ITEM:  In the UK, a Brighton and Hove Albion football fan was banned from attending the next five games because he wore a ‘regulation’ Palestine football shirt, under his jacket.  When he removed his jacket, a steward saw Roger Wade’s shirt and told him to leave mid-game.  Wade, a season ticket holder for 10 years, refused.  Later, he wrote a letter of complaint.  The football club’s response was to ban him from attending the next five games. 

ITEM:  at the Superbowl’s half-time show in New Orleans last winter, a protester displayed a Palestinian flag and a Sudanese flag. He was dragged out and banned from going anywhere near NFL games for life.

ITEM: Last Friday, the Victorious Festival in Portsmouth, UK deliberately cut the mics to the Irish band, The Mary Wallopers, when  they displayed the Palestinian flag at a concert.  In protest, tens of thousands of fans chanted “Free Palestine”. 

As the English indie rock band The Dinner Party said in a statement, 

“As a band we cannot cosign political censorship and will therefore be boycotting the festival today. As Gazans are deliberately plunged into catastrophic famine after two years of escalating violence, it is urgent and obvious that artists use their platform to draw attention to the cause. To see an attempt to direct attention away from the genocide in order to maintain an apolitical image is immensely disappointing.”

The Dinner Party, Clifford (from the US) and Irish rock band The Academic pulled out of the weekend festival—refused to play. 

ITEM:  Moh Ahmed, Canadian four-time Olympian runner, is one of 413 Canadian signatories to a letter which calls on Tennis Canada to cancel Canada’s Davis Cup finals in Halifax in two weeks’ time. Team Canada is supposed to play against Team Israel.  The letter says in part 

“…sport has historically been used to promote national sentiment tied to both “genocide” and the dismantling ofapartheid states. This is an important moment for Sport Canada and Tennis Canada to promote social justice and stand on the right side of history.”

ITEM:   Buddies in Bad Times Theatre is one of 18 Canadian theatre and performing arts organizations that have joined a “cultural and academic boycott” of Israel.

Buddies — the world’s largest queer theatre company — said that they had joined the international Palestinian Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel (PACBI). As part of the boycott, the organizations said they won’t accept funding from the Israeli state or any institutions that they say are complicit in the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories or other violations of international law.

These are just some of the ways in which organizations and their members have experienced speaking out about Israel’s genocide.

82% of Israeli Jews support expelling Palestinians from Gaza

But I can’t find one Canadian mainstream, bricks and mortar-based newspaper or news program, or commercial outlet that  has come out decidedly and furiously against Israel’s genocide.  In the last six weeks, some journalists have mentioned the starvation, the deliberate murders of children in Gaza.  Only now do the journalists write – or their masters permit them to write – even a short discussion about Israelis as murderous thugs and out of control.  For example, a June 2025 poll revealed that 82% of Israeli Jews supported the “transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries.”  54% of Jews who responded were “very supportive” of transfer.  What may be worse news, was that nearly 50% of respondents (Israeli Jews) agreed with killing Palestinians. 47% of respondents believed that the IDF (Israel Defense Forces)

“when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants?”

What do these items show us?

• After 22 months of Israel’s genocide of a people and destruction of their homes, schools and universities, we now start to hear journalists tell us they have always opposed the genocide.  But the title of the book by award-winning author Omar El Akkad says it all.   His new book is called One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.  El Akkad is a transplanted Egyptian, who attended university in Canada and once was a reporter for The Globe and Mail.  El Akkad is filled with outrage about Israel’s genocide and those working in the establishment who turn a blind eye—or worse — lie about what is going on.  It’s harder and harder to deny starvation even though many in the media at first parroted  Israel’s talking points:
  • Gaza’s children have pre-existing conditions that dispose them to starving; 
  • Hamas plants bombs under hospitals; 
  • Israel never targets journalists (except five died the other day in a deliberate Israeli air strike at the Nasser hospital).  In fact, Israel has killed more than 200 journalists in under two years.

• There has never been a more divided scene in Canada:  establishment figures such as politicians, newspaper publishers, the police, university administrators, reporters, TV personalities, the well-off and those in authority support Israel’s  genocide.  My guess is 90% of them are white and 75% male. Don’t ask me how I know.   It doesn’t seem to register with them that Palestinian civilians have suffered 83% of Gaza’s official death count of nearly 63,000.  Or that Israel kills an average of 28 children a day in Gaza. It adds up to more than 20,000 kids murdered in the last 23 months.  
• On the other side, racialized people in Canada, people under age 50, many newcomers, and almost all immigrants who came to Canada believing it was a “just” society – oppose Israel’s genocide. They are against Canada’s exporting weapons to Israel, via the US. They oppose our government’s refusal to facilitate Gazans trying to escape the genocide.  

Don’t stop talking about Gaza…

What is left for us to do? Everything.  We can’t stop talking about Gaza. We can’t give in to the mainstream media’s contortions to please funders and those in power, and the media’s falsifications of what’s really going on.   

In Halifax, one Palestinian woman from Gaza sparked sizeable weekly protests at the IRCC office (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada). She is infuriated with the government’s refusal to admit her relatives from Gaza who have been living under Israel’s bombs, drone attacks and shelling.  They have waited more than 18 months to leave for Canada.   However, though Canada welcomed nearly 300,000 Ukrainians over the last three years, the same cannot be said for Palestinians.   In the last two years, only 860 Gazans have been admitted to Canada and 1,750 applications are “pending”. 

As 19^th century British novelist Geoge Eliot once said, “”It is never too late to be what you might have been.” For anyone still sitting on the fence, this is for you.  

Feature image at the top: photo of FC Palestine sports shirt from this site