Rally Round the Flag, Jihadis

On Nov. 17, the Palestinian flag was raised for the first time in front of Toronto’s city hall. There had been a great deal of protest from Jewish activists in anticipation of this event, but to no avail. Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow, is a prominent member of the New Democratic Party (NDP), Canada’s equivalent of America’s Democratic Socialists, and one might say she is Mamdani lite. Unlike New York’s mayor-elect, she has no charisma and no charm, but she’s a dyed-in-the-wool leftist with similar principles. In response to a letter-writing campaign, she explained that the decision had been made by “staff” according to the rules treating all “nationalities” the same. And since Palestine is now officially a state, Prime Minister Mark Carney having recognized it as such on September 21, that was that. Never mind that Hamas had thanked him for the favor and immediately withdrew from the ceasefire talks that were then in progress, and this so-called state is not yet a member of the United Nations. (RELATED: Mark Carney Is Incredibly Dangerous)
In the wake of this event, my junior high school teacher — who also happens to be my oldest living friend — has announced that he and his wife want to move to Israel. They no longer feel comfortable living in Canada. He is 96 years old, and she is 99, but they won’t be the oldest Israeli immigrants. Recently, that record was set by 100-year-old Sarah Unterberg, who immigrated from Uruguay. I imagine that my parents, were they still alive, would also by now be feeling uncomfortable living in Canada.
My parents were Holocaust survivors who had survived by fleeing to the Soviet Union. They were separated when my father was drafted into the Soviet army and lost their first child due to a shortage of medicine, but miraculously, they somehow both survived. (About a third of the Polish Jews who had survived by fleeing Poland to the Soviet Union had perished due to the harsh war conditions.) After the War, they returned to Poland to pick u...