While many venerate the advanced in age for their wisdom, veneration and respect must still be earned. Haroon Siddiqui, “Editorial Page Editor Emeritus,” for the Toronto Star, did not earn it throughout his editorial career in our opinion, instead spending years spreading anti-Israel talking points.

Clearly, retirement has done nothing to mellow his incendiary viewpoints. Siddiqui’s November 8 column in The Toronto Star entitled: “Kamala Harris aligned herself with Joe Biden’s biggest failure,” is the latest in a lengthy career of trying, inexplicably, to maximize the anti-Israel viewpoint at the expense of common sense and evidence to the contrary.

Nearly two decades ago, in 2005, Siddiqui commented on the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, somehow finding a way to blame Israel for unilaterally withdrawing from territory claimed by Palestinians. In an alert at the time, HonestReporting Canada noticed his tendency to promote the “simplistic idea that Israel is always wrong.” Although he retired from the newspaper in 2015, this week’s column marked a temporary return from that retirement. Nevertheless, his views remain problematic, this time centred around the recent American election.

Commentary abounds on why Democratic party candidate Kamala Harris lost the recent presidential election to Donald Trump. Understandably, much of this conversation focuses on what was really important to American voters as they cast their vote. In his opinion piece, however, Siddiqui claimed that Harris “could’ve forged a new coalition of younger Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike, disappointed multilateralists and defenders of universal human rights,” and that this coalition would be populated by the “majority of registered voters” who disapproved of the way Joe Biden was handling the Israel-Hamas war.

In this statement, Siddiqui ignored a critical reality – the vast majority of American voters do not appear to care all that much about the situation in Israel and Gaza. A CNN exit poll asked voters what issues were most important to them in the election. Only four percent responded that America’s foreign policy ranked highest. Democracy and the economy ranked highest, at 34% and 32%, respectively.

The election was not a referendum on either candidates’, or either party’s, record on Israel and Hamas. There is a small minority of voters, some subset of that broadly defined four percent, who care so deeply about this issue that it may sway their vote, and the rest concern themselves with domestic issues.

Siddiqui went on to claim that “on Gaza, a chasm has opened up between governments and the governed, including in Canada. … Pro-Palestinian voices are routinely censored.” Not his voice, apparently, considering he’s writing for Canada’s newspaper with the highest daily circulation, nor the voices of countless other anti-Israel columnists who are regularly penning commentaries in The Toronto Star and elsewhere, far disproportionate to other global conflicts.

A “chasm” connotes a divergence with a significant following on either side, and the reality on the ground simply does not bear this out in Canada, either. As in the United States, issues around cost of living, healthcare and the economy are the overwhelming concern of voters. The Middle East does not crack the top 13 concerns. If anything, the Conservative Party of Canada, strongly supportive of Israel, is double digits ahead of its opponents, showing that at minimum, Canadians do not see support for Israel as a problematic political position.

Despite what Siddiqui would have his readers believe, there is no groundswell of support for the anti-Israel movement in either Canada or the United States, nor is there evidence of any censorship of anti-Israel views, and in fact, quite the opposite: this fringe minority is given a platform again and again, as Siddiqui’s very own column demonstrates.