I stand in my place today to speak to government motion 39. I stand in my place this morning to speak on behalf of the residents of the town of Whitby but, in particular, the Chabad of Durham Region.

Speaker, the member for Hamilton Centre, by way of things she has done and left intentionally undone, has placed this House and its members in such disrepute that as a Parliament, we have no choice but to act to defend the dignity of this institution on behalf of our constituents.

We know that in the early morning hours of October 7, unprovoked and by surprise, the terrorist organization Hamas launched a rocket barrage and manned excursion into the State of Israel. We now know that this horrific attack has taken the lives of more than 1,400 innocent Israeli citizens and wounded thousands more. Further, Hamas continues to hold more than 200 hostages, which they forcibly abducted.

Only three days later, on October 10, the member for Hamilton Centre took to social media and posted an image of a statement on her MPP letterhead, bearing her name, her title and Ontario’s coat of arms. Rather than condemning the terrorist atrocities as most of the Western world had already done, the member chose to justify the Hamas attack on the basis of an anti-Semitic allegation that the mere existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavour. I will paraphrase elements of the member’s statement, because quoting it at great length will only proliferate the member’s hateful rhetoric.

The member states outright that the existence of Israel is a generations-long occupation of Palestine, that Israel is an apartheid regime, and that for its entire short history, it has furthered only violence through what she calls “settler colonialism.” Further, the member ties her anti-Semitic ideological conjecture directly to the present war. At no point does the member acknowledge that the present conflict exists only because of an unprovoked terrorist attack aimed at Israeli civilians and carried out by a militant terrorist group with a core mandate to annihilate the Jewish homeland. The member’s musings at any other time would still have been offensive and unacceptable for any elected representative of the people of Ontario, but to make them in association with a violent act of unrepentant and unprovoked terrorism is repugnant and intolerable to the greatest extent of those words.

On October 7, more innocent Jewish men, women, children and infants were killed than on any day since the Holocaust. It was not enough for the member from Hamilton Centre that their families and friends would never see their loved ones again. She felt justified in spreading her belief that the victims and their surviving friends and families were in fact somehow responsible for their own tragic fate. Inexplicably, the member’s statement, whether intentional or impetuous, blames the mere existence of the State of Israel for the thousands of rockets launched at civilians and the invasion of thousands of militants who killed, raped and kidnapped with no regard for the dignity of human life.

Speaker, the member’s own leader recognized the blatant inappropriateness the very same day the statement was posted and quickly called upon the member to apologize and retract it. For unknown reasons, the member took more than 24 hours to post a half-hearted apology buried in the comment section of her own post. Additionally, her so-called apology ultimately reaffirmed her position against Israel’s right to self-defence.

At present, the member has still not deleted the original statement, which has now been seen more than 3.1 million times.