LILLEY: Mississauga Mayor Carolyn Parrish is an embarrassment

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Carolyn Parrish isn’t fit to be Mayor of Mississauga. In fact, she isn’t fit for any public office. The list of reasons she’s unfit is long but her outright refusal to condemn a vigil to celebrate a dead terrorist is at the top of the list.

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It shouldn’t be hard for any elected official to say they condemn any commemoration of Yahya Sinwar. That she wouldn’t is rather telling.

Sinwar was the mastermind behind the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks that Hamas launched against Israel last year. Those attacks saw more than 1,200 people killed including women, children, babies, the elderly.

Israeli women were systematically raped, more than 250 people were taken hostage.

This isn’t in dispute, it was all documented by Hamas terrorists who boastfully shared what they did online. Anyone celebrating the life of Sinwar is celebrating what he did on Oct. 7, which should be condemned.

When word of the planned vigil at Mississauga’s Celebration Square first surfaced, Parrish denied it was going to happen. She then switched to saying that the protest needed to proceed due to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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There is room for debate on whether the city was re quired to let the event happen but there is no debate on the fact that Parrish could have simply denounced the event, Sinwar and his actions. Rather than do that, Parrish sat in the mayor’s chair during a council meeting and used the old line about one man’s terrorist being another man’s freedom fighter.

“I just want to point out, and I’m not being facetious, Nelson Mandela was declared a terrorist by the United States of America until the year 2008,” she said. “Your terrorist and somebody else’s terrorist may be two different things.”

Afterwards, she said she wasn’t comparing Mandela and Sinwar even though that is exactly what she had done.

Parrish is now saying that she wants to stay out of international politics. She doesn’t think municipal officials should get involved in international issues. She’s never had an issue with blasting Israel or specifically Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Parrish has bashed Israel for years, accusing the country of war crimes in her online postings. There’s no evidence of her denouncing Hamas for their terrorist attacks or people like Sinwar for stealing billions in aid money to fund their war machine or pad their personal bank accounts.

Her apparent support of the Palestinian cause appears to go back years to at least when she was a Liberal MP and visited both the West Bank and Gaza. Yet, that apparent support seems to be so blind that she couldn’t bring herself to say that she supports the Palestinian cause but also denounce a dead terrorist and his heinous acts.

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Michael Levitt, president and CEO of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, and himself a former Liberal MP, said that he called Mayor Parrish last week to plead with her to simply denounce the vigil and she refused.

“By shamefully not taking a position on what is a black-and-white issue involving someone who was the embodiment of evil, Mayor Parrish has shown herself a bystander lacking moral strength at a time of surging antisemitism, thereby emboldening extremists and those who endanger the Jewish community and all Canadians. This is yet another sad example of a leader refusing to lead,” he said.

We’ve had too little leadership on this issue and the hate rallies that have popped up across the country in support of Hamas and now Hezbollah since the October 7 attacks. By refusing to even condemn a man as evil as Sinwar, Parrish has sunk to a new low.

She’s a disgrace to her office and to Mississauga.

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