Canada's Hamas Score: Rhetoric 10, Resolve 0
“The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”— W.B. Yeats
These are hard days indeed for those do-gooders who pass through life with nothing but a pure heart and a lack of resolve. With wars in Ukraine and Gaza, plus the possibility of war with Iran, it’s getting harder and harder to square your love of TikTok puppies with the murdered babies of Israel.
Example: Toronto’s new mayor Olivia Chow is disheartened by the demonstrations in her city this week in support of Hamas’ rape of Israel— especially by the mob’s targeting of the downtown Landwer restaurant (one of six locations across Toronto) as a “Zionist-owned” symbol of something-something. Protesters can be heard yelling “Zionist cafe” and chanting “boycott”.
Despite the best efforts of Chow and her heartfelt followers, singing Kumbaya has yet to bring the radical protesters and their pals at Toronto’s universities to their senses. Attacks on Jews or Jewish businesses have reportedly tripled in Toronto since the start of the latest Gaza conflict. Still, the mayor twins every call to end antisemitism with a plea about rampant Islamophobia (for fear of stepping on toes).
So, just days after claiming she has “made a good start as mayor”, Chow gallantly penned a press release this past weekend. In part it reads, “Targeting a business in this way is wrong. There is no place in our city for antisemitism, Islamophobia, hate, intimidation and harassment of any kind… I urge everyone in our city, through all the pain and anger so many are feeling right now, to not lose sight of our common humanity.”
“People in Toronto should be able to carry out their business, enjoying what our city has to offer without fear or concern.”
Absent from “our common humanity” is any security plan to enable citizens “to carry out their business, enjoying what our city has to offer without fear or concern”. Where is the determination to protect Toronto’s businesses, people and landmarks from the superannuated grad school students, furious Hamas radicals and Marxists by any other name bearing Palestinian flags?
Where is the resolve to say Toronto will, by force if necessary, stop the intimidation and destruction of the city by those who want to use it as a staging ground for revolution? To say, back off or face the consequences? We have a jail with your name on it?
Sorry, not happening. Instead we got pro-Palestinian demonstrators breaking through police lines while thousands blocked the ramps of Toronto’s heavily travelled Gardiner Expressway and all surrounding intersections. And the threats against Landwehr. Chow’s take: “When tragic events occur across the globe we feel it deeply.”
Chow’s love letter to the former Little City That Could goes on in this vein a while longer, extolling Toronto’s tolerance and reminding her constituents (she won the mayoralty with just 37 percent of the vote) this is not who we are.
This just in: It’s exactly the city you inherited, Mayor Chow. A maxed-out credit card has bought an IKEA set with parts that don’t fit, instructions that make no sense and no hope they can finish building anything inside of ten years. Plus a queue of new customers lined up around the block. See here as the happy natives threaten a Jewish kindergarten and daycare.
You demonstrated your (non) resolution on the weekend when Hamas butchered innocent civilians. In her statement Chow tried to work the word-salad dance, first condemning Hamas, then including them as a victim , then sorta’ condemning them while saying, “My earlier tweets on this have been deleted because of the harm and confusion they caused.” (Confusion? Really?)
All in the space of a few hours on the weekend. When that potage settled, you admitted you “messed up” your empathy outpouring. And vowed to do better.
Instead of doing better we got words about “a beacon to the world” and “city free from hate” as you conflated the brutality of Hamas and its apologists with Islamophobia. Guess that message didn’t reach the 74 TMU law students who signed a petition that endorsed rape, torture, murder and kidnapping as an acceptable form of “Palestinian resistance”.
We don’t mean to pick on you or your city, Mayor Chow. It was a similar mess in other Canadian cities run by bike-path, feel-good, fainting goats who are long on feeling and short on doing. In the nation whose politicians recoiled over the honking horns and Bouncy Castles of the Trucker Convoy, the blood libels and open threats of destruction that echoed through Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Montreal and Halifax were met with a shrug.
In Halifax CTV News writer and production assistant Yara Jamal organized a pro-Palestinian protest. She told Saltwire News that "Jews can continue to exist, the zionist ideology cannot”. Elsewhere, cries of "end the siege on Gaza" and "stop Israeli war crimes” reverberated across the nation as protesters brazenly suggested that, as “colonizers”, innocent Israelis had it coming from the hopped-up gangs that roamed their streets.
No wonder we are where we are. Chow and her bleeding hearts are, in the immortal words of Oscar Wilde, people who “know the price of everything but the value of nothing.”
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
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