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What’s a flag?

A bit of fabric. A warning, a welcoming. A symbol of something, fluttering atop a pole.

In the United States, Donald Trump has signed one of his ubiquitous Executive Orders, directing his Attorney General to “vigorously prosecute” anyone who “desecrates” the American flag. In Canada, it is not against the law to desecrate our flag. But tradition dictates that ours is always the highest flag, and that it is to be respectfully disposed of – burned or cut up – when it is worn out.

So, for most people, flags stand for something important. If it’s all-white, surrender. All-black, anarchy. And the flag of the strip of land calling itself Palestine? The answer to that question became important, this week.

In Toronto, Calgary, Mississauga and Brampton, the Palestinian flag was raised at city halls. In some places, the mayor and councillors showed up – Mississauga, Brampton. In other places, like Toronto, the mayor didn’t.

In Toronto, a group called Tafsik sought an injunction against the raising of the Palestinian flag. It lost. That’s unfortunate, because now a legal precedent has been set.

Why is that unfortunate? A few reasons.

Globally, we are experiencing the biggest surge in antisemitism in 80 years. In Canada, it is even worse.

The Times of Israel reported this week that “antisemitism was already on the rise in the Great White North in the years before the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, which left 1,200 slaughtered in Israel and 251 taken hostage to the Gaza Strip, sparking the war. But hate crimes have grown astronomically since then.”

Reported the Times: “Canadians experienced 6,219 antisemitic incidents in 2024, or an average of about 17 incidents of harassment, vandalism and violence per day.”

Seventeen antisemitic incidents, every single day. Qualitatively, that makes Canada one of the worst places for Jew hatred in the West – if not the worst. In May, an Israeli government ministry even crowned us the global “champion of antisemitism.”

So: in these circumstances, at this time, displaying that flag – that symbol – can only serve to make Jewish Canadians feel even more uncomfortable and unwanted. It is, after all, the flag of the government that slaughtered and raped hundreds of Jews in October 7, 2023. To most Jews, hoisting the Palestinian flag – now, at this time – renders the historical reality of October 7 impossible to ignore. They see it as a specific rejection of them. Jews.

That’s not conjecture, either. At the Mississauga flag-raising, the proponents even chanted “allahu akbar” – “Allah is most great.” Which was precisely what Hamas chanted, over and over on October 7, during their unprecedented orgy of murder, rape and torture. You may think that’s just a coincidence – but you’re almost certainly not a Jew.

The flag-raising, then, is wildly premature. None of the conditions that Prime Minister Mark Carney had set for recognizing a Palestinian state have been met. Not one. Why did those cities go ahead anyway? Why was it so essential to raise that flag now?

The answer, at least in part: to make Jews feel unwelcome and afraid, obviously. To isolate and intimidate them. To expose them, many Jews believe, to contempt and hatred.

Some might regard that as a stretch. Some might think that an over-reaction. But in life, as in law: what matters most is how an act of cruelty is experienced by the victim. The excuses and rationalizing of the wrong-doer don’t matter so much, if at all.

The Palestinian flag, in and of itself, isn’t the flag of Nazi Germany. True. But the Nazi flag is actually a useful parallel: in Canada, it isn’t strictly illegal to fly a swastika in front of your home. But it is a good way to invite a lot of trouble. It’s frowned upon, because it is symbol that divides people. It causes actual pain.

The same goes, this week, with the waving of the Palestinian flag. It doesn’t determine the outcome of the war in far-away Gaza. But it sends an unmistakable message to Jews: we are disinterested in your pain. We are indifferent to your feelings of isolation – here, in the place that is supposed to be your home.

So, yes, it’s just a symbol. It’s just a bit of cloth and ink.

But it’s a symbol that still divides us. It’s a symbol that wounds the victims of history, the Jewish people.

Raising it, now, is kicking them when they’re down.

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She begins:

“Weeks before my seventeenth birthday, I was walking toward the Mar-a-Lago spa, on my way to work, when a car slowed behind me. I wish I could say that I sensed that something evil was tracking me, but as I headed into the building, I had no inkling of the danger I was in. In the car was a British socialite named Ghislaine Maxwell.”

She continues.

“Mar-a-Lago employees are required to make guests feel welcome. The woman’s eyes alight on my book, which I’ve jammed with sticky notes. ‘Are you interested in massage?’ Maxwell asks.”

She’s excited. She goes to an address to learn how to give massages and earn more. Her Dad drives her.

“Jeffrey has been waiting to meet you,” Maxwell said, starting up the stairs. “Come.”

Afterwards, the girl went home and tried to shower it all off. She doesn’t tell her parents.

“So begins the period of my life that has been dissected and analyzed more than any other. I don’t enjoy repeating this story; it hurts to relive what I did and what was done to me. I worry that the awful details distract from a broader truth. Yes, I was sexually abused.”

And she was sixteen years old when it all started.

Sixteen.

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HALIFAX – In Ottawa, the political centre of all things, Chris d’Entremont is a super big deal.

In Nova Scotia, the province from which d’Entremont hails? Not so much, bud.

On a recent trip to Nova Scotia, precisely nobody had anything to say to this writer when they were asked about Chris d’Entremont. When prodded for something, anything, they just shrugged.

Pierre Trudeau used to say, uncharitably but not inaccurately, that most Members of Parliament are nobodies when removed from Parliament Hill. In the case of Chris d’Entremont, that status seems to extend all the way to his home province. Out here, they’d much rather talk about the Blue Jays. Or the weather.

The profound disinterest in d’Entremont’s much-analyzed decision to slink across the Commons floor from the Tories to the Grits may be a Nova Scotia thing. In this province, rapid partisan flip-flops aren’t front-page news. Snowplow jobs, advertising gigs, paving contracts: they go back and forth between the two main parties like the flicking of a light switch.

Departed Atlantic Canada Tory guru Dalton Camp, who not infrequently benefitted from such partisan political assignments, had the best line about how Nova Scotians regard all this partisan chicanery: “Politics is largely made up of irrelevancies.”

So why is Chris d’Entremont, who is mostly irrelevant, being treated as relevant by every pundit in the punditocracy?

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Here’s my Dad, age 20, at officer cadet training in Summer ’52, front centre. He joined the armoured corps but the war ended before he could go. He always regretted that, but us, not so much.

We miss him every single day. God bless him and everyone who serves.

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So much for the theory that Jews control democracy and elections, eh?

The neo-Nazis I used to interview loved to go on and on about what they called “Zionist Occupation Government,” or “ZOG,” and they liked to refer to New York City as “Jew York.”

Well, one thing is for sure: there ain’t no ZOG in the Big Apple no more, far-Right losers.

And, so, no one should attempt to minimize the results of the elections that took place in the US last night. November 4, 2025 was seismic. Tectonic political plates shifted. All that.

New York City, the most Jewish place on Earth outside of Israel, elected Zohran Mamdani, a guy who is pro-BDS, wants to “globalize the Intifada” and accuses Jews of mass murder. (The California proposition to “redistrict” its electoral map to defeat Republicans is a pretty big deal, too, but that’s a subject for another day.)

That result had been inevitable since Mamdani secured the Democratic Party nomination in June. Why? Because a dog painted blue could get elected mayor of NYC if he’s running as a Democrat, that’s why. It’s like getting a Conservative nomination in rural Alberta: all you need to do is maintain a pulse and you’re Ottawa-bound. (And that might even be the result if you lack a pulse.)

Mamdani won because of that, and:

• Andrew Cuomo was a fatally-flawed candidate – handsy, creepy and lazy.

• Beret-toting Curtis Sliwa was a loon, but he stole votes from Cuomo, splitting the anti-Mamdani coalition.

• Donald Trump has been governing like a far-Right autocrat, which – as history always shows us – prompted a predictable far-Left autocratic response. Politics is a pendulum, folks. In New York last night, the pendulum swung to the opposite extreme.

On that last bulleted point: Republicans got massacred in America last night, across the board. Full stop. It was the Alamo, for the GOP, except way worse. They lost everywhere.

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Zohran Mamdani is pro-BDS, wants to “globalize the Intifada” and accuses Jews of mass murder: for him to win, he needed a well-funded, well-organized campaign that legitimized all that.

Someone should write a book about that campaign.

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