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In the early morning hours of January 13, we took action in solidarity with those arrested in Toronto on November 23, 2023. Toronto police spent hundreds of thousands of dollars breaking into homes, handcuffing seniors, ransacking belongings and terrorizing families. Parents have been handcuffed in front of their children. Upon returning home, one person found her door broken and a patio chair thrown into the front yard. Members of another family were ordered not to speak in their mother tongue. The arrestees allegedly carried out the ordinary act of putting up posters on an Indigo bookshop and splashing paint on its facade. This action was aimed at Indigo's founder and CEO, Heather Reisman, who redirects Indigo's profits to the HESEG foundation, which offers educational scholarships to individuals emigrating to Israel to enroll in the IDF, thus supporting and encouraging international recruitment for the Israeli army. In order to punish the arrested activists more severely, to terrorize other activists committed to the movement in solidarity with the Palestinians, and to legitimize their persecution, the police encouraged a media narrative describing the action as crimes motivated by anti-Semitic hatred. The cruelty of these arrests and searches illustrates that if the police were truly interested in preventing hate attacks, its members simply wouldn't have gone to work.

The police can't protect genocide's accomplices everywhere or all the time. We used a fire extinguisher filled with red paint to redecorate the interior of the Indigo store in downtown Montreal, after smashing the windows. No arrests were made.

We acted to show that there is a movement that will not tolerate shameless political persecution. We want to draw attention to the people arrested in Toronto, so that they are not forgotten. The police, as well as capitalists like Heather Reitman, must not be allowed to freely terrorize those who express their resistance. Clearly, the law does not make us safe, and we must be the agents of our own justice.

https://mtlcontreinfo.org/solidarite-contre-la-repression-action-contre-indigo/