Dear friends,
We write to inform you that there is currently an occupation under way in solidarity with Gaza at NDP Foreign Affairs Critic Paul Dewar’s constituency office in Ottawa, unceded Algonquin territory. Please read about what you can do below – we need your urgent solidarity now.
We believe silence is complicity. It is time we help free the NDP from its deafening silence on the massacre taking place in Gaza.
Thousands of Palestinians are being murdered while Canada’s politicians remain silent about massive and escalating human rights violations being committed by Israel. Schools, hospitals, UN shelters, playgrounds. Anything and everything is a target.
The NDP must speak out against Israel’s war crimes. The silence of the main federal parties, including the NDP, offers a cloak of impunity to Israel, shielding it from accountability for its criminal actions.
Unless and until our political parties take meaningful action to oppose Israel’s massacre of Palestinian civilians, there will and there must be a heavy political price.
We support universal human rights. We oppose war crimes. We vote.
But more than that, we will not sit idly by while the NDP and other parties take our votes for granted because they think that politically we have nowhere else to go. The people that Israel is massacring in Gaza really do have nowhere else to go and they are counting on the world to intervene.
Join us.
WHAT YOU CAN DO IN OTTAWA
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We ask you to join us for a solidarity gathering outside Paul Dewar’s constituency office at 12pm today, Thursday July 31 at 1306 Wellington Street (Midway between Holland and Island Park).
WHAT YOU CAN DO WHEREVER YOU ARE
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Join the pan-Canadian virtual occupation. Contact Paul Dewar’s office by email (paul.dewar@parl.gc.ca), phone (613-946-8682), AND fax (613-946-8680).
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Share our social media updates and add your own comments. On twitter, use the hashtag #Voters4Gaza and follow @Voters4Gaza. Tweet directly to @PaulDewar, @ThomasMulcair, and @NDP_HQ. On Facebook, like the Voters4Gaza page.
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Contact your Member of Parliament (Pay a visit to your local NDP MP’s office if you can): www.parl.gc.ca/Parliamentarians/en/members
SAMPLE TWEETS
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Dear @NDP_HQ: be a genuinely progressive voice. Support Palestinian human rights. Oppose war crimes. #NDP #Voters4Gaza #cdnpoli
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Israel is committing war crimes. Until the #NDP speaks up against this it is supporting impunity. #Voters4Gaza #cdnpoli
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.@PaulDewar: Israel is occupying power & refuses to abide by international law. #NDP must demand accountability. #Voters4Gaza #cdnpoli
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This war isn’t about Hamas, religion, or rockets. It’s about land, racism, & ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. #NDP #Voters4Gaza #cdnpoli
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“In the end, we remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” #NDP #Voters4Gaza #cdnpoli
In solidarity,
Voters for Gaza
https://www.facebook.com/Voters4Gaza
Voters for Gaza 
Please stop this genocide
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Good work, everyone! Thank you for this. I am in Québec city and will be sending emails to Mr. Dewar and Anne-Marie Day, my MP. Don’t give up!
Tracy
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Free Gaza, stop killing children.
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I find it inexplicable that the NDP has climbed into bed with an Imperial Power (Israel) that continues its occupation of the West Bank through Settlements and a complete barricade (air, land and sea) of Gaza. The current Israelli war against Gaza has resulted in the bombing of a hospital and a UNICEF school with civilian casualties (inlcuding children) that is now over 1,000 and climbing on a daily basis. It takes little imagination to view Gaza as a concentration camp.
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together, we can.
ISRAEL has to stop.
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Paul Dewar, MP
Foreign Affairs Critic,
New Democratic Party
Dear Paul:
As a longstanding member of the NDP, a former Steering Committee member of the Canadian Peace Alliance, and as Treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War, I applaud the courage and determination of those Voters4Gaza protesters who are currently occupying your office. I believe you should come to regard the motives of those protesters as genuinely for peace in the Middle East and in the best long-term interests of the New Democratic Party, whether you see it that way today or not.
There is a problem of terrorism in the Middle East from Libya and Iraq to Palestine, which the NDP fails to comprehend. I’ll talk about the other places later on. At this very moment, however, the most glaring acts of terrorism are taking place in Gaza as Israeli armed forces pummel the tiny, besieged, coastal enclave of Gaza from the land, sea, and air causing massive deaths, injuries, and damage to the Gazan infrastructure, in complete violation of international law. The phenomenon is called state terrorism. And, in my opinion, the cynical purpose of it is not to protect Israeli civilians but rather to make life in Gaza so impossible for Palestinians – with no electricity, water, sewage system, housing, food – that they voluntarily emigrate. The phenomenon is called ethnic cleansing.
As your constituency office is today occupied by protesters motivated by the failure of the NDP significantly to distinguish its policy statements on the latest Israeli attack on Gaza from that of the Liberals or the Harper government, I am writing today to you to suggest that you and the NDP immediately change your ways before it is too late. Your failure to condemn Israeli war crimes in Gaza is cowardly. Furthermore, the so-called “balanced approach” you aspire to maintain regarding Israel/Palestine is a diplomatic illusion. After over 100 years of the Israeli colonial project in Palestine, the Palestinians now control less than 10% of the lands of historic Palestine and are confined, to be shot like fish in a barrel in Gaza, or in bantustans (reservations) in the West Bank. Israel is now the fourth largest military in the entire world and its calls for the right to self-defence, against the puny efforts of Palestinian militants, are ludicrous. The socio-economic-political situation for Palestinians is somewhat akin to the native people in Canada, except that in Canada, we Canadians have begun collectively to try to make amends, apologies, land claims settlements, compensation payments, and the like. In Palestine, however, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians continues at an ever-increasing pace – with the full support of Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau. In such a situation of illegal occupation and daily subject to Israeli crimes outlawed by the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 (to which Canada was a High Consenting Party), the Palestinians have the right to resist.
In case you haven’t noticed, Paul, the NDP is rapidly losing the support of the peace community. Some of my own family members and close friends in the labour movement as well are telling me that they won’t vote NDP in the 2015 federal election . Why should they bother going out to vote NDP if the NDP, except for one lone member in Quebec, is indistinguishable in its foreign policy from the Liberals and Conservatives? I humbly suggest you break significantly with the Harper government’s policies on Palestine at once. On Palestine, please call for an immediate end to Israel’s illegal 7-year-long blockade of Gaza. Demand that Israel unilaterally end its brutal attack on Gaza and act as if you believe in the NDP’s policy against the illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and the construction of settlements.
Paul, we have met before.
In fact, a year ago at about this time, Professor Amir Maasoumi of Montreal and I visited you in your office on Parliament Hill concerning an International Peace Delegation led by Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire to Syria. We asked you, at that time, to make a clear distinction between NDP policy and that of the Harper government which supports the covert and illegal US war of aggression against Syria, organized by the so-called “Friends of Syria” Group (FSG) of countries, of which Canada is unfortunately (thanks to the Harper government) a member. The FSG countries are using terrorist mercenaries in Syria to try to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad, who was just re-elected with double the percentage of votes received by Stephen Harper three years ago.
You never did what we asked. Rather, you continued to focus on the Syrian refugee question in isolation, completely ignoring the FSG-sponsored terrorism against Syria which is creating the refugee problem in the first place. On Syria, please make a 180 degree change: call for Canada to quit the FSG (and its economic sanctions committee) and to stop supporting the terrorist mercenaries in that country.
I need to point out something else. You spoke out publicly the other day about the deepening crisis of the Libyan state, where rival militias are now battling it out over control of parts of the country. I need to point out to you that the NDP supported NATO’s illegal regime- change operation in Libya, under the guise of the doctrine of “the responsibility to protect” (R2P) using its military forces to support terrorists on the ground in Libya. (At the very least, you and the NDP did not oppose the use of Canadian fighter planes and warships in that illegal action.) Today, those very same terrorists on the ground in Libya have destroyed the integrity of the Libyan state and made life increasingly miserable for ordinary Libyan civilians, who lost loved ones, their homes, their access to civilian infrastructure, and their security of the person, thanks to NATO’s “humanitarian” regime-change operation.
In closing, Paul, I ask you please to take heed from the Voters4Gaza occupation of your office. I hope these folks don’t actually have to engage in writing on your walls. Their message is clear: if you want to form the government in 2015, please start developing an independent foreign policy behind which Canadians can rally, one that is not made in Washington or Brussels. Please start by supporting the Palestinian people in their just demand for an end to the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza and an end to the Israeli occupation in general.
Ken Stone
Hamilton Mountain
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