Aboriginal Group claims responsibility for a Firebombing in Ontario

[apukjij]

A militant aboriginal group calling itself the FFFC claims takes responsibility for firebombing a Royal Bank outlet in Ont! Has anyone heard of them? Is our People responsible or is it some anarchist group using aboriginal interests for their own purposes? The link contains the video of the firebombing.

http://ottawa.indymedia.org/en/2010/05/11233.shtml

May 18, 2010
The Vancouver Olympic games are over, but a torch is still burning.
Royal Bank Canada was a major sponsor of the recently concluded 2010 Olympics on stolen indigenous land. This land was never legally ceded to colonial British Columbia. This hasn’t stopped the government from assuming full ownership of the land and its resources for the benefit of its corporate masters and to the detriment of aboriginal peoples, workers and the poor of the province. The 2010 Winter Olympics increased the homelessness crisis in Vancouver, especially the Downtown Eastside, Kanada’s poorest urban area. Since the Olympics bid, homelessness in Vancouver has nearly tripled while condominium development in the Downtown Eastside is outpacing social housing by a rate of 3:1. The further criminalization and displacement of those living in extreme poverty continues apace.

"Royal Bank Canada is one of the planet’s greenest companies” according to one of its own brochures. Coporate Kanada saw fit to include RBC as one of the top 50 in a competition dubbed Canada’s Greenest Employers, which purports to recognize organizations that have created “a culture of environmental awareness.” Yet RBC is now the major financier of Alberta’s tar sands, one of the largest industrial projects in human history and perhaps the most destructive. The tar sands, now the cause of the second fastest rate of deforestation on the planet, are slated to expand several times its current size.

The games in Vancouver are now over, but resistance continues. An RBC branch can be found in every corner of Kanada.

On June 25-27 2010, the G8/G20 ‘leaders’ and bankers are meeting in Huntsville and Toronto to make decisions that will further their policies of exploitation of people and the environment. We will be there.

We pass the torch to all those who would resist the trampling of native rights, of the rights of us all, and resist the ongoing destruction of our planet. We say: The Fire This Time.

FFFC - Ottawa
at the corner of Bank Street and First Avenue.

[critter - a white non-ndn person]

I understand that sometimes, some things come up to ending up as being war. However, I'm just not a person who agrees that destruction and possible harm of others is a good and just way.

[ska]

Dear Apukjij,

Sorry about the info I posted earlier in this thread.

I mentioned something about a group without posting evidence of any association.  Please accept my apology and my deletion of the earlier posting.

ska

[Ingeborg]

A militant aboriginal group calling itself the FFFC claims takes responsibility for firebombing a Royal Bank outlet in Ont! Has anyone heard of them?

What is "FFFC" supposed to stand for? If nobody knows the group, or even what their full name is...

_{[reference to deleted information removed at poster's request - k]}

[educatedindian]

Most of the links I saw describe them as anarchists, and claiming to act on behalf of Canada's NDNs. Their statement they sent out has a few phrases some would be revolutionaries sometimes use, like spelling Canada as Kanada. There's also a reference to a phrase often used in some left circles, "fire this time." But I haven't seen anything definitive about who actually did this.

[Ingeborg]

Just googled, too. And I'm still very suspicious for several reasons.

None of the sites I saw seem to know more about the group than the acronym FFFC, still they are all certain these people are anarchists. However, it is said they claim "to act on behalf of" Canada's aboriginal peoples. Right, this is exactly what anarchist DON'T do, anarchists very strongly advocate the self-organisation of people. NOT acting on their behalf, or for them. It is still probable this group is some mislead kids with a lot of wrong ideas of what anarchism is. But.....

But on the other hand there is this G20 meeting in Toronto coming up in a few days, and protests are already being organized. Now, such an act of terrorism may just be what the doctor prescribed if - errm: certain people would feel the urge to criminalize these protests altogether and be able to put persons in the clink pronto for as much as participating in peaceful protests. What a pity that protests usually belong to one's civil rights in most Western democratic states :sarcasm off:. However, all you need is one illegal act of violence, and all protest can be given the label terrorist. Which will certainly stop some, or even a lot of persons joining the peaceful protests planned, and those who still participate can conveniently be labeled 'terrorists', too.

Anarchism has been given a bad name due to a small group of people who used the so-called 'propaganda of deed' to commit terrorist bomb attacks. This was way back in the 1890ies and up to about 1905, and the tactics were soon denounced even at their time by the majority of anarchists, one reason being the innocent victims claimed by these assaults, so this strategy was intolerable for anarchists. Today, one of the largest tendencies in anarchism is non-violence, BTW.

And yes, "the fire this time" goes back to the title of a book written by James Baldwin in the late 1950ies/ early 1960ies - The Fire Next Time. The version "the fire *this* time" has been used by left persons, usually with Marxist leanings (which BTW were shared by Baldwin).

The spelling also wouldn't be "Kanada", but "KKKanada".

With the information available as of yet, this bombing smells very suspicious to me. Cointelpro is what comes to mind.

[educatedindian]

There was a small group calling itself anarchist who did bombings in the 80s in the US and Canada, the Vancouver Five. They were very young and one of them even became a born again Christian in prison. There also is a small group of anarchists and leftists from Oregon who did much of the vandalism at the WTO/GATT/NAFTA conference in Seattle. You could make a pretty good argument that both groups didn't understand how they hurt their causes with their poorly thought out tactics.

It used to be common among a few on the right to spell America and Canada as Amerika and Kanada as a way of claiming the countries were going Communist, supposedly the K being a Russian spelling. So there seems to be some confusing messages from whoever did the bombing.

[Defend the Sacred]

The buzz I'm hearing is that this was not a group of Indigenous people that did this. I'm hearing a lot of people who think it was agent provacateurs.

Whether the people who did the bombing are misguided outsiders who think they can speak for Indigenous people, or provacateurs looking to cause problems for NDN activists, I'm reminded more of the white people who dressed up as Mohawks for the original "Boston Tea Party" than any Indigenous or Anarchist group I'm familiar with.

[dabosijigwokush]

During the recent protests in Greece, firebombings of banks were also carried out. Eight banks were targeted by protesters who used Molotov cocktails in a number of the attacks.

looks like they use anyone's name for their cause, what ever that is