Vancouver police arrested and released one person at the home of Charlotte Kates, director of the terror group Samidoun, in a dramatic raid early on Nov. 14.
The raid was conducted by heavily armed officers as part of an ongoing investigation into charges of public incitement of hatred.
Police have not named the person arrested, but the address of the morning raid corresponded to the home of Kates, as reported by The Canadian Press and Global News—whose reporter Rumina Daya visited the address.
Canadian and U.S. governments announced the designation of Samidoun, which Kates runs, along with her husband, Khaled Barakat, as a terror entity on Oct. 15.
Kates had been under investigation for hate speech stemming from an April 26 rally where she praised the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks—but the period for pressing charges had expired.
Recently, authorities in British Columbia were forced to lift bail conditions that had prevented Kates from participating in any protests for a period of six months. Vancouver police arrested Kates in April after she gave an antisemitic speech that praised the Oct. 7 massacre, including “Long Live Oct. 7” and calling the Hamas-led attack “heroic and brave,” as CBC News reported.
Charges had not yet been laid before the bail deadline expired on Oct. 8.
Samidoun, a non-profit organization also known as the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, has been linked to the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and was formally added to Canada’s list of terror entities, joining PFLP, which Canada has listed since 2003. A terror group that undertook airplane hijackings, suicide bombings and assassinations of Israelis, PFLP was directly involved in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel.
Scrutiny intensified over Samidoun’s status in Canada after the group organized protests to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel.
At one event in Vancouver, some demonstrators tried to set fire to a Canadian flag, calling for “Death to Canada, death to the U.S.A., and death to Israel.”
The same masked speaker who led that chant also told the crowd “We are Hamas, we are Hezbollah,” Global News previously reported.
The CJN reported Oct. 15 that Vancouver Police Department (VPD) were investigating that incident.
In an email response to The CJN, the VPD confirmed that an arrest had been made as part of an ongoing investigation into public incitement of hatred charges.
“The Vancouver Police Major Crime Section, with assistance from the VPD Emergency Response Team, executed a search warrant yesterday at a residence in the 1800 block of East 1st Avenue, as part of an ongoing hate crime investigation under Section 319 of the Criminal Code,” wrote media spokesperson Tania Visintin.
“One person was initially taken into custody and has now been released pending completion of the investigation.”
The force did not confirm further details of the arrests or charges. Vancouver Police Department confirmed that the early morning raid of Kates’ home was a search warrant that was executed as part of ongoing hate crimes investigation, VPD Sgt. Steve Addison said, speaking to Global News.
Neighbours told reporters that they saw heavily armed police teams, heard loud and intense sounds associated with the early morning operation, and observed a “flash bang” device being deployed in the raid.
The emergency response team is deployed when executing search warrants when there may be a risk to the public or to officers, Addison told Global News.
Nico Slobinsky, vice-president for Pacific Region at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), says the moment is an important one for the Vancouver and wider BC Jewish community. The community is feeling “threatened and unsafe,” he says, and has come under pressure since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks.
“At times, the community feels alone… Jewish businesses have been targeted, Jewish members of the community have been targeted in schools, at university, in the workplace. We have seen the glorification of terrorism at the hands of members of Samidoun,” including at weekly protests on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Slobinsky told The CJN in a phone interview.
He said the investigation of Samidoun is encouraging, and called it a step in the right direction while pointing to a decision not yet made on hate crime charges for Kates.
He says he hopes the BC Prosecution Service, under the Assistant Deputy Attorney General, will approve the charges against Kates.
“We believe that it is crucial for civil society that Charlotte Kates be charged immediately. She’s now the leader of a terror organization,” he says.
“Let the courts decide.”
Following the designation of Samidoun as a terror entity, BC’s Jewish Independent reported that the agency had received a report to Crown Counsel in connection with Kates. Damienne Darby, communications counsel for the BC Prosecution Service (BCPS), told Jewish Independent in October “we are reviewing it for charge assessment,” but was unable to provide a timeline or further details.
In an email Nov. 15 to The CJN, Darby confirmed that charges are still in the assessment phase regarding the report to Crown Counsel submitted over Kates’ public remarks in April.
Darby said BCPS had not received a new report on Kates linked to the arrest Nov. 14 in Vancouver, explaining that the service is not generally involved in police investigations, “except in rare cases where police agencies request advance legal guidance.”
“The BCPS is aware of media reports regarding police activity on November 14, 2024 that may be connected to an ongoing investigation concerning Charlotte Kates, but we have not received a report to Crown Counsel in connection with this activity,” Darby wrote to The CJN.
Ezra Shanken, CEO of Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, previously said he still wants to see action taken on charges for Kates over hate speech, and called it unacceptable that legal conditions “prohibiting Charlotte Kates from participating in protests [had] expired.”
“In the year since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, the Jewish community has experienced an escalation in antisemitic hate incidents, including at protests such as those organized by Kates,” wrote Shanken in a statement released before the Oct. 15 announcement of Samidoun’s addition to Canada’s terror entity list.
Samidoun is also named in a lawsuit to claim justice for the eight Canadian victims of the Oct. 7 terror attacks.
The Ontario Superior Court statement of claim filed by lawyers for Ohad Lapidot, father of Tiferet Lapidot, who was murdered in the Nova festival massacre, and Iris Weinstein, whose parents Judi Weinstein and Gad Haggai’s bodies remain captive in Gaza, names Samidoun, along with Kates and Barakat personally, in addition to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Syria, in a filing claiming damages under Canada’s Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act. The suit seeks $250 million in compensation, alleging that the named defendants are funding schemes that reward the families of terrorist attackers against Israel.
B’nai Brith Canada, which is supporting the lawsuit, wrote in an earlier media release that “by funding a ‘pay-for-slay’ program that rewards Palestinians who carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis, the Palestinian Authority is liable under Canada’s Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act.”
Based in Vancouver since 2011, and with a Toronto chapter since 2021, Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network on its website describes itself as “an international network of organizers and activists working to build solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in their struggle for freedom,” The CJN previously reported.
According to Public Safety Canada’s website entry, “many Palestinian prisoners for which Samidoun advocates for release have ties to terrorism, assassinations and countless attacks against Israel.” The group’s goals are “the destruction of Israel and establishing a Palestinian state in its place.
“To achieve this goal, Samidoun advocates all kinds of activities, including violence. The organization helps advance the interests of other listed terrorist entities such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) on social media and in public protests,” reads the entry dated Oct. 15.
Samidoun’s website references the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, which triggered the ongoing war in Gaza and the region, as the “Al-Aqsa Flood” the term used by Hamas and its allied terrorist and militant groups.
Samidoun doubled down on the calls for death to Canada, the U.S, and Israel, and defended the flag burning attempt in an online statement Oct. 7. Organizers posted via a proxy Instagram account, Thawra Vancouver, which the group had used while Samidoun’s own account has been taken offline.
“We acknowledge that the community was shocked by the phrase, and the burning of the Canadian flag that came after the march… Yet, we at Samidoun stand by this phrase as the call to action that it is,” read part of the lengthy post, which appears to have been removed from Instagram.
“We see it as our duty to escalate the resistance here as we salute the heroism, brilliance, sacrifice and deep commitment and faith of the Palestinian resistance and the entire axis of resistance, whose struggle is liberating humanity.”
The posting, dated Oct. 7, 2024, called that escalation in Canada “particularly urgent” on the anniversary of “the great flood of resistance for liberation.”
Samidoun did not respond to The CJN’s request for comment on Oct. 15. It had promoted events in Vancouver, Seattle, and Madrid on its webpage in commemoration of Oct. 7 using the Al-Aqsa “Flood of Liberation” term and praised “glory” to assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a “martyr” and a “great international revolutionary leader of our era” in a website post Sept. 28 following Israel’s strike in Lebanon that killed Nasrallah one day earlier.
