Today, Winnipeg activists responded to the actions of the Greek government to block the Tahrir and other vessels that make up Freedom Flotilla II from sailing for Gaza with an information picket in the city’s Osborne Village neighbourhood.
The Tahrir is the Canadian vessel in the Flotilla. As with all of the other boats and crews, the Tahrir is committed to peace and nonviolence. Its mission is to deliver humanitarian aid to the suffering people of Gaza and to pressure the Israeli government to end its illegal and oppressive blockade of Gaza.
Get informed and take action. These folks can provide both information and opportunities for action.
Paul S. Graham 
Anyone or any group of people who have the courage to criticize Israel in public anywhere in North America deserve a high level of praise for courage alone. Our media, our political establishment from Right to Left, and most all other institutions sing a one-note tune of total praise and support of Israel, no matter the criminal abuses it enacts on Palestinians and others in the region. We definitely need more open discussion of what Israel really is about and how the West needs to revisits its blind support for this brutal and violently racist, apartheid state. That being said, however, I would urge these brave people to select another location and time for such a protest. Fridays and Saturdays are the lowest ebb for news dissemination and consumption (see any Nielsen’s or Nadbank study) and the Osborne Village, even when its not squeezed off with construction, on a Saturday is filled with people looking for exotic clothes or destructive drugs. Sunday would be a better day with more sober people who might be open to engagement and possibly another location, closer to either a federal govt building or an entity otherwise connected to Israel.
I would be curious to know what pamphlets or leaflets were handed out; could someone upload a copy to either this space or another so that others could review?
As an aside, I want to alert readers that the Winnipeg Public Library system has yet to carry the most recent book by Norman Finkelstein, “ThisTime We Went Too Far.” Although his previous books are available, this most recent title is not and that is a crime. In recent years the WPL has also removed the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs from both the downtown library and the St James Library. Althought not a perfect magazine, it is exceptional in providing critical news coverage of Palestine, Israel, and Washington not provided by other magazines. At the same time, books by Caroline Glick, a Zionist zombie so offensive that even the Likud government fired her, are now carried by the library and put on prominent display. A much stronger, pro-Israeli bias has taken root in our public library system and that should be confronted.