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Toronto (November 14, 2024) - In a lengthy phone conversation yesterday afternoon, FSWC President and CEO Michael Levitt repeatedly urged Mississauga Mayor Carolyn Parrish to speak out against a planned vigil for former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, chief architect of the October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel that killed 1,200 men, women and children. Shockingly, Parrish categorically refused to take a position on the tribute to the mass murderer slated for November 26 at Celebration Square in Mississauga.

A poster promoting the vigil features an image of Sinwar and reads "Sinwar Is Our Mandela." An earlier flyer for the event shared on social media shows a smiling Sinwar under the headline "Lest We Forget Our Heroes: Vigil for Resistance Leaders," as if the barbaric atrocities Hamas carried out against unarmed civilians on Oct. 7 were heroic resistance.

In a statement issued last Saturday in response to the upcoming gathering, Parrish said, "Groups have the right of freedom of expression and peaceful assembly" and that "the City will not interfere with a peaceful vigil." In a follow-up statement two days later, the mayor wrongfully claimed, "No vigil is planned."

Yesterday’s conversation between Levitt and Parrish came on the heels of a released audio recording of the mayor drawing a comparison between the genocidal Sinwar, whose homicidal brutality earned him the nickname "the Butcher of Khan Younis," and Nelson Mandela, the late South African president and human rights activist.

"Your terrorist and somebody else's terrorist may be two different things," she said during a city council meeting yesterday.

"The first responsibility of any elected official is to protect our democratic values and public safety," said FSWC President and CEO Michael Levitt. "A vigil obscenely honouring mass murderer and former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is a threat to both. 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."

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