- cross-posted to:
- ontario@lemmy.ca
- canadapolitics@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- ontario@lemmy.ca
- canadapolitics@lemmy.ca
BACKGROUND
Joanna Berry is a Canadian immigration and refugee lawyer in Ontario, Canada. On October 2, two Niagara Police Officers, one of them a sergeant detective, paid her a visit to her home. They told her they were there on behalf of the Ottawa Police Department because of her “personal social media.” They begin to tell her that “10 lawyers who are of the Jewish faith” have filed a complaint with the police about her social media. As you can tell from the video, Joanna Berry, is outraged by the visit and clearly distraught. I reached out to the Niagara Regional Police for comment but they did not respond to my inquiry. I spoke with Joanna Berry also and she gave OTL Media permission to publish the video. She told us that she wants Canadians to see it and for the video to be a warning.
“This is very Orwellian”
On The Line Media is run by Samira Mohyeddin, a multi-award-winning journalist, documentary maker, and producer at CBC Radio One’s The Current.
They didn’t warn her over her social media posts on Israel. They warned her over her messages targeting specific people, who complained to the police about harassment. Important difference.
If that were the case … they’d have these officers working overtime doing nothing but sending them around warning people about sending messages to specific people about things that were said on the internet and causing harassment.
These are police officers with more important things to do than to warn people about harassment issues.
The biggest offence about this issue is the fact that police were used to go to someone’s house because of a harassment issue … if its so easy for police to do that I have people I’d like the police to go visit and I’m sure you do too but we both know that will never happen.
It’s the early stages of a fascist ideology … it is very disturbing and very discomforting.
I don’t disagree it’s a waste of police resources. But that’s not the point. The point is the misleading propaganda that creates the false impression that the government is monitoring your social media posts and showing up at your house because you post something negative about Israel.
It’s not a false impression because that is exactly what happened here … it isn’t the government that is monitoring all this crap and knocking on people’s doors … and I never said that was the case … but there are bad actors within these institutions that decided somewhere along the line to think that - someone said something we disagree with, we should send the police to intimidate them.
If you don’t like what is said online, you disagree with a message, you complain to the person, you complain to the site owner, you complain to the media owner, … you keep escalating your complaint to another higher authority … you don’t launch the nuclear option and get the police to tell someone about your complaint right from the start.
The video opens with the claim that police visited her because of her social media posts that were critical of Israel.
When you finally get to the point where she lets the officers speak, they reveal that they are there on complaints of “unwanted messages to specific lawyers,” to which she responds, “Nobody told me not to message them.”
So clearly the issue was that she was sending problematic messages directly to people, and those messages were concerning enough to warrant a visit from the police. They would not waste their time showing up at someone’s house like this unless there was sufficient cause to open an investigation.