Ontario NDP leader defends candidate
Hamilton Centre hopeful Sarah Jama under fire over ‘Nazism’ comment at rally in May 2021
Ontario New Democrat Leader Marit Stiles is standing by her candidate in Thursday’s Hamilton Centre byelection after video emerged of Sarah Jama accusing the city’s police force of protecting “Nazism.”
The video is an excerpt of a speech that Jama — acclaimed as the NDP candidate in November after former party leader Andrea Horwath quit the seat to become Hamilton’s mayor — made at a May 2021 Palestinian rights rally at Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto.
“Sarah Jama has been asked to speak at many rallies and she’s spoken very passionately about issues like policing and human rights here and internationally,” Stiles told reporters Tuesday in Peterborough.
“We’ve all ended up at rallies … where maybe we didn’t use the right choice of words,” she added. “But I do think that Sarah has been, and will continue to be … a really strong advocate for her community.”
In the brief video posted on Twitter by a group called Documenting Antisemitism, Jama, a 28-year-old disability rights advocate, is shown at the rally with microphone in hand in front of signs reading “Zionists you will see, Palestine will be free” and “End Apartheid Now,” both references to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Over and over again, the Hamilton police protect Nazism in our city and continue to target Black Muslim Palestinians saying that we don’t have the right to push to exist,” she says in the video.
“And the same liberal-minded people will continue saying, ‘But, you know what? It’s fine if these things are happening, because the issue will go away if you get the right people in positions of power. It’s fine that, you know, Israel’s illegitimate because Netanyahu’s not there,’ ” she continues, “and we know that was not true, because the same people will continue to fund the killing of people here locally and globally.”
Her reference to right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was made around the time he was being forced from office by a coalition of opposition parties. He has since returned to power.
Jama recently came under fire from B’nai Brith, which accuses her of being a “radical activist who has been associated with groups that have frequently targeted Israel.” She has ties to Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, which has called for a Palestinian state “from the (Jordan) river to the sea” — a contested refrain interpreted by some as a rallying cry for Palestinian freedom, but by others as a call to erase the state of Israel.
Jama and her supporters maintain she is simply supporting Palestinian human rights.
United Nations Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland said in January that Israelis and Palestinians remain on a “collision course amid escalating political and inflammatory rhetoric as well as heightened violence in the West Bank,” the Associated Press reported.
Underlying the ongoing violence is the Palestinians’ decades-long quest for an independent state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war.
Israel considers the West Bank to be disputed territory and has built dozens of settlements that are now home to roughly 500,000 Jewish settlers.
The international community widely considers the settlements to be illegal.
Jama’s campaign would not make her available for an interview with the Toronto Star on Monday or Tuesday to more fully explain her remarks in the video, and interviews with some other media organizations were cancelled.
“As a well-known activist, Sarah was invited to a rally by human rights organizations on the topic of Palestinian rights. Sarah was asked to connect issues of systemic police violence here in Ontario with the same issue in Israel,” campaign spokesperson Shirven Rezvany said in an emailed statement.
“Sarah references the death of a one-year-old child in Ontario during an OPP operation, which was recent at the time of the rally. She also references the weekly demonstrations by the yellow vest movement (which sometimes included the Proud Boys and Sons of Odin), which the Hamilton community felt that the police failed to act on.”
Rezvany confirmed the dead child was Jameson Shapiro, who was killed by gunfire on Nov. 26, 2020. The province’s Special Investigations Unit has said three Ontario Provincial Police officers fired on a truck, which was being driven by the boy’s father, while attempting to stop it after reports of a father abducting his son. Three OPP constables have been charged with manslaughter in the death of the boy.
The father also died, but no charges were laid.
The weekly demonstrations Rezvany cited were described in local media stories as taking place in front of Hamilton City Hall for more than a year, and followed anti-LGBTQ violence at Pride celebrations at a city park there in June 2019.