Results tagged “palestine”

In an earlier TIFF post, we joked that the film Five Hours From Paris won our award for the "worst summary we've ever seen from TIFF" with: "In a suburb of Tel Aviv, an Israeli cab driver who longs to fly and a Russian music teacher who is soon to board a plane find out that romance is only a cab ride away."

Incendiary British anti-war MP George Galloway was scheduled to speak at a Toronto Coalition to Stop the War event tonight. On March 20, though, he received a letter from Robert J. Orr, Immigration Officer for Canada in London, England, informing him that the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) had made a "preliminary determination" that he was inadmissible to Canada on grounds of national security, raising national furor over what his Toronto lawyer, Barbara Jackman, termed an abrogation of the right to freedom of speech. Meanwhile, Alykhan Velshi, senior aide to Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, took the liberty of calling Galloway an "infandous street-corner Cromwell who actually brags about giving 'financial support' to Hamas," a man who "I'm sure ...has a large Rolodex of friends in regimes elsewhere in the world willing to roll out the red carpet for him."

CUPE Ontario's university workers are now officially like the awkward kid no one wants to play with at recess. As we reported earlier, that branch of the union passed a motion a few days ago calling for an academic boycott "aimed at Ontario universities and any institutional connections pertaining to research that help the military of the state of Israel." Today, in letters to both the National Post and the Globe and Mail, and in a statement on the union's homepage, CUPE's president Paul Moist did his best to distance the national organization from that move, saying that "The views expressed in the resolution are those of a small number of CUPE Ontario members. The resolution does not represent CUPE National policy." This is the second time in two months Moist has had to publicly chastise CUPE Ontario, currently operating under the contentious leadership of Sid Ryan: an earlier version of the boycott came in for even harsher criticism, with Moist saying that it would have violated CUPE's own anti-discrimination standards. No word on whether Ryan has also been uninvited to Moist's birthday party.

In a startling and uncharacteristic move, CUPE Ontario has done something controversial. Even more unexpectedly, they've gone about it in controversial fashion.

2009 kicked off with promise in the air, a tonic sense of the future around which Western civilization warmed itself. Despite a snowballing economic catastrophe unseen since the 1930s, the world staggered onward, still high from the incredible euphoria of Barack Obama's ascendancy to the presidency. With the expiration of the Bush Era inevitable, we all held our breath, collectively waiting to exhale.

The Israeli consulate at Bloor and Avenue was briefly taken over by a group of women, Jewish protesters, earlier today. The group, which includes writer and activist Judy Rebick and local filmmaker B. H. Yael, was protesting the recent invasion of Gaza, as well as the Canadian government's failure to condemn that military action. Their stated aim was to "send a clear statement that many Jewish-Canadians do not support Israel′s violence and apartheid policies... [and join] with people of conscience all across the world who are demanding an end to Israeli aggression and justice for the Palestinian people." Police moved in on the group shortly after their arrival and are now arresting at least some of the protesters.