sabotabby | RIP Soufi's

This is some bullshit.

For those outside of Toronto, Soufi's was a really awesome restaurant run by Syrian refugees and activists. It was almost a cliché Canadian success story. Also, their food was fucking great. Thanks to them, I got to try vegan knafeh for the first time. I just ate there last Saturday, in fact.

Last week, there was a demo in Hamilton against Maxime Bernier, leader of the fascist People's Party of Canada. Now, this is not a guy who should be given a platform to speak. Among the people who paid $75 to hear him rail about immigrants was an 81-year-old lady with a walker. Antifa yelled at the people going in, including this lady. She was not touched or otherwise harmed.

While it is bad strategy to yell at disabled old people, an 81-year-old woman would have grown up in the shadow of WWII, in which people who believed what Bernier believes in murdered 12 million Jews, Roma, queers, Communists, trade unionists, disabled people, and anyone they disagreed with. An 81-year-old woman lived through the Civil Rights era. Anyone who pays $75 to see a fascist speak is not some senile pensioner but someone who knows exactly what they're signing up for and has the disposable income to sign up for it. And thus deserves to get yelled at (but shouldn't because the optics are bad). By the way, we deport Nazi war criminals who are older than that, and they stand trial, and some of them use walkers.

What does this have to do with a nice Syrian restaurant? Well, the owner's son is also an activist and a person of conscience, and he happened to be at the rally and was standing next to the woman, unmasked, when people yelled at her. For this, he and his father have been doxxed, harassed, and sent death threats, even though the owner apologized for both of them. I have been in contact with the son all week and the threats are very serious and scary, from people who know where they live and who have a history of racist violence.

Today they announced that they were closing for the safety of themselves and their workers.

The media has been complicit, sensationalizing the whole incident. Now they're bemoaning the loss of a beloved restaurant as if they didn't help spread lies about the people who run it.

The racists have learned that their tactics win. While the PPC is unlikely to win a seat in the election, they and their brownshirts have been emboldened by a successful attack against hardworking, kind refugees.

Welcome to Toronto in 2019.

Crossposts: https://sabotabby.livejournal.com/1581863.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

rdi

Damn the fash to a very special hell.

From:

sabotabby

They are the Actual Worst.

From:

kore

That's fucking awful. It also reminds me of a long segment Rachel Maddow did just last night of how Trump turned around "fake news" to mean "objective reporting," and now "corruption" is probably going to have the same fate. "Refugee" is now thoroughly criminalized.

From:

dewline

And that word should never have been criminalized. Such language theft is evil on its face. But the people who need to learn such lessons are determined to go on refusing to learn.

From:

sabotabby

Yep. And it doesn't work when the left does it for some reason.

From:

kore

Well, it COULD BE that public educational systems are totally gutted and broke so people don't learn critical thinking skills, and Late Capitalism has also totally gutted actual news reporting so we get complete bullshit from major media outlets that are driven by advertisers wanting ever more dollars in the 25-hour-a-day news cycle! So what sticks in peoples' minds is absolutely stupid flamboyant racist nonsense driven by high emotions!

....I have turned into my dad, politically speaking

From:

sabotabby

There is that.

But.

I have strong emotions about vegan knafeh and my requirement to put it in my face. And more seriously, strong emotions about Syrian refugees. They're just along the lines of "outrage on behalf of/protectiveness towards" versus "anger at existence thereof."

From:

lapinlunaire

On the other hand, some people have access to good education and resources and just don't want to know. I'm less convinced that what we're witnessing is the result of poor education and more like the result of sheer stupidity and evil.

Also, people not having any manners and not having to fear consequences enough.

From:

sabotabby

I'm really wondering how much poor education really plays a role. Because plenty of people from earlier generations make shit decisions. Also, my observation is even when I teach things, most of the students aren't actually paying attention, which is in part a failure of pedagogy to keep up with the existence of addictive little machines that everyone carries.

From:

kore

Also the Left here would rather happily sit around and argue about stuff like "but maybe we DO need NYT articles about Joe Biden being vulnerable" rather than breathing fucking fire over Trump destabilizing THE GLOBE, I cannot imagine if 1/100th of this shit had been pulled by Clinton, let alone Obama (talk about criminalizing a role -- they are just DETERMINED to wipe out that a Black man was in the White House if it means blowing up the actual world to do it)

....gotta take my mood stabilizers, anti-anxiety pill, and antidepressant so I can be a good functioning or at least non-frothing member of 21st century society, bbl

From:

sabotabby

The fact that the Dems think they can run Republican Lite and win after doing it last time and losing just boggles my mind.

From:

kore

"Hillary Clinton didn't win, hmmm, she wasn't hugely appealing as a moderate middle of the road white New Liberal with a basically conservative past, too associated with Clinton AND Obama, hmmm, hmmmm, who could we put up after that....I KNOW, JOE BIDEN!!!111"

//cries

T keeps saying if the Dems give Biden the nomination it assures Trumpty of a second term.

From:

kore

Only at least Hillary could speak coherently and didn't physically molest women in a completely creepy way and actually DID STUFF on her own, rather than "Remember how you all loved Barack Obama? I stood next to him for eight years!" Whacky Racist Uncle Joe.

(I have hated that man ever since the Anita Hill hearings. God he is a motherfucker.)

From:

lapinlunaire

Why not both though? Trump sucks but whatever the hell the Democrats are doing is baffling, and people like Joe Biden just suck less but still suck.

From:

minoanmiss

Oh no, no, augh. I am so, so sorry.

From:

sabotabby

It's now made national news. It's wild. I would like to think that this means that people are at last taking the extreme right threat seriously, but tbh a third of Canadians appear to be fascist now.

From:

lapinlunaire

I don't feel bad for this old woman and I don't know why the optics should be bad unless she's senile. If she's still got her faculties, then she's an adult like any other who knows what she's doing. She doesn't exactly sound like some poor old lady who accidentally wandered into a far-right shitshow.

I just looked it up and Eichmann was like 56 or something when he was executed. That doesn't seem like a lot but for his era, he wasn't as young as he'd be considered now (I looked up life expectancies for that time), so about equivalent to this woman, I'd say.

The way the restaurant family is being treated really sucks. :( I understand why they had to close but it sucks that nobody stepped in time to make that unnecessary to begin with. I hope they pull through.

From:

sabotabby

She still has her faculties and hates immigrants, so she deserves to get shouted at.

It looks like they'll re-open, with the help of the owner of the Paramount, a Lebanese restaurant that employs a lot of Syrian refugees and has also weathered some extreme bullshit from the far-right and triumphed.