Terry Newman: The anti-Zionist doctor who didn’t know what she’d done wrong

Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto on Wednesday, May 27, 2026. Photo by Peter Power/Postmedia

Article content

Kavita Algu, a former palliative care doctor at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, recently quit after a workplace investigator found her to be disruptive and unprofessional, which the Toronto Star would like you to believe is some kind of injustice. Judging from the Star’s own “investigation” and Algu’s activism, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Article content

According to the Star’s investigation, Algu “was never told specifically what she did wrong.” She was just a physician who engaged in Palestinian advocacy and “ultimately felt she had no choice but to leave a career she had spent years building.”

Article content

Article content

Article content

The Star’s Shree Paradkar notes that Algu wasn’t a particularly experienced public speaker when she spoke at a Toronto rally in 2024, but that she “felt obligated to speak out about the destruction of a health-care system,” which apparently included suggesting that Israel was targeting staff and patients in hospitals and committing “genocide” against Palestinians.

Article content

Article content

Of course, this wasn’t the only time that Algu had made such accusations. Less than three months after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, Algu wrote an op-ed for Spring magazine, which refers to itself as “a magazine of socialist ideas in action,” arguing that health care in Gaza was being “specifically targeted including bombings of ambulances and hospitals and sniper attacks on medical professionals.” She then suggested that what was happening in Gaza was a “textbook case of genocide.”

Article content

Algu has made numerous posts on X that would cause most reasonable people — especially Jews working at a historically Jewish hospital that was founded because they could not get jobs and health-care services elsewhere due to antisemitism — to raise an eyebrow.

Article content

Article content

Responding to comments made by Foreign Minister Anita Anand in July 2025, Algu equated Hamas, a recognized terrorist group, with the Israeli government, writing on X: “You say ‘Hamas must release all hostages, lay down its arms and play no role in…governance’. Should Israeli government officials do the same? Some of whom are wanted by the (International Criminal Court)?”

Article content

Of course, there is no evidence that Israel is committing a “genocide” in Gaza and there has been no finding of such by any credibly international body. Moreover, the International Criminal Court prosecutor who issued those warrants for Israeli officials was forced to resign last month over a sexual-assault scandal and allegations that Qatar promised to “look after” him if he set his sights on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Article content

More recently, in response to a BBC News report in June, Algu wrote on X: “We all watched every single hospital and university in Gaza be bombed by Israel and the entire civilian population tortured and starved — while you have been telling us the slaughter is moral and just. Of course no one trusts most mainstream news.”