Defend Palestine – Defend Resistance! 

In October 2024, the US and Canadian imperialists designated Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, a “terrorist entity” under the Canadian criminal code and by the US Treasury Department, alongside designating the revolutionary Palestinian intellectual Khaled Barakat. In November, the Vancouver police staged a military-style raid on the home of Charlotte Kates, the international coordinator of Samidoun, using a flash-bang grenade, breaking windows, and driving an armored vehicle into a residential neighborhood. 

The coordinated repression and lawfare directed at Samidoun, and the harassment directed at Barakat and Kates, is an attempt to censor and silence the most principled and steadfast sections of the Palestinian movement. It has no basis in law, as Samidoun has engaged in nothing other than protected first amendment speech, and of course, Genocide Joe has no problem pardoning his son, his Treasury department engages in a blatant act of censorship.  The “terrorists” lists maintained by the US state department and treasury departments have absolutely nothing to do with keeping people in the US safe, instead, they are a long-standing tool of US imperialists to demonize people and organizations fighting for liberation and to lay the groundwork to criminalize people who politically support those organizations, or simply provide accurate information about those movements. 

The US and Canada, those pillars of the “liberal international order” are North America’s own blood-drenched imperialist colossus. It would be impossible to tally up the toll of human misery generated by US imperialism and its pathetic junior partner Canada, from the unmarked graves of kidnapped indigenous children, the centuries-long joint project of plundering Haiti, and the current US-Canada defense partnerships unfettered arms sales to the Israeli genocide. The critical work of Samidoun in exposing the realities of the thousands of Palestinians kidnapped and held in US-sponsored Israeli hellholes poses no material threat to the US or Canada of course, but ideologically exposes the ugly reality of US-Canadian imperialism, and the real costs to the people of the world of the domination of the US and its lapdogs and lackeys. 

It’s no coincidence that the lawfare waged against Samidoun comes at a time when the Palestine movement in the US is in decline, through a combination of self-censorship and surging repression. Far too many people have decided that they are unwilling to face the minimal risks for defiant protest in the US, and have acquiesced to the widespread repression and surveillance even of routinized protests. This environment gives the repressive apparatuses the ability to act with seeming impunity. The attack on Samidoun, on its leadership, and on Khaled Barakat is an attack on everyone in North America speaking out for Palestine who refuses business as usual. It must be defeated. 

Samidoun is not a terrorist organization, the US and Canadian imperialists are! Delist Samidoun, and abolish the terrorist lists!