British Columbia had the third highest total number of anti-Semitic incidents behind Quebec, with 709, and Ontario, at 481.
The countrywide total topped 2,000 incidents of hatred toward Jews in 2018 for the first time in more than 35 years, marking the fifth straight annual increase and the highest number of incidents the organization has recorded since it began tracking such data in 1982. The report suggests the federal government needs to address legislative gaps that allow hateful rhetoric to flourish and spread.
The report comes just two days after a gunman opened fire on Jewish worshippers at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Southern California on Saturday — an attack that was prefigured by a threatening social media post, according to the FBI. The online screed said the alleged attacker was inspired by the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh in October, a tragedy that was preceded by virulent anti-Jewish comments posted online by the suspected shooter.
During the Poway attack, one woman was killed and three others were wounded, among them a child and the synagogue’s rabbi.
“Anti-Semitism has real-world consequences,” Ran Ukashi, the national director of B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights, writes in the report’s introduction. Pointing to the murder of 11 Jewish worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue, Ukashi suggests anti-Jewish harassment is not only deeply troubling; its sharp rise in Canada fuels the fear here of violence of the kind seen internationally in the past year.
According to the report, online harassment on social-media platforms including Facebook and Twitter — or through electronic communications such as email — accounted for 80 per cent of total incidents.
“Of particular concern is the rise of anti-Semitic harassment on social media, including death threats, threats of violence and malicious anti-Jewish comments and rhetoric,” Mostyn said, echoing Ukashi’s warning.
“Now what’s happening is you can easily reach thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people via the internet,” he said. “You can do it quietly, you can do it in your basement and that’s a very, very serious problem.”
The report defines harassment as “verbal or written actions that do not include the use of physical force against a person or property,” including: promotion of hate propaganda via social media, the internet, telephone or in print; verbal slurs, hate speech or harassment, or systematic discrimination in public spaces; and verbal threats of violence in cases where “the application of force does not appear imminent, or no weapon or bomb is involved.”
And while physical violence represents only 0.5 per cent of the incidents cited in B’nai Brith’s Monday report, Canada is no stranger to real-world intimidation, violence or threats of violence against Jews. (B’nai Brith only includes incidents in the report where a victim’s Jewish religion was the explicit reason for the attack).
On Monday, the York Region police hate-crime unit reported investigating an incidentinvolving the spray-painting of anti-Semitic graffiti on the front of the garage of a Vaughan home on Friday.
In November, four 17-year-old Jewish boys wearing religious garments were assaulted in north Toronto by another group of teenagers, who prefaced their attack by making derogatory comments about the boys’ religion. In February, two Saskatchewan schoolchildren were beaten by their classmates for being Jewish.
And a Montreal man was charged with inciting hatred toward Jewish people and threatening to cause death and bodily harm to Jews after allegedly writing online posts in October in which he threatened to kill “an entire school full of Jewish girls,” according to the Montreal Gazette.
Mostyn said there is no reason to believe there is an elevated threat of an attack in Canada, but the amount of online hatred targeting Jews is having an impact. This, he said, is why B’nai Brith is pushing for protections that go beyond adding more security officers outside synagogues and Jewish schools.
“We have to start at the start, and the start is incitement,” Mostyn said. “And too often nowadays this incitement is taking place on the internet and it is influencing others that unfortunately take violent and drastic actions, and that’s what really needs to stop.”
B’nai Brith’s recommendations include instituting a dedicated hate-crime police unit in every major city and providing enhanced training for hate-crime officers, and co-ordinating between the federal government and social media platforms to develop a plan to counter online hate.
Facebook recently began deleting pages belonging to white supremacist individuals and groups, but has faced significant backlash for not doing more to stop hatred advanced on its platform.
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