July 4, 2016

On Sunday, Toronto’s annual Pride Parade was forcefully stopped by Black Lives Matter malcontents. Hijacking the event for about thirty minutes, the racial agitators successfully co-opted its media and bystander draws of attention, seizing the focus of observers for itself. Repeatedly shouting “shut it down!”, the racially-driven leftists described the parade as “anti-black.”

Toronto’s Black Lives Matter movement – whose founder compared Canada’s government to the Ku Klux Klan, said black people in Canada lived in a “state of emergency,” and asked “Allah for strength to not kill white people” – held up the event as an intangible hostage while providing a list of demands for its release.

The demands were:

1. Commit to BQY’s (Black Queer Youth) continued space (including stage/tents), funding, and logistical support.
2. Self-determination for all community spaces, allowing community full control over hiring, content, and structure of their stages.
3. Full and adequate funding for community stages, including logistical, technical, and personnel support.
4. Double funding for Blockorama (to $13,000 + ASL interpretation & headliner funding).
5. Reinstate and make a commitment to increase community stages/spaces (including the reinstatement of the South Asian stage).
6. A commitment to increase representation amongst Pride Toronto staffing/hiring, prioritizing black trans women, indigenous people, and others from vulnerable communities.
7. A commitment to more black deaf and hearing ASL interpreters for the festival.
8. Removal of police floats in the pride marches/parades.
9. A public townhall, organized in conjunction with groups from marginalized communities, including, but not limited to, Black Lives Matter- Toronto, Blackness Yes, and BQY to be held six months from today. Pride Toronto will present an update and action plan on the aforementioned demands.

Mendacious framing of Toronto’s law enforcement as racist bullies was a central theme of Black Lives Matter’s demands. During the political extortion, Black Lives Matter’s Twitter account was active, accusing the city’s police of using the Pride Parade to “erase their racism problem.” The alleged use of the event’s LGBT participants by local police amounted to “pinkwashing,” said some Black Lives Matter agitators.

Alexandra Williams, a co-founder of Toronto’s Black Lives Matter group, explained her group’s motivations to Canada’s state news agency. “[Black Lives Matter] wanted to hold Pride Toronto accountable for ‘anti-blackness,'” adding, “We didn’t bully our way into Pride… we made space for ourselves in a place where we have been erased.”

“Pride Toronto ‘has shown little honor to black queer/trans communities, and other marginalized communities. Over the years, Pride has threatened the existence of black spaces at Pride that have existed for years,” said the racial agitation group in a news release.

The Pride Parade’s organizers surrendered to Black Lives Matter’s thuggish behavior. Its executive director, Mathieu Chantelois, singed a document agreeing to all the aforementioned demands.

This same weekend was the annual anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic  “Quds Day.” Conceived by the Iranian regime in 1979, it calls for the destruction of Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem in the name of the “Palestinian” national cause.

Sunday’s circus is the inevitable result of the left’s commitment to valuing victimhood – real or imagined – as political capital. Consistently reassured that they have special privileges bestowed upon them by legitimizing their illusory perceptions of grievance, various left-wing groups vie for attention while angling for better positions within the hierarchy of imagined oppression. Pride Parade was originally conceived as a demonstration in pursuit of legal rights. It has now become a virtue-signaling platform for left-wing politicians, simultaneously serving as a stadium within which competing groups contend in the Oppression Olympics.