The Electronic Intifada Podcast 4 March 2025
This was the message Canadian author and activist Yves Engler shared during The Electronic Intifada Livestream on 27 February.
Engler was certainly not deterred. He continued to speak out against Israel’s crimes even after spending five days in a Montreal jail.
Engler was initially charged with “harassment” in connection with social media posts criticizing Dahlia Kurtz, an influencer who uses social media to spread hatred against Palestinians and Muslims, and to disseminate debunked 7 October atrocity propaganda used to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
After police called Engler and informed him of his impending arrest, he went online to refute the accusations of harassment. “On dozens of occasions I’ve responded to Kurtz’s racist, violent anti-Palestinian posts on X,” Engler wrote on his website.
Because of that post, police then claimed Engler was also harassing the police and added a series of new charges.
Throughout the 16-month bombing campaign in Gaza, Engler would film his confrontations of figures that supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This included high profile Canadian politicians, including foreign minister Mélanie Jolie, then-deputy prime minister and finance minister Chrystia Freeland, as well as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Engler said the legal case against him was a “prime example of the lawfare that’s being used by Zionist groups across North America and the world.”The author said this was a reaction to the strength that the Palestine solidarity movement has built.
“There’s never been a greater upsurge of international solidarity than over the past 16 months,” Engler said.
“There is no example in the history of Canadian foreign policy where there’s been more demonstrations, more actions, more disruptions, against Canada’s complicity in an international crime.”
For this reason, Engler emphasized the importance of pushing back.
“I think we still have relatively free societies,” Engler said.
It should not get too far to “deter us from activity, deter us from campaigning, deter us from being bold, from continuing to take action.”
At the top of the program, associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman delivered a news briefing highlighting Israel’s ongoing military assault in the occupied West Bank, as well as Israel’s delayed handover of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners as part of the exchange deal that concluded the first phase of the ceasefire in Gaza.
BBC censorship
Associate editor Asa Winstanley highlighted the BBC’s censoring of their own documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone following an anti-Palestinian campaign.
The British broadcaster faced criticism for translating references to “Jews” – al-yahud in Arabic – by Palestinians in the documentary to “Israelis.”Ali Abunimah, director of The Electronic Intifada, explained why that translation is accurate within its context.
“Hamas, as a part of the Palestinian resistance, has made clear repeatedly from its top leadership down, and this was as part of the renewed official charter that was published in 2017,” Abunimah said.“They say that we fight the Israelis not because they are Jews, but because there are oppressors.”
Palestinians fight for their liberation from Israel’s settler-colonialism in “exactly the same way that the Algerians fought the French,” Abunimah added.
“Not because they didn’t like camembert and brie” or “baguettes and garlic and berets,” Abunimah explained.
“It wasn’t because they’re anti-French or because they don’t like complicated subjunctive tenses of the French language. It’s because the French were their oppressors. The French had come to steal their country from them and subjugate them.”
Palestinians “didn’t choose the religion of their occupier,” Barrows-Friedman added.
“It’s not their fault that their occupier happened to be Jewish.”
Rather, it is Israel and its propaganda apparatus that consistently tries to blur the line between anti-Jewish bigotry, on the one hand, with criticism of Israel’s state ideology, Zionism, on the other.
“They put the Jewish symbols on their weapons, on their tanks, on their warplanes, on their uniforms,” Abunimah said.
“The system of rule that Israel has imposed is one of what B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, accurately describes as Jewish supremacy,” Abunimah added, referring to B’Tselem’s 2021 report concluding that Israel is an apartheid state.
Israel’s sabotage of the ceasefire
Contributing editor Jon Elmer broke down the seventh prisoner exchange of the first phase of the ceasefire, as well as the handover of the remains of Israeli captives, including those of the Bibas family.
The exchanges took place in the southern city of Rafah, as well as in Nuseirat in central Gaza.
Elmer discussed several military operations that the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, depicted on stage during the Rafah exchange that their forces carried out against the Israeli military during the war.
He also emphasized Israel’s repeated violations of the ceasefire.
In the discussion, Jon, Nora, Ali and Asa talked about the prospects for the next phase of the deal – as Israel apparently moves to scupper it by cutting off all food and humanitarian supplies to Gaza.They also looked at how Israel used the return of the bodies of the Bibas family, three of whose members apparently died in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in November 2023, to stir up renewed genocidal hate against Palestinians.
And they talked about how New York governor Kathy Hochul forced Hunter College, part of the City University of New York, to cancel a search for a professorship in Palestine studies, yet another blatant act of censorship on behalf of Israel and its lobby.
You can watch the program on YouTube, Rumble or Twitter/X, or you can listen to it on your preferred podcast platform.
This writer produced and directed the program and The Electronic Intifada’s Maureen Clare Murphy and Asa Winstanley contributed writing and production. Michael F. Brown contributed pre-production assistance and Eli Gerzon contributed post-production assistance. Past episodes of The Electronic Intifada livestream can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
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