Antisemitism in Canada at record levels in 2021 with violence rising, audit finds | CBC News

Anti-Semitic incidents were up seven percent overall from a year earlier, but the number of violent incidents increased by more than 700 percent, from nine in 2020 to 75 in 2021.

In one recorded incident, a man allegedly gave a Nazi salute before assaulting a woman in a Toronto subway station, according to the report.

In another, an Ontario liquor store clerk was assaulted by a customer who called him a “dirty Jew.”

In June, the Montreal kosher bakery was burned down.

The report found that there was a spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes last May, coinciding with escalating violence in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel. Pro-Israeli Jewish protesters were beaten, had stones thrown at them and spat on.

At an anti-Israel rally in Winnipeg, a man displayed a poster showing a figure throwing a Star of David into a trash can with the slogan: “Please keep the world clean.”

The most attacked religious minority

David Matas, senior legal counsel for B’nai Brith, said the Jewish community “tops the list” of minorities subject to religious hatred.

“If you are Jewish, you are much more likely to be the victim of a hate crime than if you are a member of another minority,” Matas said.

He told a news conference in Ottawa that there had been an “increase” in anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses.

The report says that post-secondary institutions are “significant breeding grounds for anti-Semitism,” with Jewish students increasingly reporting vandalism and threats of violence.

Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman said there is a “rising wave of anti-Semitism in this country” not only among the far right but also among university professors.

“Anti-Semitism is one of the ugliest manifestations of racism,” he said.

The report found that harassment of Jewish Canadians dropped slightly to 2,460 incidents in 2021 from 2,483 in 2020. But there was a 12 per cent rise in online hate, attributed to more people communicating online during the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19.

B’nai Brith, who monitors the incidents, found that some Jewish candidates in federal elections, including Montreal-based Liberal MP Anthony Housefather, had their posters painted with swastikas.

At a news conference in Ottawa on Monday, Housefather called anti-Semitism “a serious problem.”

He said he personally saw people in a car driving down a busy street in his constituency “screaming insults” out the windows, including “kill the Jews, kill the Jews.”

The MP said the abuse scared off many voters, with one asking her if she should remove the mezuzah, a small decorative box containing lines of the Torah, from the outside of her door because it would identify her household as Jewish.

Quebec reported the most incidents

Marvin Rotrand, national director of the Human Rights League of B’nai Brith Canada, described “worrying trends” in several provinces.

The most reported anti-Semitic incidents last year occurred in Quebec, which recorded 828 incidents in 2021, up from 686 the previous year.

British Columbia saw a 111 percent increase from 2020 to 2021, from 194 to 409, including 56 cases of vandalism and 296 incidents of online hate and abuse.

Abuse against Jews increased sharply in Alberta and more than doubled in the Prairies and Nunavut.

In Atlantic Canada, the number of reported incidents dropped to 80 last year from 199 in 2020.

Ontario had the second highest number of reports of anti-Semitic incidents in 2021, but the 821 incidents were a drop from 1,130 the previous year.

New Democrat MP Randall Garrison, who represents Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke, said he was shocked by the rise in cases in BC, noting that online communication “has made it easier for the haters to be heard.”

The report included a case in Richmond, BC, where a wooden post with the message “COVID is the Jewish world order” was found on a busy street.