Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
And, of course, the very best and indeed only way for Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow to save the world is to stand firmly with the Palestinians against that colonial-settler, apartheid, genocidal state of Israel that really should do the decent thing, for once, and disappear, making room for a twenty-third Arab state. More on Mayor Chow and her embrace of the “cause of Palestine” can be found here:
A ceasefire is holding in Gaza. In places like Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the mayor’s tenure was interrupted by a seven-year prison stint, local governments will have to drop their calls to end the war and get back to the boring business of running their cities.
Beleaguered Jewish residents across North America, who have gritted their teeth through an unprecedented spike in antisemitic attacks, are surely breathing a sigh of relief.
Earlier this month, however, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow decided to dust off the Israel punching bag for one last go.
Speaking at a fundraiser for The National Council of Canadian Muslims in Brampton — Canada 7th largest city — Chow claimed, “the genocide in Gaza impact [sic] us all.”
Encouraged by the audience’s applause, she then got personal: Chow told the audience that when her mother was 13, Chow’s grandmother died of dysentery as a result of Imperial Japan’s invasion of China during World War II, leaving Chow’s mother alone to care for her siblings.
Reasonable people can disagree about the proportionality of Israel’s response to the barbarity of Hamas and fellow terror groups’ attack on October 7, 2023. But to compare it to a war whose explicit goal was conquest — and which resulted in an estimated 20 million Chinese deaths — is more of an apples to elephants comparison than apples to oranges.
More troubling was Mayor Chow’s glib use of the phrase “genocide.”
A sculptor by training — who spent her professional career in mostly local politics, with a stint as a member of parliament for Canada’s perennial also-ran socialist party — Chow is not well qualified to be making legal conclusions.
The timing was particularly ham-fisted, given the fact that only days earlier, reports had surfaced of a massacre in Sudan, one in which the blood of more than 2,000 unarmed civilians ran so deep that it could be seen in satellite images.
She’s been quite a piece of work, this Mayor Chow. She hasn’t a clue as to how to make Toronto safer, how to pay for a mass transit system that is crumbling, or what to do about the precipitous rise in the price of housing. She does know that her left-wing supporters will gladly overlook all that, as long as she can yet again take aim at the mighty empire of Israel. But it’s all the others, the voters not on the left, who should worry her. They can no longer stomach hearing her rants against the Jewish state.
Chow now faces a challenge from “centrist Councillor Brad Bradford,” who is “openly campaigning,” such that “the road suddenly looks a lot bumpier for Chow.” One aspect of that is the difficulties that Toronto’s Jews are facing. At the synagogue of Algemeiner author Ian Cooper, “in addition to being warned of ‘heightened security,’ congregants were told that there would be no Yom Kippur food drive to support a local charity this year, and that they should instead donate cash. Think about that for a moment: when Toronto Jews want to commemorate their holiest day of the year by donating non-perishable goods to a non-Jewish charity, they now have to consider the possibility of being blown up in a terror attack.”
Cooper recounts that at a pro-Israel event at Toronto Metropolitan University featuring IDF veterans, “the organizers had been refused a permit on campus, so they held the event off-campus and took steps to keep the location secret. Nevertheless, they were hunted down by protestors organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, some of whom stormed the building, broke a glass door, and caused minor injuries to one of the IDF vets.”
Cooper concludes: “If the current mayor isn’t up to fixing these problems, voters should find someone else who will.”
“Yes, I was getting to that,” says Mayor Chow. “Of course I will fix all of those problems. I need a bit more time, so if I can just be re-elected…. And don’t forget that I am the only candidate for mayor of Toronto who has made ending the colonial-settler apartheid genocidal state of Israel a centerpiece of my agenda. For that alone, I think I deserve your vote.” Of course.
