Senate of Canada hosts 'unacceptable' Palestinian tribunal, Jewish advocacy group says
A Canadian Jewish advocacy group is demanding answers after an anti-Israel tribunal was held at the Senate of Canada over the weekend.
“It is completely unacceptable that the Senate provided its space to speakers with documented histories of promoting antisemitism and with ties to terror,” wrote Noah Shack, the CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), in a letter addressed to Speaker of the Senate Raymonde Gagné on Monday.
The Palestine Tribunal on Canadian Responsibility took place in Ottawa on Nov. 14 and Nov. 15. Senator Yuen Pau Woo, an independent senator appointed by Justin Trudeau to represent British Columbia, confirmed to National Post that he had booked the Senate of Canada room for the tribunal. Other senators were advised of the tribunal and given a chance to join, he said.
“The event has already been used to promote blood libels and other classic antisemitic tropes, including an absurd and overt lie that Israeli dogs raped Palestinians (stated by speaker Thomas Becker over Zoom),” Shack said.
Becker, an American lawyer, told the tribunal about his involvement in the Freedom Flotilla, a group of vessels that sailed to the Middle East to end what it referred to as the “illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza.” He accused Israeli soldiers of kidnapping and torturing him after they intercepted the flotilla last month.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said the vessels and passengers were taken to an Israeli port. Becker was deported to Turkey a few days later, the Kansas City Star reported .
While speaking to the tribunal, he also said Israel committed sexual violence against Palestinians, including “rape by animals.”
Many speakers said Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza, despite a ceasefire agreement being reached in October. One speaker said the ceasefire was “a cover for a continuation of the genocide,” while another referred to terrorism as resistance.
“The Senate of Canada hosting a panel featuring individuals who have justified the rapes, murders, and atrocities of October 7 should serve as a wake-up call to Canadians,” said David Sachs of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 people hostage.
“The growing influence of pro-terror rhetoric within the anti-Israel movement poses a real danger. It is time for Canadian institutions to stop providing a platform for those who incite hate and violence under the guise of academic discourse,” Sachs said.
Shack pushed for an investigation into how the two-day event took place and “disciplinary actions against those involved in hosting the event” in order to “ensure such an egregious use of one of Canada’s democratic houses does not occur in the future.”
The Senate said it received National Post’s request for comment but did not respond in time for publication.
Suleiman Baraka, a scientist who works with the University of Alberta, told the tribunal that “Hamas is not Taliban, is not ISIS.” All of those groups are listed as terrorist entities in Canada.
“The occupation is hindering us. It’s not Hamas,” he said.
Former University of Toronto professor Uahikea Maile told the tribunal via video call that his stance after October 7 was mischaracterized in a National Post article as an “antisemitic celebration of violence against Jewish people.”
“On Oct. 7, 2023, I woke to photos of Palestinians triumphantly tearing down the apartheid wall near Nir Oz, manifesting their freedom amid a decades-long blockade in Gaza by the Israeli government,” he said.
He did not mention that around a quarter of the population of Nir Oz was either kidnapped or murdered by Hamas, The Times of Israel reported .
“Our universities have a political and historical complicity in the occupation of the Palestinian people,” Maile said.
Richard Falk was delayed while trying to enter the country with his wife, Hilal Elver. He addressed the tribunal multiple times over the weekend. He said it was “very flattering to be considered threats to national security.”
Canada Border Services Agency spokesperson Rebecca Purdy told National Post in an emailed statement that the agency cannot comment on individual cases, but its role is to “assess the security risk and admissibility of persons coming to Canada.”
Falk is a former professor at Princeton University and former United Nations special rapporteur overseeing the Palestinian territories. He was previously condemned by the Canadian government for comments he made pointing the finger at Israel for the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. In doing so, he promoted the antisemitic trope of “global Jewish power and demonization,” according to the Anti-Defamation League.
He mentioned various ways to delegitimize Israel to the tribunal. One of the ways he outlined was to push the UN general assembly toward “supporting more openly and more radically the limitation of Israel’s rights.”
Another speaker, Ahmed Abofoul, is a lawyer for Al Haq, a foreign non-government organization that was sanctioned by the United States in September .
He called for Canada to “publicly affirm and materially support the full Palestinian sovereignty,” and said the country owes Palestinian victims financial compensation for the “damage caused by its complicity.”
“The Canadian state apology must explicitly name its complicity in the genocide in the Gaza Strip, its historical and ongoing alignment with the Zionist settler colonial regime, its own settler colonial genocide against Indigenous people,” said Abofoul.
Two women sitting on the panel of the tribunal — Françoise Vergès and Mireille Fanon Mendès-France — have had ties to the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. Samidoun was listed as a terrorist entity in Canada last year.
Vergès attended a Samidoun event in Paris in April 2024, which paid tribute to terror convict Walid Daqqa .
Mendès-France co-organized a tribunal about U.S. imperialism with Samidoun in 2022.
In 2023, she signed a letter in collaboration with the terrorist entity , along with leader of one of its Canadian chapter’s Charlotte Kates and others. They called for the release of Palestine Action activists arrested in the U.K.
This year, in an article posted to her foundation’s website, Mendès-France said: “It’s not Hamas that needs to be questioned, but a state that has lost all sense of proportion.”
A press release said the event was supposed to be held in the University of Ottawa’s Human Rights Research and Education Centre. However, in a statement to National Post, spokesperson Jesse Robichaud said there was no such agreement in place as the venue “did not have the room capacity or technology infrastructure needed to accommodate the event.”
The purpose of the event, as it is listed on its website, was to “document the multiple ways that Canadian entities – including government bodies, corporations, universities, charities, media, and other cultural institutions – have enabled and continue to enable the settler colonization and genocide of Palestinians, and to articulate what justice and reparations would require.”
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