After two-and-a-half hours of entirely mundane and politically correct corporate floats, Toronto’s Pride parade came to an abrupt halt Sunday when a series of keffiyeh-clad pink- and purple-haired pro-Palestinian dykes occupied Yonge St.
Like the Black Lives Matters protesters which shut down the parade for 25 minutes in 2016, a motley group of about 20 women planted themselves halfway down the route screaming that Pride was associated with genocide and apartheid.
The self-described “Coalition Against Pinkwashing” shouted demands for Pride to disassociate itself from apartheid (presumably Israel which is anything but an apartheid state) while — laughingly — a group of naked men waddled by.
Pride’s organizers, clearly unwilling to have these interlopers removed by police, abruptly put an end to the parade — attended, according to police, by about 300,000 spectators — and issued a statement indicating they did it out of fears for “public safety.”
Organizers said they regretted any “inconvenience” caused to the participants — evidently referring to the dozens of floats left stranded and forced to disband.
It gave me not-so-fond memories of 2016 when BLM — the honoured group at Pride — turned on the organizers and staged a sit-in halfway through the route.
I was marching in the parade that year and broke the story.
Instead of removing them as they should have, the organizers agreed to meet a list of their demands, which included banning the police from marching in the parade. That ban continues to this day and was evident at Sunday’s parade.
Pride’s progressive organizers clearly didn’t learn their lesson: namely, don’t pander to those radical groups who will end up turning on you.
Back in April, Pride — no doubt pressured by the more radical amongst them — issued a statement calling for a ceasefire in the Hamas-Israel conflict and decrying the treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Evidently that wasn’t enough.
It was rather rich to see various factions of those who call themselves progressive turn on each other.
None of those dykes who staged their sit-in — some bare-breasted — would last a minute in Gaza. But reality seems to elude these protester wannabes.
Truly, however, before the hijacking by the dykes, I had already concluded that the parade had indeed lost its way.
In all the years I’ve marched and reported on the event, I don’t think I ever remember so many corporate entities trying to get in on the opportunity and desperate to prove how woke they are.
They kept on coming and coming Sunday with the same messages, the same giveaways and the same pack of employees conscripted to march and look proud — building and beauty companies, all the big banks, food chains, law firms and any other business that perceived they could make money from DINKS (double income, no kids).
Even the drag queens looked wilted.
In between, I saw groups lecturing us about gender fluidity, alleged book bans and sex education.
There were health outfits and hospitals — with marchers who didn’t look the least bit healthy — promoting their gender-affirming care. There was a pro-Israel group of about 100 marching accompanied by at least two dozen beefy security guards — a sad statement about the times.
And right off the top I saw Toronto mayor Olivia Chow standing atop a truck clad in a low-cut purple dress and Pride-coloured boa waving to the crowds as if she were Queen.
Very few people cheered from my vantage point at Yonge and Bloor. She, and the collection of radical left councillors she posed with at some point, were nowhere to be found when the shutdown occurred about two hours later.
She has not made any comment whatsoever on the hijacking, or for that matter another Pride event — the early morning attack on another Jewish synagogue in Toronto called Pride of Israel.
It is what the Jewish community and our allies have come to expect from this weak, incompetent mayor.
As for Pride, if I were running the show I wouldn’t be the slightest bit proud of the parade I saw Sunday or the circus that occurred midway along the route. The parade was as dreary as the weather.
In less than 10 years, the true meaning of Pride has been destroyed by progressives who think they know better than anyone else.
