Protesters gathered outside Victoria’s Indigo bookstore at the corner of Finlayson and Douglas streets on Friday calling for a boycott of the store over CEO Heather Reisman’s HESEG Foundation for Lone Soldiers.
The foundation provides scholarships for foreign soldiers who serve in the Israel Defense Forces and want to remain in the country after their service is completed.
The protesters say the funding offers an incentive for foreign soldiers to join a military that has a track record of “enforcing apartheid.”
A similar protest in Toronto on Nov. 14 ended with 11 people being charged with mischief over $5,000 after a group of people approached a large Indigo location, glued posters to the doors and windows and poured red paint on the windows and sidewalk of the business.
According to local media reports, the vandalism included posters accusing Reisman, who is Jewish, of funding genocide.
Michael Levitt, the president of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, condemned the incident, calling it a “vile antisemitic attack.”
— With a file from The Canadian Press
