Ottawa has a Pride parade scheduled for today. It isn’t going to be the event the organizers planned.

Individuals and organizations have been dropping out, to the point where I suspect there won’t be many left willing to take part. The parade route has been halved, not because not enough police officers were willing to volunteer for the event. Not surprising given the anti-police previosuly expressed by the organizers.

For some reason, August is Pride month in Ottawa. So is June. A sign of our times I guess.

What has triggered the current exodus is the stand taken by Capital Pride on Palestine. Instead of decrying violence against sexual minorities there, something that is established policy, they spoke out against Israel (where the LGBTQ+ community does have rights) and the conflict in Gaza. They attacked, though indirectly, the major sponsor of the parade.

Issuing a statement of solidarity with Palestine is a trendy thing these days. There is no doubt the situation in Gaza is horrific. There is also, it seems to me, very little understanding of the history of the area and the conflict. No-one wants to talk about the Palestinian state that the UN tried to establish in 1947 that was rejected because the Palestinians didn’t want to co-exist with Israel. There never has been a country called Palestine.

I am not going to list all the people and organizations who have announced they won’t be taking part in todays parade. It is a long one, and I am sure incomplete, including politicians, civil leaders, political parties, hospitals and other institutions and private businesses. The statement of solidarity created a feeling that the parade, and perhaps even the LGBTQ+ community is an unsafe place for Jews.

I’m not sure it actually would be, but perception and feelings play a big role. You would have thought that the parade organizers, themselves part of a community that used to be fearful and marginalized, would have understood that. If they did and issued the statement anyway, perhaps the accusations of anti-Semitism have some merit.

The cynic in me wonders if they actually believe their statement, or issued it in the hopes that Palestinian demonstrators would let the parade proceed uninterrupted. Pride parades across Canada have been targeted by those supporting the Palestinian cause. (Which makes no sense to me, except for the publicity. Why would those who feel they are oppressed attack a group that also feels, to some extent, that they are still oppressed?) I doubt our local Palestinian protestors will miss the opportunity for free publicity – I expect disruptions on the parade route.

I will admit to being somewhat amused by the publicity, the route change and the participants dropping out. Everyone these days seems to have a cause that they are passionate about. When those causes conflict, who is to say what should have the priority?

Our society is changing. (I had thought first to use the word crumbling, but the optimist in me decided that was too negative.) The world has shrunk, and foreign conflicts are increasingly being fought on our doorsteps, in our park and on our streets.

As a nation, we need to decide whether the old rules of respect and tolerance are still valued and valid. There has been a lot of violence in our streets in recent years, not only about Gaza, as battles from the “old country” have been imported by those with ties to ancestral homelands.

Do we want that to stop? You tell me.