September 30, Orange Shirt Day – Drum and Sing for Missing Children of Indian Residential Schools

National Day of Truth and Reconciliation

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215 – In Memoriam (Video)

Created by Jeunes pour le Renouveau Démocratique (Youth for Democratic Renewal in Quebec, Canada). In tribute to the memory of the Indigenous children, August 23, 2021

Over 160 unmarked graves confirmed near site of Kuper Island Industrial School in BC

(July 14) – The Penelakut Tribe is one of six tribes of the Penelakut First Nation whose traditional territories include parts of southern Vancouver Island and of some of the southern Gulf islands in the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the BC mainland. On July 8 Penelakut Tribe Chief Joan Brown, Council and Elders issued an invitation to join in their work to raise awareness of the Kuper Island Industrial School and to inform people of the confirmation of more than 160 undocumented and unmarked graves near the site.

Cowessess First Nation discovers 751 unmarked graves

Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess First Nation announced on June 24 that 751 unmarked graves have been found at a cemetery near the former Marieval Indian Residential School. The Residential School operated from 1899 to 1997 in the area where Cowessess First Nation is now located. The colonial state and Catholic Church forced Indigenous children from across Saskatchewan and Manitoba to stay at the school. The RCMP and other police powers threatened Indigenous families with imprisonment if they did not hand over their children.

This Day. Netanyahu’s lesson from the Tiananmen Square massacre

June 4 is the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China. Concerning this event, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the time Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and former Ambassador to the United Nations and an American businessman with the Boston Consulting Group, was reported by the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot in November, 1989, to have said the following:

“Israel should have taken advantage of the suppression of the demonstrations in China, while the world’s attention was focused on these events, and should have carried out mass deportations of Arabs from the territories. Unfortunately, this plan I proposed did not gain support, yet I still suggest to put it into action.”

Mass grave of Indigenous children found at former BC residential school

The buried remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School have been located on the school’s grounds with the help of a specialist in the use of ground penetrating radar, said Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir in a May 27 news release. Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc is the home community of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the largest school in the residential school system run by Indian Affairs, a system that persisted until 1996.Casimir said the deaths were spoken about but had not been previously confirmed. “We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” stated Casimir, who said the discovery is an unthinkable loss. “Some were as young as three years old. We sought out a way to confirm that knowing out of deepest respect and love for those lost children and their families, understanding that Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc is the final resting place of these children.”

Latest anti-China motion in the House of Commons (I)

By Louis Lang

On February 22, an anti-China motion was introduced in the House of Commons accusing China of “genocide.”[1] The private member’s opposition motion was put forward by Conservative Michael Chong (Wellington–Halton Hills, ON), and says:

This day in 1890: The massacre at Wounded Knee

Court of Leaves, Painting by GateKeeper

By TONY SEED

Originally published December 28, 2018

1890 (29 December): The 7th U.S. Cavalry commanded by Col. James Forsyth massacred 300 unarmed and peaceful Lakhota Sioux Indians, many of them women and children, at Wounded Knee Creek (Chankpe Opi Wakpala), South Dakota – a Lakota encampment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation – after a fruitless search for weapons in their encampment. In other words, the Sioux are completely disarmed. About thirty soldiers also died, many victims of their own crossfire.

‘We Charge Genocide’ – Forerunner at UN of Black Lives Matter

By W. T. Whitney, Jr.

The police killing of George Floyd on May 25 provoked demonstrations worldwide. The United Nations Human Rights Council on June 17 debated a draft resolution introduced by the “African Group” of nations that condemned “structural racism endemic to the criminal justice system in the United States.” The African nations were responding to a letter from the families of murder victims George Floyd, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and Michael Brown; 600 human rights organizations had endorsed it.

Other U.S. appeals for relief from racist violence had arrived at the United Nations. The National Negro Congress and the NAACP delivered petitions in 1946 and 1947, respectively. Three years after the United Nations ratified its Genocide Convention, the New York-based Civil Rights Congress in 1951 submitted a petition to the United Nations. The title was: “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of the Government against the Negro People.”¹

This Day. Remembering Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza’s universities

The Islamic University of Gaza was damaged after it was bombed by Israeli warplanes early on Saturday, 2 August, 2014 | Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency

MEMO | August 4, 2020

What 

Six years ago, Israeli occupation forces targeted the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) in one of the deadliest military offensives against the two million Palestinians living within the besieged enclave. The conflict left 2,251 people dead, with more than 11,000 wounded, according to Palestinian and UN sources. A further half a million Palestinians were displaced. Six years on, the UN has complied an extensive report on the scale of destruction to Gaza’s higher education facilities during the 50-day onslaught which began 8 July 2014.

This Day. ‘Discovery’ of New Found Land and Cape Breton: Who was Caboto and what was his claim on Canada?

The Venetian navigator Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), commissioned by Henry VII of England, landed in Newfoundland, on June 24, 1497 believing it to be an island off the coast of Asia and named it New Found Land. [[1] Under the commission of this king to “conquer, occupy, and possess” the lands of “heathens and infidels”, Caboto reconnoitred the Newfoundland coast and also landed on the northern shore of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. [2]

He returned to England on August 6 and took three Mi’kmaq with him, thereby introducing slavery into North America. This may be responsible for his disappearance when he returned to Newfoundland with five ships in 1498. When his ships arrived in northern Cape Breton Island, the Mí’kmaq attacked. Only one ship returned to England, the other four, with Caboto as Captain, never returned.

This day in 1945: On Holocaust Memorial Day

Red Army doctor attends to Auschwitz prisoner after its liberation on January 27, 1945

In this seminal essay originally published on this website in 2009, Dr Hakim Adi challenges the false narrative around Holocaust Memorial Day. January 27, the day of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army in 1945, is commemorated as Holocaust Memorial Day internationally.

This Day. Martyring the six ‘Chilcotin Chiefs’

October 26 is the anniversary of the 1864 hanging of the six “Chilcotin Chiefs” (also Tsilhqot’in) by the Colony of British Columbia. The hanging took place at 7 a.m. on Front St. in Quesnel, one of the largest mass hangings in Canadian history. They had been ambushed at what they were told was a peace conference where they would meet the newly-installed Governor Frederick Seymour and discuss terms. The mostly indigenous crowd of 250 represented seem to have been Dakelh from the north, Secwepemc from the south, some Tsilhqot’in and a party of Nuxalk who walked 1000 km to honour the “Chiefs.” 

Cultural genocide: National Museum of Brazil destroyed

(September 3) – Very sad news. The 200-year-old National Museum of Brazil has been virtually destroyed by fire.

The museum in Rio de Janeiro had 20 million items, including Egyptian and Greco-Roman artifacts and a 12,000-year-old human fossil, the oldest found in the Western Hemisphere, known as “Luzia”. Connected to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the museum has expositions that include anthropology, archeology and paleontology, among others.

Farm warfare: How Israel uses chemicals to kill drops in Gaza

The use of chemical weapons is a crime against humanity. The purpose of herbicides is to enable farmers to grow produce, but Israel is quietly using them to do just the opposite in the Gaza Strip — in the name of security | AMIRA HASS, Haaretz

Palestinian farmers harvest their wheat in a farmland in central Gaza | Reuters

(July 6) – Photographs of military armored vehicles uprooting and crushing trees and vegetation within the Gaza Strip are not foreign to Israelis, but what is less widely known is that since 2014 Palestinian fields are also being  razed through the use of herbicides sprayed from the air — as first publicized by the website 972.

Zionists codify discrimination and ethnic cleansing with ‘Jewish nation-state bill’

On May 3, Israel tabled a draft law that defines Israel “as the Jewish and democratic nation state of the Jewish people to self-determination in their historic homeland.”

Sixty-four members of the Knesset voted in favour of tabling the bill, while 50 voted against. One of the bill’s sponsors, MK Avi Dichter was quoted as saying during discussion of the bill: “Anyone who does not belong to the Jewish nation cannot define the State of Israel as his nation-state.”

100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration: Palestine – Ethnic cleansing and dispossession (Excerpt)

By Dr. ISMAIL ZAYID*

Click to enlarge.

CALENDAR OF EVENTS

[…]

It was the second of November 1917 when Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, issued his infamous declaration in the form of a letter written to Lord Rothschild. It read:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

It is interesting to note that the four-letter word “Arab” occurs not once in this document. To refer to the Arabs who constituted, at the time, 92 per cent of the population of Palestine and owned 98 per cent of its land, as the non-Jewish communities is not merely preposterous but deliberately fraudulent. I do not need to tell you that this letter has no shred of legality, as Palestine did not belong to Balfour to assume such acts of generosity. Dr. Arnold Toynbee described the British role, in issuing this document, accurately:

“We were taking it upon ourselves to give away something that was not ours to give. We were promising rights of some kind in the Palestinian Arabs’ country to a third party.”

Similarly, the well-known Jewish writer, Arthur Koestler, summed it up aptly when he described the Balfour Declaration as a document in which “one nation promised a second the country of a third.”

Support Mi’kmaq demand to remove the name ‘Amherst’ from PEI historic site

Since 2008, Mi’kmaq leader Keptin John Joe Sark, a member of the Mi’kmaq Confederacy of Prince Edward Island has been demanding that the PEI government take action to have the name of Jeffrey Amherst – a notorious British General responsible for distributing blankets infected with smallpox amongst the Mi’kmaq and other Indigenous peoples in the 18th Century – removed from the historic site at Port-la-Joye at Rocky Point, across the harbour from Charlottetown.

‘Removing Cornwallis,’ it’s been a long time coming

In support of the “Removing Cornwallis” activities in Halifax, Nova Scotia – July 15, 2017 from 12:00 to 15:00 hours

By TONY SEED

On November 21, 2009 some 200 people gathered in a rally in Cornwallis Park to oppose the inaugural Halifax International Security Forum (HISF), a warmongering agency based in Washington, DC and funded by the Department of National Defence and Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. They took the collective decision to rename it Peace and Freedom Park as their very first act, an act carried out in consultation with Mi’kmaq elders such as acclaimed historian Dan Paul.

They covered the statue of Edward Cornwallis with a white sheet. The anti-war rally was organized by an ad hoc committee consisting of activists from different affiliations and background, which became No Harbour for War.

The genocide of the Palestinian people: An international law and human rights perspective

Center for Constitutional Rights, August 25, 2016

While there has been recent criticism of those taking the position that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, there is a long history of human rights scholarship and legal analysis that supports the assertion. Prominent scholars of the international law crime of genocide and human rights authorities take the position that Israel’s policies toward the Palestinian people could constitute a form of genocide. Those policies range from the 1948 mass killing and displacement of Palestinians to a half-century of military occupation and, correspondingly, the discriminatory legal regime governing Palestinians, repeated military assaults on Gaza, and official Israeli statements expressly favouring the elimination of Palestinians.

Atlas of Palestine 1917-1966

Palestine is one of the most well-documented areas of the world. What makes The Atlas of Palestine — with 450 colour pages documenting 1,300 towns and villages and 20,000 place names, and ten years in preparation — so unique? | Interview with DR. SALMAN ABU SITTA*, al-majdal

Nakba: The man reconstructing Palestine’s lost villages

Driven by a desire to return to his childhood village, Salman Abu Sitta is rebuilding the map of historic Palestine | VACY VLAZNA* Aljazeera

Abu Sitta has ensured that the keys to the Palestinians’ stolen homes will inevitably reopen the never forgotten doors | Getty Images

Salman Abu Sitta was only 10 years old when the Nakba –  the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 – happened, forcing him from his home near Beersheba. Like many Palestinians of his generation, his traumatic loss and enduring desire to return would be the defining features of his life from that moment on.

Dresden and Poznan: Two different ways to wage war

The Liberation of Poznan by the Soviet Red Army

By YURIY RUBTSOV

The Red Army and British-American forces had one enemy – the German Wehrmacht – but quite often they waged different wars. The liberation of the Polish city Poznan by the Red Army and the bombing of Dresden by [other Allied countries] – one event following one week after the other – 70 years ago in February 1945. These two examples provide a good illustration of this.

Remembering the Holocaust: Commemoration of those murdered by the Nazis

Top: Memorial plaque to those killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz, put in place in 1948 and removed in 1989. Bottom: Soviet Red Army liberates Auschwitz prisoners January 27, 1945.

Originally published on January 27, 2014 by TML Daily

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, the day in 1945 that Soviet troops liberated prisoners from the Nazis’ Auschwitz prison camp, the peace- and justice-loving people of the world join all those whose families suffered so greatly under the Holocaust, a program of systematic state-sponsored murder by the Hitlerite Nazis and their allies, the Italian fascists and Japanese militarists. The word “Holocaust” must be understood in its broadest sense as referring to the mass murder of all those who were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and murdered by the Nazis in Germany and the countries it occupied, especially the Jews and others targeted for extinction including the Roma and many Slavs as well as political opponents, particularly communists and resistance fighters. So too the Japanese militarists carried out the Nanjing Massacre and many other atrocities in China and throughout Southeast Asia, while to this day they owe reparations to the Koreans for the crimes committed against them.

Genocide scholar condemns Israel’s ‘racist’ teaching of the Holocaust

Prof. Yair Auron’s thesis is clear: Israel prefers to avoid, repress and minimize the suffering of other peoples in the Holocaust and other circumstances, to perpetuate victimization and isolationism. Ofer Aderet in Haaretz 

A memorial to the murdered European Sinti and Roma who were persecuted as ‘Gypsies,’ designed by Dani Karavan, in Berlin, 2012 | AP

The cover of the new book by historian and genocide scholar Prof. Yair Auron features a drawing of five different-coloured patches: red for political prisoners; black for asocial and work-shy prisoners; pink for homosexuals; brown for Gypsies; and purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Only one colour is missing – the yellow patch for Jews. The book’s title, “The Non-Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime,” explains why.

Imbue with new life the clarion call of Never Again!

Prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp are liberated by the Red Army, January 27, 1945.

BY DOUGAL MACDONALD, January 27, 204

On January 27, 1945, the advancing Soviet Red Army entered the Nazis’ Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp, liberating more than 7,000 prisoners, most of whom were ill or dying. The prisoners were liberated as the Red Army was inflicting one defeat after another on the German troops, driving the Hitlerites steadily backward until the final demise of the Third Reich in Berlin on May 9, 1945. Recognizing the great significance of the liberation of Auschwitz, in 2005 the United Nations General Assembly officially designated January 27 as the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the many millions of people murdered by the Nazis in their bloodthirsty quest for world domination.

Genocidal health conditions of Indigenous peoples

The CBC in August 2015 reported the results of a study from Statistics Canada showing risk of avoidable death for First Nations peoples twice that (in some cases five times that) of non-natives. On January 15th, 2016, it featured a plea by the Ontario First Nations Regional Chief, Isadore Day, that Canadians deal with the fact of inadequate health care for aboriginal peoples.

John Pilger on ISIS: Only when we see the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry

 By JOHN PILGER / johnpilger.com

In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”.  As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.

Word. ‘We will hit you with gas until you all die…’

In a startling and sinister escalation, Israeli troops stormed the West Bank’s Aida refugee camp this week with tear gas blasting and a truck loudspeaker blaring a deadly, perhaps unprecedented message: “We are the Occupation army,” it proclaimed. “Throw stones and we will hit you with gas until you all die – the youth, the children, the old people…We will not leave any of you alive.” Said one Palestinian, “Such threats merely add words to the deed.”

Official admission of long-concealed genocide by the Canadian ruling circles

Tens of thousands First Nation children died in residential schools. The fact that Canada’s Aboriginal peoples have not been wiped out, and are indeed growing in numbers, is not proof that genocide never occurred, as some would have us believe. The historical and psychological reality of genocide among our Aboriginal communities is very much alive and a part of living memory. The sooner we recognize this truth, the sooner accounts may be truly rendered without impunity.

By Dene Moore | The Canadian Press

(This article was originally published on March 14, 2014) – The death records of tens of thousands of First Nations children who died during the time residential schools were operating in Canada have been handed over to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.