Thursday, March 23, 2006

 

Anti-Semitic incidents in Canada on the rise

Did any of you ever watch "bowling for Columbine"? I did, back in the day when I wasn't as politically savvy and aware of Moore's repulsive bias and one thing that stood out for me was Moore's emphasis on Canada being the land of holding hands and singing happy feel good songs. Although hatred of Jews was not a part of his documentary, from my perspective, the point he was trying to get accross was that America was populated by gun toting maniacs and run by brainless hicks, whereas Canada [for instance] was the land of tolerance, free from gun crime, hatred and mistrust.
So when I saw this article about the increase Canadian anti-Jewish crimes over at Cage, it raised an eyebrow, well both eyebrows actually :


A Jewish organization that monitors anti-Semitic activities in Canada said Wednesday the number of incidents last year was the second highest total in the 23-year history of their audit.

B'nai Brith Canada said 829 anti-Semitic incidents were reported to their anti-hate hot line and offices in 2005. A record 857 were documented in 2004.

"We were looking at numbers in the two hundreds a decade ago," said Ruth Klein, director of B'nai Brith's league for human rights. "We show almost the same figure as last year and last year was an all-time high."

Out of the total 829 incidents, 531 were classified as harassment, 273 as vandalism and 25 as violence. Out of the total, 35 were directed at synagogues and 19 at Jewish communal buildings, 113 targeted Jewish homes, 46 occurred in the workplace, 161 related to Internet hate - including 34 cases of targeted hate by e-mail.

The organization says many of the incidents are influenced by neo-Nazi groups and propagandists of the Middle East who are anti-Israel.

Klein said there has been an explosion of hate on the Internet.

"We really have to worry about the next generation because they are certainly not getting Canadian values of tolerance and respect through the Internet," Klein said.

Klein listed a number of examples of anti-Semitic incidents - including students at an exclusive high school in Toronto who created an anti-Semitic Web site and sent hate-filled e-mails to Jewish students who dared to complain - and three teenage girls who attacked an elderly Jewish man outside a synagogue in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

She said the defacing of buildings remains common.

"Sometimes the police don't take it that seriously because they are used to seeing that," Klein said. "It's become routine. You have to fight against that mind-set."

Klein said most of the anti-Semitic activity is reported to their anti-hate line, but they also get their information from police and from calls to their office.

Among other things, the organization is calling on the government to broaden the definition of a hate crime to include Holocaust denial and to fund initiatives designed to fight hatred.

"If we want to see a reversal, every sector of society and every minority group has to get up and say enough," Klein said
Link...
Don't get me wrong here. I obviously don't think all Canadians hate Jews, but I think that articles like this put things in perspective whenever we are bombarded by the MSM with the comparison between the US and Canada. Specifically that message is Canada=nice tolerant happy land, and the US=horrible intolerant angry land. Just in case you were wondering, anti-Jewish indcidents in the US (in 2004) were roughly 1800, compared to the [approx] 800 incidents in Canada. Now when you compare these figures to the countries populations, you can see that anti-Jewish incidents are roughly four times more likely to occur in Canada.
Just some food for thought.

Permanent Link posted by J @ 6:17 pm
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