With age comes wisdom, or at least it’s supposed to. Clearly, not always.

In 2014, Vancouver author and retired doctor Gabor Maté published an opinion column in The Toronto Star where he made the ignorant and obscene comparison between the Warsaw Ghetto, where hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews were forced by the Nazis, while awaiting their murder, to the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist regime in control of Gaza.

More than a decade has passed since that repugnant comparison appeared in Canada’s most widely-read newspaper, but there is no evidence that Maté has matured in his worldview, nor become more knowledgeable about the Middle East.

However, that has certainly not stopped him from providing his opinion to readers.

His June 20 opinion column entitled: “What is happening in Gaza is an injury to our collective conscience. We must be allowed to speak out,” is the latest installment in The Toronto Star’s litany of anti-Israel commentaries.

Maté downplayed anti-Jewish hate speech, saying that it a “phantasm, evoked to intimidate people from expressing their grief, outrage, and demands for justice,” referring to the ongoing Hamas-provoked war in the Middle East,” later adding that “what is far more common and genuinely confusing for many is that Israel and its supporters, Jews and non-Jews, habitually confound opposition to Israeli policy with antisemitism.”

There should be little confusion. Criticizing Israeli policy is entirely valid, a point explicitly spelled out by the normative definition of antisemitism, laid out by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which says that “criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”

What veers into anti-Jewish hate speech is when Israel is held to standards that no other country is held to, or when vicious lies are spread against it, including the allegation of “genocide,” a slur so unfounded that even one of its most prominent advocates, Amnesty International, attempted to redefine the word in order to promote its agenda.

Using the Holocaust, the mass murder of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis, as a cudgel to demonize Israel is reprehensible. Such claims are not only entirely without merit, but represent a blood libel leveled against Israel, while actual cases of genocide are widely ignored.

The real genocides casually ignored by Maté include the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023, where thousands of Palestinian terrorists carried out a bloodthirsty campaign of carnage with intent to murder as many innocent people as possible. That is an attempted genocide. Israel’s counter-terrorism operations, which – particularly considering Hamas’ cynical use of Gaza civilian infrastructure – has been lauded by experts in urban warfare as going beyond what is required under under international law, is no genocide by any stretch of the imagination.

Being ignorant is not antisemitic. But peddling an anti-Israel slur, using the biggest mass killing of Jews in history to assault the Jewish State using comparisons to Nazi Germany, all while blithely ignoring actual, documented instances of genocide against Jews, goes far beyond innocent ignorance. It is malicious and without question hateful.

Maté pontificating on what constitutes antisemitism is like an arsonist lecturing on fire safety, and yet The Toronto Star continues to hand him the matches.