A comrade from Samidoun Toronto spoke at the Vancouver rally for Palestine on Wednesday, 24 July 2024, organized to confront Zionist war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu’s infamous address to the US Congress, where he was met with dozens of standing ovations as he celebrated genocide and demanded even more advanced weaponry. The Vancouver demonstration came alongside many throughout North America and internationally, as well as a mass mobilization of many thousands outside the Capitol.
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Text of the speech:
Militant greetings, comrades! As my comrade said, I’m a member of Samidoun’s newly formed Toronto chapter. Thank you for having me here today. We have mobilized today to rebuke and denounce Benjamin “war criminal” Netanyahu’s address to the US Congress, which happened just a few hours ago in DC. Shame!
It is shameful to invite chief genocidaire Netanyahu to speak in Congress, but it is not surprising. It should be expected from the imperialist war machine that is the United States of America, and it is shameful for this so called country, Canada, and its genocidal leader Justin Trudeau to not even utter a single condemnation of this address. But it too should be expected because Canada is just the imperialist lapdog of America.
Canada and the United States are both settler colonies that require the same settler logics and brutalities as “Israel”. We must not be surprised at each and every move of consolidation and friendship between the US, “Israel” and Canada. We must accept this as our current reality and then we must accept what must be done.
To change this reality we must mobilize and organize. The Zionist entity desperately clings to western powers for political and financial support. It is an entity in collapse that is hanging by its last thread, because of the power of the axis of resistance. From the united Palestinian factions to the heroic Yemeni armed forces, to the bravery of Hezbollah, the resistance continues to take the Zionist entity apart piece by piece.
Shortly after Netanyahu’s address earlier today, Hamas released a statement about this: “Netanyahu’s speech reflects the depth of his military, security and international crisis. He tried to publicly cover it with the philosophy of defeats suffered by his army in Gaza, promoting imaginary victories by liberating a number of captives, forgetting the horrific massacres he committed against civilians in Rafah and Nusseirat.”
They continue to say: “Netanyahu’s attack on the axis of resistance reflects the depth of his military and security crisis due to the open fronts which call for more efforts from all arenas and all fronts to inflict defeats on this Zionist entity.”
I say again, just as the Islamic resistance does, “Israel” is a colony on the brink of collapse. The resistance through waging popular and armed struggle has brought the Palestinian liberation struggle and the global struggle against imperialism forward tenfold through Al Aqsa Flood Battle!
As my comrade mentioned earlier, we are just days past the heroic operation carried out by the Yemeni armed forces, in which the Palestinian-named and Iranian-designed drone, Yafa, flew undetected by the Zionist enemy’s interceptors and radars for miles. The Yemeni Armed Forces have declared Yafa, what the colonizers call Tel Aviv, an unsafe area. The imperialist war mongers will call it terrorism, but we know this is anti-imperialist resistance.
So long as occupation continues, resistance will too. Despite attempts at stifling organized dissent, the resistance is stronger and more united than ever before. As a prisoner solidarity network, Samidoun sees how colonized and oppressed masses of the world are opening up the prison doors. From Gaza on October 7th to right now in Dhaka, as students storm the prisons to free their comrades, prisoners are the frontline of our struggle, because prisons are a tool to lock away our freedom fighters from our movements.
The enemy will remove our most militant comrades from the struggle, the ones who are most willing to put their body and lives on the line for liberation. These are our leaders. We see this here in so called BC with Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chief Dza Heil, who has been sentenced to days of house arrest for defending his land from colonial extraction. We see this with Al-Qassam’s Abdullah Barghouthi, who has the longest prison sentence in history – 5,200 years! It was recently revealed that Zionist dungeon guards, also known of the guards of the “Israel Prison Service,” have been torturing him.
Leaders of the Popular Front, Ahmad Sa’adat and Khalida Jarrar, are also incarcerated right now. In occupied Palestine, thousands of Palestinians are currently incarcerated in Zionist jails. We must remember that these comrades on the inside are those who are experiencing the most heightened contradictions of imperialism. We must not leave them behind. They are our leaders!
It is prisons and prisoners that connect our movements globally because they are the number 1 tool used by our imperialist enemies to crush us. But prisoners persist inside Zionist occupation prisons. There’s writing and studying and organizing happening every day, unbeknownst to the enemy, and in colonial prisons across Turtle Island, prisoners are organizing for better working conditions. Reading, writing, they are striking, rioting and partaking in hunger strikes.
Prisoners are the compass of our struggle and we must follow and support them and understand that, as believers in the liberatory power of resistance, we are all potentially future prisoners. Malcolm X reminds us that we are not outnumbered, we are just out organised. We must go beyond mobilization. I ask that you join an organization – Samidoun, or another anti-imperialist or prison solidarity group. Organize yourself to resist. Be part of this global resistance. Long live Yemen’s steadfast resistance and the glorious and united Palestinian resistance, from Hamas to the Popular Front to Hezbollah and beyond, victory is imminent!
Thank you.
