Palestine Supporters Denounce Zionist Violence, Police Brutality

180 activists rallied at the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia in Victoria, for the thirty-eighth weekend in a row, to demand a ceasefire abroad and an end to violence against peaceful protesters at home.

Today we had two representatives from university encampments address the attendance. The first one was of course from the University of Victoria, gathering support for the People’s Park encampment, currently engaged in stalled negotiations with the administration. While the topic didn’t come in the address, it is relevant to mention the encampment residents have been injured by a hostile individual and three dogs last month.

The second speaker is back from Virginia Tech and was among the first to have been arrested back in April in a wave of police crackdown on university encampments that has widely been denounced not only for its precipitous use of force instead of negotiations but sometimes its graphic brutality as well.

And then we had a surprise speaker, our comrade Bruce Dean who’s back from the hospital after having been viciously assaulted by a Zionist at a rally on June 9, then brutally arrested by VicPD officers even though he was manifestly the victim, discharged prematurely from the hospital even though he was fighting for his life due to multiple injuries and complications, detained in handcuffs for hours, then allegedly thrown onto the pavement by headquarters as he was released.

The cab driver supposed to bring him back home instead interceded with the police to have it call an ambulance and the patient driven back to the hospital, where he underwent hip replacement and heart surgery.

Dean has reached out to the Independent Investigations Office (IIO), which is notorious for securing very few indictments of offending police officers. This may be attributed to the fact that roughly half of investigators are former cops.

Also noteworthy is that Dean exchanged at length with Councillor Susan Kim after his speech. It turns out he was assaulted eleven days prior to a city of Victoria council meeting motion by Marg Gardiner calling out alleged rampant antisemitism in town, countered by a Jewish collective instead denouncing violence against Palestine supporters by Zionists.

While we rightfully clamour for a ceasefire abroad, we should emphasise that our own cities have become battlegrounds in this struggle for Palestine liberation. In the age of social media and livestreamed genocide, inflammatory rhetoric and colonial mindsets spread violence half a world away to the farthest reaches of the globe, and no one standing for human rights is safe from it.