And new pro-Palestinian camp set up at Victoria Square in the heart of downtown Montreal. As with the encampment at McGill University, it is in fact a physical and political occupation.
However, it is less and less a peaceful exercise of freedom of expression and more and more a public trial of Israel.
The occupiers falsely present it as a “genocidal” state and accuse any institution with the slightest connection to it of having the “blood of the Palestinians on their hands.”
According to them, the Jewish State would be determined to wipe out the Palestinian people from Gaza while it is rather at war in response to the slaughter of October 7, 2023 perpetrated by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas on Israeli soil.
Dishonesty
We can condemn the force of Israel’s response. But to pass off a war actually started by Hamas as the planned extermination of the Palestinian people by Israel – as six million Jews were victims at the hands of the Nazis – is unspeakably dishonest.
That said, intellectual and political dishonesty, fortunately, is not illegal. The aggressiveness of masked occupiers defacing public places while depriving their fellow Jewish citizens of their right to feel safe in their own city, however, does not go unnoticed.
Inaction
Ditto for the inertia of the SPVM. We partly understand his fear of seeing the occupants set themselves up as “martyrs” if the police intervene.
However, we understand their inaction less when even a journalist – Yves Poirier from TVA – was attacked on Tuesday in Victoria Square by a masked occupant while he handed them his microphone.
It’s impossible not to think of the so-called “Freedom Convoy”. Here too, the Ottawa police stood idly by when journalists and citizens were verbally or physically attacked by occupiers. The whole thing, therefore, ended very badly.
I say it again. The situation of these camps in Montreal has become untenable. What are the authorities waiting for to govern themselves accordingly?
