Howard Levitt: Olivia Chow owes Toronto’s Jewish community some answer

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Chow is obviously entitled to criticize Israel, condemn its government, oppose its military campaign and express upset over Palestinian civilian deaths. None of those positions, by themselves, are inherently hostile to the Jewish community

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But there is a profound difference between criticizing a government and adopting rhetoric that demonizes the world’s only Jewish state, one reborn as a direct result of an actual genocide the large majority were slaughtered in the most heinous ways

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That distinction becomes particularly important when the politician using that rhetoric is the mayor of a city with a Jewish community in crisis.

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Chow, with decades in public life, knows the power of political language. She knows that a mayor’s words do not disappear when the speech ends.

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Her words signal whose suffering she recognizes. Whose claims she considers legitimate. Whose political concerns she is prepared to take seriously. And whose she is obviously prepared to ignore

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It is not one sentence or missed debate but her cumulative record. The audiences she chooses to address, political causes she embraces and the people she is not willing to confront

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Chow appears perfectly comfortable using the most inflammatory language before audiences deeply engaged by the Palestinian cause. Yet when Toronto’s Jewish community asks her to discuss the hatred directed at Jews in the city she leads, she finds a procedural reason not to appear.

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Perhaps it is political calculation.

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A politician does not have to personally be politically opposed to the Jewish communities interest to make herself useful to people who are. She only has to decide that confronting them is politically inconvenient. That is how prejudice becomes normalized.

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The politician does not have to utter a slur. They can simply become comfortable with the people who do, the rhetoric they use and be unwilling to challenge them when doing so carries political costs

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That is why I believe my concerns about Chow are justified. Not because she supports Palestinian rights, criticizes Israel or disagrees with Jewish organizations.

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It is the combination. She uses language about Israel that Jewish organizations have condemned as profoundly offensive, operates comfortably in political spaces where hostility toward Israel is prominent and embraces one of the most extreme accusations that can be made towards any state.

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And when Toronto’s Jewish community asks her to account for her record at a debate devoted to its safety, she is absent.

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None of this proves what she privately believes. But it reveals something about her public judgment, priorities and the risks she is unwilling to take on behalf of one of the communities she represents.

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And that is precisely what voters are entitled to judge.

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Perhaps Olivia Chow will yet prove me wrong. But if she does, it will not be by another statement about tolerance or by announcing another security initiative.

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She has to explain why the language she uses is so extreme. She has to explain why Jewish concerns seem less urgent when addressing them carries a political cost. She has to explain why, when Toronto’s Jewish community asked its mayor to stand before it and answer difficult questions about its safety, she chose not to attend.

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Ultimately, politicians are judged not by the intentions they purport, but by the choices they make.

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I am not alone in my view of this mayor. If I am wrong, the burden of disproving that conclusion is not on Toronto’s Jewish community. It is on Olivia Chow.

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And right now, her record makes my case for me.

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Howard Levitt is senior partner of Levitt LLP, leading his teams of labour lawyers in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.

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