The Lawfare Campaign Against Pro-Palestinian Speech Comes To Canada.

Canada Is Now Joining The Long List of Western Countries to Begin Criminalizing Anti-Genocide Speech.

Pictured Above: Canadian author Yves Engler.

On his website the Canadian writer and author of the books “ Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy” and “Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People’s History of the Canadian Military” Yves Engler wrote, “Tomorrow the Montreal police will arrest me”.

The reason? He said it’s because of his “posting to social media against Israel’s genocide in Gaza”.

He “received a phone call from a Montreal police officer by the last name of Crivello” who asked him “to come to a downtown police station where I will be charged for harassment and indecent communication.”

Yves wrote that:

Crivello (the police officer) said a complaint was submitted against me months ago by a legal firm on behalf of racist media personality Dahlia Kurtz. Crivello said I had described Kurtz as a “genocide” supporter and “fascist” on Twitter. Guilty as charged.

He noted that “On dozens of occasions I’ve responded to Kurtz’ racist, violent anti-Palestinian posts on X”.

Before getting into the free-speech issues let’s look at the facts.

Dahlia Kurtz is a Canadian influencer who describes herself on her website as an “award-winning radio talk show host, international speaker, and syndicated columnist.”

She has written for mainstream Canadian outlets like the National Post, Hosts a radio show on Sirius XM, and has 41.4K followers on X.

Kurtz is an open and proud supporter of Israel’s Mass murder campaign in Gaza. For context, Amnesty International has said that Israel is “committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza” and concluded in a lengthy report that there is a “sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip”.

The report found that “Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.”

Human Rights Watch similarly concluded that “Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide” by “inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the population in Gaza by intentionally depriving Palestinian civilians there of adequate access to water, , most likely resulting in thousands of deaths”

The International Court of Justice also found that “it is "plausible" that Israel has committed acts that violate the Genocide Convention.”

Kurtz is a strong supporter of a mass murder campaign that the world’s top human rights organizations have concluded is a genocide and the ICJ has concluded is a “plausible genocide”. Calling her a “genocide supporter” is not “harassment and indecent communications” it’s a fact.

Furthermore, Kurtz herself has engaged in some truly vile rhetoric on social media and on her Twitter page where she sports over 41 thousand followers.

For starters she has repeatedly engaged in atrocity denial, minimizing the well-documented fact that Israel is intentionally starving civilians in Gaza. She shared a video to social media of Palestinians celebrating the ceasefire in Gaza and wrote:

Super energetic starving children in Gaza, dancing in their cozy, clean and warm sweaters, whilst clearly freezing to death. The adults choreographing the celebration are their genocided obese parents.

In another tweet, she shared a video that purported to show a Palestinian child holding a gun (for context Israel holds Youth military training camps as well) saying:

That kid in Gaza doesn't look malnourished to me. Regular meals supplemented with guns and hate.

For context, this is propaganda used to deny the well-documented fact that Israel has been deliberately starving civilians in Gaza. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against Isreali Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for the “war crime of starvation as a method of warfare”.

The UN has also said that the Israeli blockade in Gaza has caused “one if four people” to be “starving” and “nine out of ten families in some areas” to spend “a day and night without food.

The “Integrated Food Security Phase Classification” also found that the blockade would cause “all 2 million people in Gaza” to face “acute food insecurity, with at least one in four households facing famine-like conditions”.

Kurtz has also spread fake news to justify civilian casualties in Gaza. On Twitter, she published a fake news story, without providing a link saying:

NEWS: About half of Gaza was aware of and involved in the October 7 massacre. Terror network Al Jazeera published a propaganda program about the plan for October 7 — with the order, day, and time of 6:30am. Instructions were disseminated amongst the innocent civilians of Gaza.

This is clearly propaganda used to justify Israel’s mass targeting of civilians in Gaza. It is reminiscent of videos the Israeli government has posted to social media that claim there are “no innocent civilians in Gaza”.

This is propaganda to justify Israel's targeting of civilians in Gaza, where the Geneva-based human rights organization “Euro-Med Monitor” found that 9 out of every 10 people killed by Israel in Gaza are civilians and the UN found that 70 percent of people killed are “women and children”, “the ages most represented among the dead were five to nine-year-olds” and “80% of victims were killed in residential buildings or similar housing”.

Kurtz also supports the complete ethnic cleansing and annexation of Gaza. In response to Donald Trump’s call to “take over Gaza” and force Palestinians into “Jordan, Egypt, or other Places”, she said, “Goodbye Gaza Strip, Hello Maga Strip”. She is also on record saying that “Gaza is not a country”.

Dahlia Kurtz has also engaged in extreme dehumanizing rhetoric. In one tweet she called former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar a “rat” and tweeted “the dead rat of Gaza” after he was killed.

Kurtz has also extended this type of rhetoric to her political opponents. She quoted a clip from the Piers Morgan Show where the Israeli intelligence asset Mosab Hassan Yousef called the political commentator Cenk Uygur a “parasite” for his support of Palestine.

She has also repeatedly called for pro-Palestinian protestors to be deported to Gaza while it was being bombed by Israel.

She once tweeted out “Now it’s time to send all those death-chanting Intifada university students to Gaza”.

In response to an Anti-Zionist Jewish protest that took place against the genocide in Gaza at Canada’s parliament building, she said :

These "Jews" love Gaza so much. I have no problem sending them all there with my own money. It's an investment.

In response to a University campus protest against the genocide in Gaza, she said “They clearly belong together ... in Gaza”.

Of all the lawfare campaigns I have covered against pro-Palestine figures, this one has to take the cake for the most ludicrous yet.

Yves Engler has criticized a public figure who has:

• Denied well-documented war crimes

• Spread fake news to justify the murder of civilians

• Called For The Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza

• Called her political opponents “parasites”

• And called to deport her political opponents to Gaza.

and for this, he is being arrested for “harassment and indecent communication”.

The fact that the Montreal police are going along with this case is truly terrifying.

But it’s part of a much larger lawfare campaign against those who oppose the genocide in Gaza.

The UK government has now gone after Richard Medhurst, Richard Barnard, Sarah Wilkinson, Asa Winstanley, and Miko Peled for their reporting and activism on Palestine.

Switzerland briefly jailed journalist Ali Abunimah when he was supposed to give a talk on Palestine in the country.

Austria has recently joined the British legal case against journalist Richard Medhurst for his reporting on Palestine.

This new case against Yves Engles is just the latest development in the growing criminalization of pro-Palestine and anti-genocide speech in the Western world.

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