A translated transcript of a speech by Nurit Peled Elhanan at a protest marking the one year anniversary of the Gaza War.

When public figures of the status of multiculturalism and immigration minister Jason Kenney and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff deem it prudent to attack Israeli Apartheid Week, a grassroots series of events organized every March on university campuses by a constellation of rag-tag student groups, we can say with fair certainty that the Palestine solidarity movement has arrived at the “fight” stage.

An important legacy of the Nazi Holocaust is the perpetrator’s defense “I didn’t know” at the Nuremberg tribunal hearings. More recently law challenges this “ostrich defense” by both perpetrators and bystanders, implying that there is an obligation to know. With regard to Israel/Palestine, there is little reason not to know about the horrific realities, for despite massive pro-Israeli advocacy there is ample documentation from within and without pointing to the clear culpability of the State of Israel in a number of international crimes against the Palestinian people.

There is hardly any election, in which the White House has a significant stake, where the electoral defeat of the pro-US candidate is not denounced as illegitimate by the entire political and mass media elite. In the most recent period, the White House and its camp followers cried foul following the free (and monitored) elections in Venezuela and Gaza, while joyously fabricating an ‘electoral success’ in Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition received over 53% of the vote.

Your job just got a whole lot harder,” quipped Naomi Klein after Iran’s Prime Minister, Ahmed Ahmadinejad’s address on April 20, at the opening day of the Durban Review of the World Conference Against Racism. In the lead-up to the Conference, I had written and lobbied tirelessly to defend it against allegations that it was an anti-Semitic hate fest.

Naomi was right. The world’s powers instantly condemned the speech to banner headlines. President Obama called it “harmful” and White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs called the speech “hateful rhetoric.” Peter Gooderham, British ambassador to the UN said it was “outrageous” and “anti-Semitic.” British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, labeled it “offensive, inflammatory and utterly unacceptable.” And French President Nicolas Sarkozy condemned it as “an intolerable call to racist hate.”

The struggles of the Vietnamese against American imperialism and the liberation struggles in South Africa were historical moments that galvanized people to act in solidarity. The time has come for us to denounce this new form of apartheid and dispel the myths that cloud the path towards justice for Palestine.

In July 2005, 171 Palestinian civil-society organizations issued a call to the “international civil society organizations, and people of conscience all over the world, to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel, similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.” This call came after 57 years of ethnic cleansing, 38 years of military occupation and one year after the International Court of Justice issued its advisory opinion declaring Israel’s apartheid wall to be illegal under international law.

Harry Abrams, B.C. representative for B’nai Brith, has filed a human-rights complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission against Peace, Earth and Justice, alleging that the Victoria-based website, its editors, manager and director “contrive to promote ongoing hatred affecting persons identifiable as Jews and/or as citizens of Israel.”

Scott Taylor is a Canadian journalist, as well as an editor, publisher, storyteller and ex-commando. He has reported from Serbia, Cambodia and Western Sahara, and is the veteran of 21 (unembedded) trips into Iraq. In September, 2004, he was betrayed by Iraqi police and kidnapped by anti-Western insurgents. After four days of captivity and beatings, Taylor was released through intervention by Turkish intelligence services. Undeterred, he returned to Iraq in 2005.

Under Paul Martin’s Liberals and Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, the Cana-dian government has rapidly shed any pretense at having an independent foreign policy. In Haiti, Canadian forces joined their U.S. and French counterparts in carrying out the coup d’ tat of 2004, overthrowing the elected Lavalas government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and instituting a foreign occupation of the country. In Afghanistan, similarly, thousands of Canadian troops are engaged in combat operations to defend the U.S.-led occupation and allow the U.S. military to focus its resources on Iraq. For years, escalating Canadian support for Israel has been part of this trend. In recent months, it has become more unabashed than ever.