Article content

A day after police searched an East Vancouver home and arrested the person who lives there as part of an “ongoing hate crime investigation,” Charlotte Kates didn’t talk about the raid.

Kates, founder of Samidoun, an anti-Israel group recently placed on Canada’s list of terrorist organizations, lives in one of the four suites in a building in the 1800 block of East 1st Avenue.

Article content

A front window on the ground floor of the building, covered in gray vinyl siding and black mold, was boarded up with plywood on Friday.

A man emerging from the ground-floor suite with the broken window said: “I’m with Charlotte.” He put some items in the back of a minibus before returning to the suite without answering any questions, simply repeating “no.”

Vancouver police’s major crimes section and the VPD’s emergency response team searched the residence “as part of an ongoing hate crime investigation under section 319 of the Criminal Code,” spokesman Const. Tania Visintin said in an email on Friday.

“One person was initially arrested and has now been released pending the completion of the investigation,” she said, without identifying the person arrested.

Section 319 prohibits incitement to hatred against an identifiable group.

In April, the VPD opened a criminal investigation into Kates, alleging she made hateful comments at a pro-Palestinian rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery, calling Hamas’s attack on Israel “heroic and brave” and leading protesters in a chant of “Long Live.” Oct 7.”

Article content

Article content

Kates was arrested and ordered not to participate in any more protests, demonstrations or gatherings until a later court date. But she got to travel and she visited Iran in August.

The VPD said a month ago that police had forwarded a recommendation to prosecutors for charges in June, two months after Kates was arrested at the demonstration organized by Samidoun. Police have not said what charges are recommended.

At the time, the BC Attorney’s Office confirmed it was still reviewing the report by the VPD recommending charges against Kates, 44, and said it had no deadline to complete its work.

Kates is one of three directors of Samidoun, who is registered at the East Van address searched on Thursday. It has been active in Vancouver and Europe to protest Israel’s attack on Gaza after Hamas carried out a deadly terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

The organization was declared a terrorist organization by Canada and the United States on October 15 on the grounds that it raises money for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group banned in the United States since 1997 and Canada since 2003.

Article content

According to Postmedia News columnist Terry Glavin, Kates arrived in Vancouver about 12 years ago after an internal dispute among pro-Palestine activists at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Kate’s husband is Khaled Barakat, who was born in the village of Dahiyat al-Barid near Jerusalem in 1971. He was deported from the US when his residency expired in 2003 and later came to Vancouver as a Palestinian student activist at UBC in 2004.

Bracket is considered a terrorist in the United States and is alleged to be part of the PFLP leadership.

To recommend prosecution under that section, a crime must have occurred, such as assault, damage to property, or uttering threats, and the crime must have been motivated by hatred or bias against a victim, such as the victim’s race, nationality, ethnic origin, language, color, age, religion, disability, gender or sexual orientation.

If a crime is committed and proven to be motivated by hate or bias, the offender may receive a higher sentence during sentencing.

Some 40 years ago, Alberta high school teacher Jim Keegstra tested the constitutionality of Section 319 after being accused of knowingly promoting hatred of an identifiable group for teaching his students racially biased material directed at Jews.

He appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada on the grounds that Section 319(2) violated his right to freedom of expression under Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Supreme Court in 1990 agreed with him that Section 319 violated freedom of speech, but it was justifiable under Section 1 of the Charter.

Article content