SAIMA JAMALS STATEMENT AFTER FINDING OUT REASON FOR REVOKING YMCA PEACE MEDAL: This statement is attached with the Nov 14 video of CBC News clip about the YMCAs fiasco. Story starts at 3:50 but stuff before that is quite intriguing too. In my story, they interviewed one of my nominators as well. As usual, out of the 30 mins of interviewing they only posted a few seconds of what I said. But it caught the gist ok. cbc.ca/player/News/Canada/Calgary/ID/2601107801/ As you can see from the story, it was revealed that some of the Calgary Jewish community leaders pressured the YMCA to disregard the decision of the award selection committee weeks after it was allocated and announced to me. What hurts the most is why Calgarys Jewish leaders would do this to me, when I have always considered them my friend. Whenever I saw hate or anti-Semitism, I have put my neck out to defend them and have taken every opportunity I get to building strong bridges of interfaith. This sort of dagger in the back makes me question whether their intentions are true in building a strong Calgary community where people of different faith co-exist and support each other through thick and thin. Also they accuse the rallies of demonizing Israel. Every speaker we arranged to come speak in those rallies including myself spoke about peace, human rights, co-exitence and brought into light the utter critical situation faced by the people of Gaza. It is now obvious that our Calgarys Jewish community has a problem in understanding the work we did, and we’re going to need to talk to them about that. The second point I see they attempted to use is a fist fight at one of the rallies attended by thousands of Calgarians protesting Israels war crimes in Gaza and passionately calling for peace, as though I am personally responsible for what took place even though I offered an apology for the outbreak and in no way had I any control over the confrontations that took place that day between unknown individuals taunting each other. In light of the many successful peace rallies and years peace work I have organized, this incident was a singular anomaly outside of anyones control. What an affront to our intelligence that this Jewish Federation pressure group would bring such an accusation and that it would be accepted and believed at face value. I see institutional bullying, discrimination, false allegation and defamation on me by the YMCA and the Jewish Federation.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 18:03:53 +0000
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