Canada: Another Record-Setting Year For Anti-Semitism April 16, 2008

Anti-Semitic incidents in Canada hit another record high in 2007, according to the League of Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada. The 2007 total of 1,042 incidents represented an 11.4% increase over the previous year, and was nearly double the 586 incidents reported in 2003:

Incidents of anti-Semitism continued to trend upward in Canada last year, with a record 1,042 occurrences reported by the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada – nearly one-third of them on the Internet.

The new high marked an 11.4 per cent increase over 2006 and nearly doubled the 584 incidents reported in 2003, the League stated in its 2007 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents.

Occurrences ranged from assaults on visible Jews to the airing of a Holocaust-denial film by a campus student group…The largest number of incidents was reported in the Greater Toronto Area, home to the country’s largest population of Jews, where 427 events were recorded, down four per cent from the year before. Montreal, with 249 incidents (up 16 per cent from 2006) and regional Quebec, with 42 incidents (up 282 per cent from the year before) showed increases…

Breaking down the incidents by type, the Audit reported that of the 1,042 events, 699 were categorized as harassment, up from 588 in 2006. Altogether, that category represented 67 per cent of incidents in 2007.

The Audit also reported 315 cases of vandalism, down marginally from the 317 recorded the year before and 28 cases of violence, down from 30 in 2006.

There were 22 incidents involving synagogues, with targeted houses of worship in Montreal, Toronto,Winnipeg, Edmonton, Richmond, B.C., Hamilton and Barrie, Ont….

Nearly 30 per cent of all incidents – 310 in all – were attributable to Web-based activity. Of these, nearly one-third involved threatening or harassing communications.

Harassment was reported in 31 instances in the workplace and 82 incidents were reported in school settings, mostly at public schools.

“With concerted efforts underway to import anti-Israel propaganda into the high school classroom, such an increase cannot be entirely unexpected, since anti-Semitism is often a by-product of virulent anti-Israel activity,” the Audit stated.

One love to the Canadian Jewish News and to B’nai Brith for including the Holocaust-denial film in their list of incidents. This audit alone shows justifiable reason that Jews in particular, though we may be harshly critical of Israel, are generally quite wary of anti-Israel sentiments. Even if there were a premise upon which to base the conversation, raising the “should Israel exist?” question almost invariably ignites latent anti-Semitism in someone in earshot/the viewing audience, and as we can see, anti-Israel propaganda can lead to outright violent or destructive hate crime.

Not everyone, however, considers hate speech to be an incident worth noting.

B’nai Brith singled out Quebec commissioners Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor whose namesake Bouchard-Taylor commission was responsible for 14 percent of all incidents in Quebec, B’nai Brith attorney Anita Bromberg contended. The commission’s spokesperson, Sylvain Leclerc, stated that “something’s out of whack” with B’nai Brith “equating the torching of a synagogue, a physical attack and an anti-Semitic statement.” Ms. Bromberg said the commission had a “laissez-faire” attitude about anti-Semitic harrassment and said that:

…bec in 2007 (up from 226 in 2006), 240 were cases of harassment. In all, 37 cases - or 14 per cent of all incidents - were “Bouchard-Taylor-related,” B’nai Brith lawyer Anita Bromberg said from Toronto.

Fifteen anti-Jewish statements were uttered at the hearings, directly into the microphone and carried live in TV, she said. Another 22 were made in blogs and left in telephone messages to Jews and made specific reference to the commission.

The correlation between things like Holocaust denial and anti-Israel propaganda, which take aim at things central to diaspora Jewish identity, and anti-Semitic hate crime, which involves people taking aim at Jews, can not be ignored. While we can not go on the vanguard in favor of unchecked censorship, we must put up our guards and speak out when confronted with hateful speech — because hate does not always confine itself to the voice box.