporters of Palestinian rights are facing the same problems … It’s heartbreaking to see that relentless assault on young Palestinians in [Ontario], so when Emilio and others said, let’s get together … that was music to my ears.”

Ellis is a familiar name in the Ontario legal scene. He has represented a host of student groups and individuals smeared by the pro-Israel lobby. Among the cases he’s tackled – a set of legal proceedings against Toronto restauranteur Kimberly Hawkins. Hawkins had posted pro-Palestinian messages on the window of her shop, Foodbenders (now closed), and a barrage of anti-Zionist comments on social media. Unfriendly encounters ensued, followed by charges of discrimination. These were dismissed by a provincial court in November 2021, but other cases against Hawkins are active, including a defamation case and a pair of complaints to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, claiming that Zionism is a creed that should be protected under the Human Rights Code.

Ellis is also representing Toronto teacher Javier Davila, a social justice educator and equity advisor who got dismissed, back in the Fall of 2021, for circulating information about Palestinian human rights to other teachers.

The trigger for Davila’s dismissal — a pair of articles in the right-wing Toronto Sun and parallel smear campaign by B’nai Brith Canada.

But students rallied to Davila’s cause, and he was rehired. Ellis and fellow attorney Dimitri Lascaris are now suing B’nai Brith Canada for defamation. (Lascaris filed a libel suit of his own against the organization, back in 2017, following its claims that Lascaris had advocated “on behalf of terrorists.” Lascaris won his case, and was awarded costs.)     

Victory is sweet, but there’s no time to breathe, Ellis told Mondoweiss.

“They will attempt to take away your job; they will attempt to take away your livelihood. They will file a complaint with the police, alleging hate speech! I mean, they will go to the nth degree to take your life away.”

Yazan Khader, another founding member of the LCP, is familiar with the hazards of speaking truth about Palestine in Canada, especially for young Palestinians, who hunger to do so.

“What experience has shown us time and time again is that acting on that hunger comes at huge backlash,” Khader told Mondoweiss. “It comes with defamation that ruins careers and therefore lives, and I know many, many friends who have been targeted online; doxed on line. And every time you Google their name it’s the first thing that pops up; it’s an unpleasant reality to live in …  that sort of defamation should not come without a cost.”

The LCP will impose that cost, says Khader. It will be “something that people can coalesce around,” allowing people “to rub shoulders with one another … to engage in some sort of debate on strategy, which somehow, in my experience … somehow creates connections; creates bonds, that propel things forward.”

LCP co-founder Faisal Bhabha has a major strategic goal in mind. Bhabha – an associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law school – wants to find a Canadian court that will strike down the lobby’s core claim (endorsed by the Trudeau government and its antisemitism czar, former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler) that anti-Zionism is antisemitic; that it’s antisemitic to call Israel a ‘Jewish supremacy’, or a ‘racist’ ‘apartheid’ state; that advocating for the Palestinian right of return, or for BDS, is ‘antisemitic’.

Bhabha’s commitment to justice is rooted in personal experience. In the midst of the First Intifada, assigned to write a high school essay about a famous person, he decided to write about Yasser Arafat. But the assignment came with a ground rule — that person could not be “evil,” Bhabha recalls, so his choice of Arafat as a subject in Grade 9 English class got nixed by his teacher.

Reflecting on the life of his father, a South African who’d fled apartheid, Bhabha proposed someone else to write about — Steve Biko, recently portrayed by Denzel Washington in the film Cry Freedom. Go for it, the teacher said.

Years later, Bhabha would receive another personal lesson. In late Spring of 2020, speaking on a York University panel about the IHRA definition of antisemitism, Bhabha declared that Zionism is a “racist” endeavor aimed at achieving “Jewish supremacy” in Israel, comparable to white supremacy in the States.

Worse still, Bhabha said that accusing Israel of exaggerating the Holocaust “could be, for some, a plausible argument.”

In a flash, B’nai Brith Canada leapt into attack mode. Bhabha was “unfit to teach anyone about human rights,” they declared in one of its incensed email notes, and called on York University to suspend him.

York University did not suspend Bhabha, but it didn’t defend him either. Bhabha recalls the episode with a shrug.

“It’s all performance,” he told Mondoweiss. “It’s all this shtick to feign offense and to say these horrible people have implanted themselves in these powerful institutions and they’re influencing young minds.”

“And they’re losing,” Bhabha told Mondoweiss.

But sometimes the lobby wins – and harmless people pay the cost. Ayman Elkasrawy did.

In the wake of a deadly attack on an Ottawa mosque, Elkasrawy, the assistant imam at a mosque in Toronto, chose his words poorly. Mistranslated (a favorite lobby tactic), they were immediately seized upon by B’nai Brith Canada to get the young man dismissed from a teaching post at Ryerson University. Community leaders ran from Elkasrawy “like he was the plague,” recalls Bhabha, who filed a complaint to the Ontario Human Rights Commission on Elkasrawy’s behalf.

Elkasrawy would be vindicated in a lengthy Toronto Star piece, but the damage had been done. The human rights complaint continues at a glacial pace, says Bhabha.    

Meanwhile, Bhabha and his colleagues are pursuing other avenues for Palestinian justice and free discourse — their Legal Centre for Palestine. They want young people to get involved.

Young people “don’t see what the issue is,” Bhabha told Mondoweiss. “They actually don’t why all the sensitivity around basic statements of commitment to Palestinian justice. And so, we want to amplify those voices.”

Stephen Ellis agrees. Last November, two hundred students at Toronto’s Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute walked out of class in support of Ellis’ client, Javier Davila.

And this past Nakba Day, in the Ottawa suburb of Nepean, dozens of students staged a walk-out to commemorate Palestinian ethnic cleansing. Never losing a beat, B’nai Brith Canada alerted the local school board about the “divisive mass truancy event” and the “anti-Israel activities” of a Member of Parliament who’d supported it, calling on the school board to investigate the “infiltration of [Ottawa] schools by groups using social media to disrupt classes.”

“This is exciting, when we see the lobby trying to put every finger in every crack in the dike [laughter],” says Ellis. “But we can’t rest on our laurels … The battle lines are literally everywhere: at the universities; in the workplaces; at the school boards, on the streets. Literally everywhere.”

And the battle is vicious. Having failed to get Khaled Barakat canceled from that June 3 speaking engagement, in Ottawa, B’nai Brith Canada is stepping up its game.

Canada’s “oldest independent Jewish Human Rights organization” has now “put together a video” of Barakat speaking in Arabic, side by side with alleged screenshots of newspaper articles where he supposedly admits PFLP affiliation, both conveniently translated (or mistranslated).

“Although it is strictly forbidden for members of terrorist groups to enter Canada or obtain Canadian citizenship and despite repeated requests, Ottawa has not provided any explanation for its failure to act against Barakat,” says B’nai Brith Canada CEO Michael Mostyn in a June 8 email and webpage post. (Mostyn faces defamation charges in the Javier Davila lawsuit, one of at least a half dozen filed against B’nai Brith Canada over the years.)  

“With this latest video proving unequivocally Barakat’s senior involvement in a designated terrorist group, the Canadian Government now has sufficient evidence to deport him, and we hope it acts immediately to do so.”

Those wishing to respond to B’Nai Brith Canada’s call for justice can visit the webpage of the Legal Centre for Palestine.