Two Toronto police officers entered a small classroom at York University on Feb. 2 just as Muhannad Ayyash was preparing to give a lecture on the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

The officers told us the university had called the police and asked them to check out a “major event” and “a possible protest” happening on campus.

I invited them to stay for the lecture and they just smiled. After a few short minutes, they left.

The episode was not an isolated event, but rather a clear manifestation of a structure of colonialism and racism that permeates Canadian post-secondary institutions.

In so far as institutional anti-Palestinian racism is concerned, York University itself has a long and troubling history.

@ShamsCharania: Atlanta’s Trae Young and Toronto’s Scottie Barnes have replaced Joel Embiid and Julius Randle on the NBA Eastern Conference All-Star team.

Synopsis from Tribeca Film Festival: Eschewing the glaringly color-blind format of many other documentaries interested in advocating for plant-based living, They’re Trying to Kill Us utilizes its specificity as an act of community care and offers up a new vision of what veganism might look like for communities of color who have been systematically targeted by nutritional and environmental racism. Executive produced by Billie Eilish and Chris Paul and featuring appearances from plant-based living advocates and cultural influencers such as Dame Dash, Angela Yee, Mya, Styles P, and Ne-yo, Kuhn and Lewis’ eye-opening film sheds light on ever urgent issues of food and health injustice. —Sarah-Tai Black

Link to watch film: https://www.theyretryingtokillus.com/

The site asks for an email address, first, and last name. If you don't want to sign up to their mailing list - which to be fair is how I learned about the free streaming this month - you can enter any info.

Season so far plot

Overplotting: On the last month plot, the Suns and Pelicans are sharing a spot, as are the Magic and Nets. The Warriors and Mavericks are sharing a spot on the season so far plot.

New data source: For this post - and probably going forward - I switched from using Basketball-Reference.com data to NBA.com data. NBA.com provides many more filters for the team advanced stats tables than BR, which enabled me to create the last month plot. There are small differences between the NBA.com and BR data, which I think is because NBA.com doesn't count In-Season Tournament as regular season games but BR does.

Previous edition: Team offensive and defensive ratings (Dec 31, '23)

Meanwhile, BC United has committed to scrap the CleanBC plan, saying it “will kill jobs, kill paycheques, kill billions in funding for vital public services and plunge our province into a recession.”

If anything, B.C.’s progress in reducing emissions has been too slow for such a wealthy place in light of the climate emergency we find ourselves in. As of 2021, B.C.’s greenhouse gas emissions were a mere three per cent below 2007 levels, even as the economy was still emerging from COVID-19 shutdowns that year.

The consequences of inaction are becoming painfully clear, globally and locally. We estimated economic costs of $10.6 billion to $17.1 billion from B.C.’s 2021 extreme weather trilogy of heat dome, wildfires and floods/landslides. Nearly 600 people died in the heat dome event alone, a call to action if ever there was one.

Despite this, the provincial government remains overly concerned about introducing climate action that affects industry’s “competitiveness.” It has overseen a major expansion of the oil and gas industry, with gas production up 40 per cent in 2022 relative to 2017 — when the current government was first elected — and 126 per cent higher than 2007, when B.C. first legislated GHG reduction targets.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/13889523

Canadian organizations representing Jewish, Muslim and Palestinian communities, along with anti-racism activists, have joined forces to condemn the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies (FSWC) for allegedly instructing its employees to surveil and report Ontario school students for criticizing Israel.

A CBC News report published last month quoted two FSWC employees who said that the centre’s educators were instructed to report students who made comments critical of Israel, or references to the genocide and occupation of Palestinians, to the organization.

The whistleblowers, who were kept anonymous, told CBC: “The idea is to contact the school, inform the school they have an antisemitism problem and pressure the school to shut down the Palestinian support [by] accusing them of antisemitism, encouraging more pro-Zionist workshops or lessons.”

On Nov. 17, 2023, Eman, a 28-year-old Palestinian woman living in Cobourg, Ontario, woke up to scroll through Instagram for updates on Gaza, as she had done every morning since October 7.

As she clicked on a video, Eman quickly realized that she was watching something she never wanted to see: Her 26-year-old brother, Ahmed, laying face down on a sidewalk.

His head was blurred, but blood spilling onto the pavement was visible. Eman’s father, Saad, was crouched down beside him, clinging onto a white flag and crying out in Arabic: “I told you — let’s stay at home, my son!”

Canadian organizations representing Jewish, Muslim and Palestinian communities, along with anti-racism activists, have joined forces to condemn the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies (FSWC) for allegedly instructing its employees to surveil and report Ontario school students for criticizing Israel.

A CBC News report published last month quoted two FSWC employees who said that the centre’s educators were instructed to report students who made comments critical of Israel, or references to the genocide and occupation of Palestinians, to the organization.

The whistleblowers, who were kept anonymous, told CBC: “The idea is to contact the school, inform the school they have an antisemitism problem and pressure the school to shut down the Palestinian support [by] accusing them of antisemitism, encouraging more pro-Zionist workshops or lessons.”

Last week, we passed the 100th-day mark of Israel’s latest episode of aggression against the people of Gaza. It was a depressing milestone to consider. A hundred days of Palestinians being mercilessly exterminated in all kinds of brutal ways: Israeli bombs ripping them apart, Israeli bullets piercing their skulls, and the Israeli-imposed siege starving them or killing them through otherwise treatable infections.

A hundred days in which the countries that said “never again” almost 80 years ago did nothing to stop our extermination. A hundred days in which we pleaded, humanitarian organisations pleaded, the United Nations pleaded and people in the streets across the world pleaded, but we were all ignored.

The devaluing of Palestinian life is not a supposition, it is a statistical fact. According to a new study of coverage in major US newspapers, for every Israeli death Israelis are mentioned eight times – or at a rate 16 times more per death than that of Palestinians. An analysis of BBC coverage by data specialists Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava found a similarly devastating disparity, and that humanising terms such as “mother” or “husband” were used far less often to describe Palestinians, while emotive terms such as “massacre” or “slaughter’” were almost only ever applied to the Israeli victims of Hamas’ atrocities.

Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, while laying out South Africa’s case against Israel in the international court of justice, described this as “the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something.” For younger generations exposed to numerous video clips of screaming mothers clutching the lifeless corpses of their newborns, this whole episode has proven instructive.

What do these young people then make of media coverage, or the statements of politicians, that don’t seem to treat Palestinian life as having any worth at all? What conclusions are being drawn about the growing minority populations of western countries whose media and political elites are making so little effort to disguise their contempt for Palestinian life as it is extinguished on such a biblical scale?

St. Louis, Missouri, US

It took far longer than he expected, but on January 12, in a 12-0 vote, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen voted overwhelmingly to adopt the committee substitute that had emerged from the Legislation and Rules Committee earlier in the week, calling for a bilateral ceasefire in Gaza. With its passage, St. Louis became the 16th municipality in the country to call for a ceasefire — reminding itself to prize its humanity above all else, to “give it a front seat” as Congresswoman Bush might say.