The United States and Canada announced earlier this month that they were listing the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which the U.S. government called a “sham charity” front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist group. The group responded by threatening to sue the Canadian government, the National Post reported last week.
Leaders of Jewish and pro-Israel groups in Canada told JNS that they applaud the government’s decision, but that it should have come long ago.
Shimon Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, told JNS that CIJA has been calling on the Canadian government to list Samidoun for more than four years.
“We have provided officials with voluminous documentation supporting this demand. Everyone from Canadian G7 allies, like Germany and the European Union, has listed-banned Samidoun. Financial institutions have banned Samidoun from using their platforms,” he said. “The case for listing it as a terrorist entity was clear.”
CIJA is happy that Canada “finally acted, although it was a long time in coming and Samidoun has, during those years, been a primary driver of the hate we are experiencing,” Fogel told JNS.
Fogel noted that Samidoun has threatened but hasn’t yet taken legal action.
“It has not, to this point, been followed by any legal efforts and frankly, we doubt they can avail themselves of any legal remedies,” he told JNS. “The case is so compelling they could not possibly offer any rationale to a court that would justify reconsideration.”
The pro-Israel agency of the Jewish Federations of Canada is following developments in the government’s action to make sure that Samidoun is stripped of its nonprofit status, that its assets are seized, and that its immigration status in Canada is reviewed, “and that ultimately, they are ordered to leave the country,” Fogel said.
Mike Fegelman, executive director of HonestReporting Canada, told JNS that “Samidoun has proudly praised the murder, rape and kidnapping of Israeli civilians by Hamas, and the news media must not allow the group to try and rehabilitate itself and rewrite history now that it has been banned as a terrorist organization in Canada.”
“If this lawsuit progresses, Canadians writ large, along with political stakeholders, lawmakers and media, should welcome Samidoun having to go through discovery, so we can learn of its sources of funding that support its terrorist activity, locally and abroad,” he said.
Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of NGO Monitor, told JNS that he has monitored Samidoun for “several years.”
Samidoun, which had active branches in 15 countries, functions “as fundraising arms for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in their activities around the world,” Steinberg said.
The PFLP is a “constituent member” of and more radical than the Palestine Liberation Organization, and has condemned the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for agreeing to the Oslo framework, Steinberg said.
Samidoun directed “quite a bit of violence in some of what they called ‘protests,’ or more like mob events, in Vancouver, shutting down public areas, roadways and other things that should have been red flags in Canada for a long time,” he said. “In fact, that has been raised by members of Parliament and in the media.”
The joint U.S.-Canadian designation of Samidoun had the result for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party of “deflecting the hostility and the criticism from anti-Israel groups,” Steinberg said. It “was significantly easier for them to say, ‘We did this with the United States. This is a security decision, and there is no political elements to it.’”
Terry Glavin, a Postmedia columnist who has written extensively on Samidoun, told JNS that “ever since Samidoun was established, I’ve been aware of them, more or less.”
“It didn’t take any revelation. They were a part of PFLP. Those are the people they hang around with,” he said of the three-year-old nonprofit. “Those are their heroes, and they were open about it.”
Trudeau may have dragged his feet for years before listing the terror group due to “being timid and pressured” by voting demographics, Glavin said.
He called Khaled Barakat, Samidoun’s Vancouver-based leader, and Barakat’s wife Charlotte Lynne Kates, a member of Samidoun’s board, “fanatical” and compared their activities to setting small fires with each protest. Some Canadian journalists from major publications soft-pedaled their reporting on those protests, asking simplistic questions like, “Was the turnout what you expected?” Glavin said.
“Nobody was looking at really what was going on,” he told JNS. “This wasn’t pamphleting from the basement, or some unionist standing on a back street in Toronto or Vancouver.”
Anthony Housefather, a member of the Canadian Parliament and the country’s special advisor on Jewish community relations and antisemitism, has defended Trudeau against charges of Jew-hatred and has long targeted Samidoun.
“It is ironic that this group claims it is within their free speech to burn Canadian and American flags, call for the destruction of our countries and Israel, glorify the massacre of Oct. 7 and then claim it is defamatory to call them a terrorist organization, which the governments of both Canada and the United States have recognized that they are,” he told JNS, of Samidoun.
Steinberg told JNS that Samidoun has fingerprints “in the wave of antisemitism that has been growing since Oct. 7, particularly on campuses.” There has been a “very visible Samidoun presence,” including posters and recruiting materials, on North American campuses, he said.
“We don’t know all these cancer activities out there—their funding, their staffing, their support framework is carefully hidden,” Steinberg said. He added that universities “will have to be much more careful” about scrutinizing the funding of anti-Israel campus groups to make sure they don’t trace back to designated terror groups.