Tag: hate crimes

Choosing love not hate

On Sunday, vigils were held in many cities to commemorate the 11 worshippers killed at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2018. The shooting was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history.

As we have mourned and taken greater measures toward protecting ourselves, we have, mainly, not let fear paralyze us or isolate us from our neighbours and the larger world. We have continued to live Jewishly, whatever that means to each one of us; whether it’s helping those less fortunate, lobbying for sound government policies, going to synagogue or simply being kind to the people we encounter in our day.

In Vancouver, community members and others could join two collective moments of remembrance on Sunday: the Jewish Federations of North America’s Pause with Pittsburgh, which included the livestreaming of a public memorial service, and a service at Congregation Beth Israel, organized by the Rabbinical Association of Vancouver with the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, Hillel BC and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.

Over the weekend, Jews were also encouraged – as they were in the wake of the tragedy last year – to #ShowUpForShabbat, an initiative of the American Jewish Committee, calling for us “to honour the victims and raise our collective voice for a world free of antisemitism, hate and bigotry.”

Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld, who grew up in Pittsburgh, told News 1130, “There are still many people who are frightened and worried about what took place a year ago…. There are people who are concerned about coming to synagogue and people who are concerned about antisemitism. Especially on holidays, one of the messages I deliver is that, unfortunately, antisemitism is on the rise in the world. But we have to remain strong, to have the courage to come to synagogue, and to not allow attacks like this to prevent us from being who we are and to deprive us of the benefits that come from being in a sacred space.”

Infeld also noted, “One of the aftermaths of the attack is that people in Pittsburgh didn’t feel this was an attack just on a synagogue, they felt it was an attack on Pittsburgh…. We have to understand an attack on any sacred space is an attack on an entire community, so we need to stand together as one community with the message that love is stronger than hate.”

While the situation is not as bad as elsewhere in the world, the number of hate crimes and the incidences of antisemitism in Canada, including in British Columbia, have increased worrisomely. Love has a long row to hoe. Not only to give us the courage to speak up in the face of prejudice, but also to confront and temper our own. Not only to make us self-assured enough to make space for those with whom we agree and for whom we care, but also for those with whom we disagree and whom we dislike. Not only to inspire us to dream of a better world, but to give us the imagination and resourcefulness to bring those aspirations into being.

Love can only be stronger than hate if we choose to make it so.

 

Will jail curb hater?

The sentencing of a notorious hate promoter in Toronto last week is, in some ways, evidence that our country’s laws and norms against targeting identifiable groups are working.

James Sears, editor of Your Ward News, a propaganda sheet distributed periodically to 300,000 households in Toronto and area, was sentenced to two consecutive six-month terms in jail. His paper is filled with bigotry and hatred, especially targeting Jews, women and LGBTQ+ people. He is obsessed with the Rothschild family, denies the Holocaust, dabbles in bizarre racial theories and celebrates rape. One issue invited volunteers to join an Adolf Hitler Fan Club. He and a co-conspirator, publisher LeRoy St. Germaine, were found guilty in January of promoting hatred against women and Jews. St. Germaine is yet to be sentenced.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, among others, praised the judge’s sentence. In fact, the judge openly expressed his wish that he had the legal power to hand down a harsher sentence.

Unlike the United States, where constitutional freedoms make it legal to express almost anything but overt death threats or yelling fire in a crowded hall, Canada’s laws place limits on acceptable discourse. This is, it has seemed, a consensus position that we as a society have accepted as justifiable limits on our freedoms for the greater good. In practice, convictions on the basis of hate speech are exceedingly rare. More common are hearings and decisions via our network of human rights commissions, which provide a quasi-judicial recourse for victims. Neither of these systems is perfect. But cases like Sears’ indicate that, when necessary, they can have the appropriate outcomes.

We hesitate to call this good news, however. Justice may be served but, in the long run, what is gained? A happy ending would have been a society in which ideas like Sears’ are nonexistent. A more realistic world might be one in which some form of restorative justice is the sentence, some construction in which Sears and St. Germaine learn from their victims about the harm they have inflicted and perhaps come to see the humanity of the people they vilify. Instead, Sears will spend a year (or four months, depending on parole) stewing over what he doubtlessly interprets as some heinous injustice perpetrated against him by the imagined forces of evil. Justice is served, probably, but is the larger cause of social cohesion and mutual understanding?

Hate crimes in Canada spike

(image from Statistics Canada)

Crimes against identifiable groups in Canada have spiked sharply, according to the latest data from Statistics Canada on police-reported hate crimes. Jews and Jewish institutions were the foremost targeted group, but hate crimes against Muslims comprised the largest increase.

Across Canada, there were 2,073 police-reported hate crimes in 2017, an increase of 664 incidents over the previous year. Almost half of all hate crimes were reported in Ontario. In British Columbia, 255 hate crimes were reported to police, including 68 that targeted Jews, 36 incidents against black people, 19 against Muslims and 18 crimes based on sexual orientation. Reported hate crimes against the Muslim, black, Arab or West Asian and LGBTQ+ communities all increased nationwide.

Across the country, hate crimes against the Jewish community rose by 63% between 2016 and 2017 – from 221 incidents to 360 – and the Jewish community remained the most frequently targeted group in both absolute and per capita terms, the report stated. Hate crimes against the Muslim community increased 151% between those years, from 139 police-reported incidents in 2016 to 349 in 2017.

In one of few comparatively bright spots in the report, violent incidents decreased as a proportion of all hate crimes, accounting for 38% of reported hate crimes in 2017, down from 44% in 2016. But this proportional decline is tempered by the raw numbers. The actual number of violent hate crimes increased 25% but decreased as a proportion of hate crimes overall only because the number of non-violent crimes increased that much more – non-violent offences like mischief and public incitement of hatred increased 64%.

Of the 360 police-reported crimes against Jews or Jewish institutions across Canada in 2017, 209 of those were in Ontario and 49 in Quebec – making British Columbia not only the second province in raw numbers of anti-Jewish attacks, but almost tying Ontario on a per capita basis and surpassing all other provinces by far.

Hate crimes in Canada have been creeping upward relatively slowly since 2014, according to Statistics Canada, but 2017 saw a leap of 47% over the previous year. Most of the crimes involved hate-related property crimes, such as graffiti and vandalism.

Despite the large increase in 2017, however, hate crimes still represent a very small proportion of overall crime – about 0.1% of the more than 1.9 million non-traffic crimes reported by police services in 2017. That said, a 2014 Statistics Canada study, General Social Survey on Canadians’ Safety (Victimization), in which Canadians self-reported incidents of perceived hate crimes, indicated that two-thirds of such incidents were not reported to police, suggesting that the numbers in the hate crimes reports might underestimate actual incidents substantially.

image - Hate crimes versus religious groups, 2016 and 2017
(image from Statistics Canada)

“Police-reported hate crimes refer to criminal incidents that, upon investigation by police, are found to have been motivated by hatred toward an identifiable group,” explains StatsCan. “An incident may be against a person or property and may target race, colour, national or ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, language, sex, age, mental or physical disability, among other factors. In addition, there are four specific offences listed as hate propaganda offences or hate crimes in the Criminal Code of Canada: advocating genocide, public incitement of hatred, wilful promotion of hatred, and mischief motivated by hate in relation to property used by an identifiable group.”

Hate crimes against Muslims, particularly in Quebec, contributed significantly to the overall spike in 2017 reported incidents. Hate crimes in that province increased 50% over the previous year, with incidents targeting Muslims almost tripling to 117 reports in 2017 from 41 the previous year. Perhaps most disconcertingly, the biggest spike in anti-Muslim incidents in Quebec occurred in the month following the mass shooting at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec, where six Muslim men were murdered in a shooting rampage on Jan. 29, 2017.

In response to the statistics, which were released Nov. 29, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs called on the federal government to take a three-pronged approach to hate-motivated crime and related matters.

“In the wake of this report, we are reiterating our call on the Government of Canada to take three key steps to combat hate,” Shimon Koffler Fogel, chief executive officer of CIJA, said in a statement. “First, we are grateful that the prime minister announced he will enhance the Security Infrastructure Program. We urge the government to expand it to cover training costs, especially given that emergency training saved lives during the Pittsburgh synagogue attack. Second, we need a national strategy to combat online hate. Experience shows that vicious rhetoric online can fuel and foreshadow violence offline. Third, the federal government should strengthen the capacity of law enforcement to combat hate crime. This should include enhancing legal tools to deal with hate speech and supporting the creation of local hate crime units where they are lacking.”

Each one, and all one

The news is not good. Hate crimes are up almost everywhere in the world one cares to look. A Statistics Canada report on police-reported hate crimes in Canada erases whatever smug superiority Canadians may have been feeling when watching rampant racism south of the border, at least some of which seems a result of the licence granted by a president who flirts with the most incendiary elements in U.S. society. The number of hate crimes reported to Canadian police in 2017 far outstripped the number in 2016 (see story, page 1) – and the actual number of hate-motivated incidents may be up to three times larger than the number reported to police.

Similarly terrible phenomena are taking place across Europe, where xenophobic and racist rhetoric is manifesting into violence against Jews, Muslims, Roma, asylum-seekers from Africa and Asia and, really, anyone who does not fit an escalating nationalist and populist consensus.

The lines are not all clear, either. The perpetrators and the victims can, at times, overlap. In online posts, email threads and private conversations, we witness members of our own community attributing motives to entire groups of people, and spreading hatred based on religious or racial identities. Likewise, messages of anti-Jewish hatred are common in online locations addressing the Israeli-Arab conflict, often including antisemitic comments from members of victimized minority groups.

The range of hate-motivated incidents addressed in the Statistics Canada report varies – most are non-violent and involve graffiti or crimes against property. But, when they are violent, they strike with a precision that aims at the emotional, as well as physical, vulnerabilities of the victims. In three of the most horrific hate crimes of recent years, assailants struck in the very places where people should expect safety – in the spiritual sanctuary of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, S.C., where nine African-Americans were murdered by a white supremacist on June 17, 2015; at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City, a mosque, where six people were murdered by an Islamophobic killer on Jan. 29, 2017; and at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 were murdered during Shabbat services this past Oct. 27.

The idea that people should be safe in a place of religious observance seems to be precisely the reasoning behind such attacks. But there is another form of violent crime that seems oddly excluded from this discussion.

Thursday (Dec. 6) marked the 29th anniversary of the mass murder at the École Polytechnique, in Montreal, where 14 women were killed by a man with deep-rooted hatred against women. A commemoration took place at the Vancouver Art Gallery, in recognition of the annual National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, with empty shoes representing the 545 women who have been murdered in British Columbia between 1997 and 2015 (the last year for which reliable statistics are available).

These victims include some of Canada’s murdered indigenous women, women working in vulnerable situations and women who were murdered because they were women and members of another marginalized group. Others were murdered by their domestic partners. In probably all of these cases, issues of differential power (of various forms) and attitudes about the value of women’s lives, factored into their fates. They are victims of gender-based violence.

It seems strange that, in a discussion about hate-motivated crimes, we exclude an entire gender, whose experience with violence is as prevalent, or more so, than that of other identifiable groups.

This is not an attempt to detract from one or another group’s experience with violence to emphasize something else; it is more an attempt to emphasize that every life should be respected and that membership in an identifiable group often diminishes that respect in the eyes of perpetrators.

But neither should the universal idea – every life is sacred and every individual deserves respect – detract from the more particular issue at hand. Every life is sacred and every individual is deserving of respect, but membership in particular groups can disproportionately impact on one’s experience with violence and discrimination. So, while we should be always conscious of the universal, we should likewise militate against the particular bigotries and prejudices that lead to disproportionate victimization of identifiable groups. In Canada and around the world right now, humankind could benefit from more emphasis on both the universal and the particular.

אנטישמיות בקנדה

המכתבים נשלחו למוסדות היהודים בערים הבאות: טורונטו (ארבעה בתי כנסת), מונטריאול (שני בתי כנסת), אוטווה, המילטון, קינגסטון, קלגרי ואדמונטון (שני בתי כנסת).

מחלקת פשעי שנאה של משטרת קנדה פתחה בחקירה לבדוק את זהות שולחי מכתבי השנאה לבית כנסת ברחבי המדינה. עד כה ידוע כבר על לפחות עשרה בתי כנסת שקיבלו מכתבי שנאה אנונימיים בימים האחרונים. המכתבים נשלחו למוסדות היהודים בערים הבאות: טורונטו (ארבעה בתי כנסת), מונטריאול (שני בתי כנסת), אוטווה, המילטון, קינגסטון, קלגרי ואדמונטון (שני בתי כנסת).

המכתבים כוללים ציור של צלב קרס על מגן דוד צהוב עם דם נוטף, בצרוף הסלוגן “היהודים חייבים במיתה” גן כן עם דף נוטף. בשלב זה לא ברור האם קמפיין השנאה היה קשור לחג החנוכה שחל באותם ימים, או להכרזתו החד צדדית של נשיא ארה”ב דולנד טראמפ, כי ירושלים היא בירת ישראל, או שמדובר בפעילות אנטשימית “רגילה”.

ראש ממשלת קנדה, ג’סטין טרודו, אמר בתגובה לפרשה החמורה: “למעשי שנאה ואנטישמיות אלה אין מקום במדינתנו ואנו לא נסבול זאת”.

בבני ברית קנדה מציינים כי בשנת 2016 נרשמה עלייה משמעותית בהיקף של עשרים ושישה אחוז בפשעי שנאה נגד יהודים במדינה (1728 מקרים בסך הכל), לעומת השנה החולפת (2015). בבני ברית מוסיפים עוד כי 2016 הוותה שנת שיא בפעולות האנטישמיות, מתוך 35 השנים האחרונות, בהן הארגון מנהל רשום בנושא.

כלבים כלבים בואו הביתה: נהגי משאיות מחזירים הביתה כלבים שהלכו לאיבוד ברחבי קנדה

מי אמר שלנהגי משאיות לא איכפת משום דבר חוץ מעבודתם. מתברר שבשנים האחרונות נהגי משאיות שנוסעים ברחבי המדינה הגדולה הזו מחזירים לביתם הרבה כלבים שהלכו לאיבוד. האיחוד מחדש עם בעלי הכלבים מרגש ביותר. הנהגים עושים זאת ללא שום עלויות וכולם שמחים.

מרגרט פוסטר-הייד (ממחוז אונטריו) שהייתה בעברה בעצמה נהגת משאית כבדה, החליטה שיש מקום לנצל את ההזדמנות שנהגי משאיות נוסעים בכל רחבי קנדה, לשם החזרת כלבים אבודים הביתה. היא הקימה לפני כארבע שנים רשת באינטרנט בשם “גיבורי הכביש מעופפים נודדים”, שמקשרת בין בעלי כלבים שאבדו וקיבלו מידע שהם נמצאו במרחק גדול מביתם, לבין נהגים שעובדים בכל רחבי קנדה. בעלי הכלבים ממלאים את פרטי הכלבים שאבדו, היכן הם אבדו, היכן נמצאו והיכן הם גרים. המידע נמסר לנהגים בשטח שמקבלים מידע מפורט היכן לאסוף את הכלבים שנמצאו. הם מעלים אותם לתא הנהג במשאיות שלהם ומסיעים אותם לאחר כבוד לנקודת המפגש עם בעליהם.

כאמור הנהגים כמו גם פוסטר-הייד לא גובים שום כסף על השרות המבורך שהם מספקים. בעלי הכלבים שלא נדרשים לשלם על החזרת כלביהם הביתה, בדרך כלל מכבדים את הנהגים במתנות וכרטיסי שי לשימוש בבתי קפה ומסעדות.

לדברי פוסטר-הייד עד כה הרשת של נהגי המשאיות עזרו בהחזרת לא פחות מארבע מאות כלבים לבעליהם המודאגים. רק בימים האחרונים נהג בשם סקוט סטיבנס, החזיר ממחוז בריטיש קולומביה למחוז אלברטה כלב בשם פרנקי. הכלב הלך לאיבוד לפני כחמישה חודשים (במהלך קיץ האחרון), נמצא בריא ושלם מרחק של לא פחות מ-1,200 ק”מ מביתו. מדובר בכלב טיפולי מיוחד שברח מהבייביסיטר שלו לאחר שזה שיחרר אותו מהרצועה, בזמן שבעליו אשלי פאור (אם יחידה לילדה קטנה בת שלוש) שהתה בבית החולים. פרנקי יודע להריח את רמת הסוכר בדמה של פאור וכן הוא עוזר לה להירגע מהחרדות הרבות שלה. סטיבנס שמח מאוד להחזיר את פרנקי במשאית שלו לבית בעליו. פרנקי במפגש עם פאור ובתה קפץ משמחה ולקיק את שתיהן ממושכות. אכן הוא שמח לחזור הביתה.

A “slap on the wrist”

At a sentencing on March 13, Arthur Topham, the man convicted of deliberately promoting hatred against Jewish people on his now-defunct website radicalpress.com, was given a ban on public online activity and a six-month curfew.

B.C. Supreme Court Judge Bruce Butler said Topham, 70, did “not call for violence; his views were political satire,” and said it was not Topham’s “intent to indirectly incite violence.”

On the racist, antisemitic website he founded and on which he posted vitriol until removing the site just prior to the sentencing, Topham wrote that Jews should be forcibly sterilized. He described Canada as being “controlled by the Zionist lobby” and Jewish places of worship as “synagogues of Satan.” He could have faced a sentence of up to two years in prison.

Unrepentant, Topham told the Quesnel courthouse he felt it was his “duty to alert the … public to the imminent threat …. [of] the Jewish lobby.”

In Feb. 27 posts on anti-racistcanada.blogspot.ca, Topham informed his followers that his Facebook presence and website would be removed from the web within two weeks and said he would be unable to publish “anything on ANY website that has my name attached to it. To do so would mean immediate jail for breaking whatever probationary restrictions that will be imposed on me.” He said his “immediate concerns are personal family issues and health challenges” and added he was “not planning on doing any interviews in the immediate future.” On March 8, he exhorted his followers to download any and all items from radicalpress.com for free.

B’nai Brith Canada, which had alerted the RCMP to Topham’s activities back in 2007, said it was “strongly disappointed” with the sentencing. In a statement, chief executive officer Michael Mostyn described the sentence as “a mere slap on the wrist which will do little to protect Canadian Jews or preserve the multicultural mosaic of our society.”

Mostyn continued, “Mr. Topham is a committed and unrepentant Jew-hater, who persisted in publishing lurid antisemitic content on his website throughout this legal process. Canada’s laissez-fair approach to hate crimes continues to fail minority groups and puts them at increased risk of attacks against their lives or property.”

Mostyn said the timing of the lax sentence was especially disturbing, “as Canada’s Jewish community reels from a series of bomb threats against our community centres, inspired by the same hateful ideology that drives Mr. Topham.”

Harry Abrams, who was the representative for the B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights in 2007, when he was first to raise the alarm about Topham’s antisemitic writing, described the sentencing as “a rope around [Topham’s] balls.”

“Somewhere in all this, the judge took pity on an old man with a sick wife and bought this thing that Topham and his friends were trying hard to sell: that all this was a parody, a satire,” Abrams said. “Sure, I’m disappointed with the sentence, but we have to look at the sum total of this thing. Topham has been exposed as a sick, crazy old man, his stuff is down from the internet and he’s restricted from posting online. This is what we’ve got to work with, and he’s not just given free rein to go back to beating on us Jews.”

Ryan Bellerose, advocacy coordinator for B’nai Brith Canada’s League of Human Rights for Western Canada, described the sentence as “a little ridiculous.”

“He was convicted of hate speech and he’s got a curfew? This almost sends a message that you can pick on Jews and it’s totally OK, you won’t have an existential payment for it,” he said. “We finally managed to get someone charged and convicted on a hate crime in Canada and the message they send with the sentencing is that it’s not taken very seriously.

“Everyone is talking about antisemitism right now, and the bomb threats to Jewish communities in Canada, which, of course, needs to be dealt with. But no one is even talking about this [Topham’s sentencing]. That’s an especially bad message to send in today’s climate,” said Bellerose.

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net. This article was originally published by CJN.

 

Topham appeal denied

The appeal of Arthur Topham, convicted of promoting hatred against Jewish people in November 2015, was rejected last month by the B.C. Supreme Court. On his website, radicalpress.com, Topham wrote that Jews should be forcibly sterilized. He described Canada as being “controlled by the Zionist lobby” and said Jewish synagogues are “synagogues of Satan.”

Harry Abrams, who was the representative for B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights in 2007, when he was first to raise the alarm about Topham’s antisemitic writing, said he’d like to see Topham receive the maximum sentence of two years.

“He was convicted in 2015 by a jury of his peers and he’s dragged it out, kept everything up on his website since then and added to it over all this time,” said Abrams, who now serves as chair of community relations for the Jewish Federation of Victoria and Vancouver Island. “It’s all been hateful, deliberate and with the intention of causing maximum pain and fear to Jews. He’s a sick guy and there has to be some kind of backstop on this.”

The Feb. 20 ruling is an important one, said Adam Fishman, who worked closely with Amanda Hohmann, national director of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights on this case.

“The argument by Topham’s lawyer, Barclay W. Johnson, that the law that criminalizes hate speech in Canada is unconstitutional, had no merit in my opinion,” Fishman said. “Basically, they were arguing that the presence of the internet and the fact that information is more widely available because of it, changes whether that material is constitutional or not. The judge firmly rejected that argument. He wrote in his decision that it actually makes the offence even more serious, by virtue of the fact that it’s much easier to disseminate hate today.

“This also means that when faced with incidents of hate, especially online, police and prosecutors should press charges because there’s no evidence those charges won’t succeed – so there’s no excuse for not enforcing them.”

Abrams speculated that Topham might try to appeal this conviction again in the B.C. Court of Appeal. Johnson said he had not received any instructions from his client on this matter.

Johnson had shared office space with Topham’s former lawyer, Doug Christie, who died in March 2013. “On his deathbed, I told [Christie] I’d look after the rest of his files, and this was one of them,” Johnson explained. “My interest was piqued by going over the issues related to freedom of expression. Ninety-nine percent of the material Arthur Topham posted from other sources is available on the internet, so the question is, what do you do about all this wickedness? I don’t think you use the Criminal Code. We argued that the protections afforded in Canada are of little assistance if you weigh them against what’s available worldwide.”

Johnson said Topham does not have a criminal record and was hopeful he would not serve time in jail. But Abrams begged to differ. “I really think he should spend a couple of years in jail. He’s sadistic and racist, and he’s worked really hard for it.”

Johnson added Topham’s sentencing is scheduled for this Friday, March 10.

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net. This article was originally published by CJN.

Come together, right now

Canadians – and concerned citizens worldwide – are reeling from the horrific attack on a Quebec City mosque (the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec) on Jan. 29 that left six dead and others wounded. Amid the revulsion and grieving, here are some possible lessons.

We can’t ignore the Trump factor. While Islamophobia has long preceded U.S. President Donald Trump, by all indicators, Trump’s hatefulness – capped by his wide-reaching travel ban – has unleashed additional hatred against Muslims and other minorities.

Since the election, the Southern Poverty Law Centre has recorded more than 700 incidents of “hateful harassment” across the United States. Despite our ingrained public ethic of multiculturalism, Canada is clearly not immune.

Price-tag-style attacks might have come to Canada. What West Bank Palestinians are tragically used to, Canadians might be now experiencing as well. It is probably no coincidence that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped forward to declare his government’s intention to take in refugees barred by Trump’s executive order. But Trudeau’s welcoming pledge might also have unleashed more hatred in dark corners of Canada against anyone who can too easily be “othered.”

West Bank Palestinians are all too often the target of this kind of retribution. Whenever the Israeli government appears to retract support for the settlement enterprise – in the form of evacuations of illegal outposts, for example, violent settlers enact what they call “price-tag” attacks against Palestinian life, limb and property. These, too, of course, are terrorist attacks.

Some Israelis have created a counter movement – rather than price tag (tag mechir), they enact acts of kindness and solidarity (tag me’ir, light tag). The many Women’s Marches in Canadian cities countrywide to coincide with the Women’s Marches in the United States were an example of this approach. So was the vigil at Ottawa’s Parliament Hill the day after the murders, to stand in solidarity with the victims of the mosque attack. We will need many more moments of connection in the weeks and months to come.

Quebec has a fraught history with multiculturalism. Is it a coincidence that the attack occurred in Quebec rather than in a different province? Maybe. But just maybe this hateful violence stems from the province’s difficult relationship to multiculturalism. While Canada enshrined multiculturalism into law in 1971 – the first country to do so – Quebec’s history with multicultural policies, probably owing to the province’s concern with maintaining its own minority-language identity, is much more fraught.

In 2013, Quebec attempted to enact a failed Charter of Values (Charte de la laïcité), which sought to ban “conspicuous” religious symbols from being worn by public sector employees. A decade ago, the town of Hérouxville, also in Quebec, issued its own “code of conduct,” widely seen as a dig at immigrants.

Said one storeowner in 2013 interviewed for the Globe and Mail, “Immigrants are welcome to come to Quebec, but when they come, they have to adapt to our ways.”

Banning religious symbols – as the province had sought to do in 2013 – is not the same as murdering people in cold blood, of course. But this kind of flat intolerance against religious expression can all too easily become twisted in the mind of a hateful and violence-prone individual to commit the unthinkable.

It is terrorism. Despite the bigoted propensity by some to use the word terrorist to delegitimize and dehumanize certain ethnic or religious groups, this term does have a clear definition and we should use it when warranted, if only to make sure we keep using it correctly. Simply put, terrorism is violence for political ends.

An attack on a centre of worship is intended to instil fear in society around that target group – the worst kind of collective dehumanization. This is politics of the ugliest and most hateful kind.

Misinformation unleashes further hatred. On the Monday morning after the attack, the media were reporting the names of two supposed suspects, one of whom was apparently of Moroccan origin. Some right-wing news outlets made hay from this, circulating the information even once the media clarified that he was apparently a witness, not a suspect. As of now, the sole suspect is 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, who has since been charged with six counts of murder.

Come together, right now. In a statement following the attack, Trudeau said it is “heart-wrenching to see such senseless violence. Diversity is our strength and religious tolerance is a value that we, as Canadians, hold dear.”

While I hesitate to use the kinds of binaries that have arguably led the world to this point, I am tempted to say that the coming days and weeks will reveal two types of people on this continent: ones who are here to support one another against the forces of hatred, Islamophobia, antisemitism, misogyny and xenophobia; and ones who are aiding and abetting those terrible forces. Among those who stand on the side of goodness and compassion, the time is now for solidarity across every fissure.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She is a columnist for Canadian Jewish News and contributes to Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward, among other publications. A version of this article was originally published on haartez.com.

Removing graffiti full-time

Corey Fleischer volunteers most of his time to removing hateful graffiti. (photo from Corey Fleischer)

When Montrealer Corey Fleischer finished university, he was unsure of what career path to take. In the interim, to pay the rent, so to speak, he started Provincial Power Washing.

Reflecting back on those days, Fleischer said, “I hated what I was doing – washing a lot of trucks, houses, decks, residential and commercial – zero substance. I’m a person who thrives off substance.”

One day, while heading to a job, Fleischer happened to spot antisemitic graffiti out of the corner of his eye.

“I was driving downtown here, in Montreal, and I saw a swastika on a cinderblock in a very busy part of town,” he said. “I had the equipment needed to remove it, so I got out of the truck and did just that. I got back in my truck, not thinking anything of it.”

From that day on, whenever Fleischer came across such graffiti, he would stop and remove it. As well, in the evening, after returning home from work, he would grab a bite to eat, shower and go out to look for racist, antisemitic and homophobic graffiti to remove.

“I would scour the city for hate crimes – back alleys, on walls, anywhere,” said Fleischer. “I found another one (swastika) and then another one. And then I started noticing, as the graffiti-removal side of my business began growing … I realized this was a real problem around town. It became my pastime. I quit hockey and softball and everything. It’s what I spent all my time doing. It fulfilled my life.”

For the first several years, it was only Fleischer’s parents and close friends who knew what he was doing. Then, he received a call from the local B’nai Brith Canada office to confirm his address, as they wanted to include him in a community newsletter mailing. While Fleischer refused to give out his address, he told the BBC that he had pictures of 40 swastikas that he had removed over the past five years, if that was of interest.

The BBC representative, said Fleischer, “literally couldn’t understand what was coming out of my mouth. She couldn’t believe that’s how I was spending my time. So, I sent her the pictures. They sent out a blogger to come and follow me, to do a story on what I was doing.

“Lo and behold, my life at that moment completely changed. People started seeing what I was doing and wanted to get involved. It went from removing 40 to 50 hate crimes in five years … [to] a couple hundred last year alone. The increase was pretty crazy.”

Fleischer now has thousands of followers wanting to get involved, so he has many more reports coming in, asking for free hate-graffiti removal. He said he has gone from spending about 10% of his company time removing hate graffiti to 95%. And, thanks to social media, the movement Fleischer started has gone global.

“People are calling me from all over the world, trying to figure out how to remove hate crimes in their area,” said Fleischer. “And, I basically put it together and have the removal done – wherever the people are calling from – with a local company.

“For most people dealing with hate crimes, it’s not a comfortable situation. People don’t know what to do with them or how to act when they see them. I happen to thrive in uncomfortable situations. I’ll go and organize. If I can’t find a local company to remove it, I’ll contact the local government, mayors, statesman, whoever, to get it done.

“For example, there was an attack on a Jewish cemetery in New York state. Their whole cemetery was defaced with swastikas and hate symbols. And somebody called me up from the town, saying they’d seen my videos and they’d been staring at these swastikas on their cemetery for two weeks – right around Yom Kippur. So, they called me to find out what could be done.”

After Fleischer hung up the phone, he began calling power washers. As it was a small town, it was hard to find someone, so Fleischer called the mayor and the local government. Within two days, all the graffiti was gone.

“When people figure out who I am and what I’m doing, they tend to spring into action quicker than if it was another situation,” said Fleischer. “Although I started the movement, it’s not just me getting it done. It’s people in the community, that I like to call ‘my army.’ I’m just a tool that was given to these people in order to remove these hate crimes. I’m just the instrument.”

While removing the hateful graffiti is, of course, good, Fleischer pointed out that it does not deal with the root of the problem. So, he decided to collaborate with Montreal-based Overture with the Arts, a not-for-profit that provides mainly after-school art classes to high school students. One of its programs is targeted at educating students about the Holocaust through a series of spoken word workshops about Anne Frank. OWTA opted to include a talk by Fleischer in the program.

“Instead of thinking about the actual guys who are putting on the hate crime, I had to find another way to make a difference in our society and in our communities,” said Fleischer of his speaking role. “I had to think of a way to make another difference by educating our youth, our future.

“When I was growing up and was going to high school, I was never taught about the Holocaust. I was never taught about the biggest massacre, the biggest tragedy, in human history.

“Before I started this whole movement, I didn’t even fully understand…. I knew what a swastika was, I knew it was bad, but I didn’t understand everything that was going behind it.”

The first two schools at which Fleischer spoke were classroom-sized talks, but this quickly expanded into full auditoriums. Schools now flood him with requests to come and speak.

“I had two calls this morning from schools calling me, out of the blue, trying to figure out how I can come to their schools,” said Fleischer in his interview with the Jewish Independent. “The school tour is called Erasing Hate.”

Fleischer received a peace medal last year from the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) for his efforts with Erasing Hate, along with 30 Auschwitz survivors.

“To think I’m even in the same bubble with people like that, with something I started doing as a pastime, because I followed my heart, is mind-blowing. It’s really something else,” he said.

“Hopefully, we won’t, in the future, be ignoring hate crimes on the street and the future – our kids, the kids in schools – will understand that you don’t need to be silent. You can wake up, open your mouth and you can make a difference. That’s what this has turned into.”

For more information, Fleischer is on Instagram (@ErasingHate) and Facebook.

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.

פשעי שנאה

אלכסנדרה ביסונאט (27) שיועמד לדין על 11 סעיפי אישום בהם שישה מקרי רצח בדרגה ראשונה, וחמישה נסיונות לרצח, הזדהה עם העמדות של מנהיגי הימין ומתנגדי ההגירה המוסלמית. בהם: הפוליטיקאי הלאומני הצרפתי, ז’אן-מארי לה פן (מנהיג מפלגת הימין הרדקלי החזית הלאומית), ונשיא ארה”ב, דונלד טראמפ.

ביסונאט פעל כזאב בדד עת תקף מוסלמים שהתפללו במסגד בקוויבק סיטי ביום ראשון בערב, והרג שישה גברים ופצע שמונה עשר בהם חמישה במצב קשה (שניים מהם זקוקים לעבור ניתוחים נוספים). הוא פעל במקרה או שלא במקרה יומים אחרי הוצאת הצו של טראמפ שאוסר על כניסת מוסלמים משבע מדינות, בשלושת החודשים הקרובים. שכנים שהכירו את הרוצח ציינו שגר בשכירות עם אחיו התאום לא הרחק מהמסגד, והוא נחשב לצעיר לא חברותי ומאוד מסוגר בתוך עצמו.

ביסונאט יליד קוויבק סיטי ברח ממקום האירוע והוא נמצא ברכב ביציאה מהעיר (במרחק כ-40 ק”מ מהמסגד), כאשר התקשר למשטרה והסגיר עצמו. הוא טען שהרגיש רע והוא מתחרט על מה שעשה. החשוד הועבר ביום שני בבוקר לבית המשפט ושם הוקרא כתב האישום נגדו, שלא כלל סעיפים שקשורים לטרור. הדיון הראשון בעניינו יתקיים בבית המשפט ב-21 בפברואר. עד אז ישאר כמובן במעצר והמשטרה תמשיך לחקור את מעשיו החמורים והרקע להם.

ביסונאט היה סטודנט שלמד אנתרופולוגיה ומדע המדינה בפקולטה למדעי החברה באוניברסיטת לאוול המקומית. לא היה לו עבר פלילי והוא לא היה מוכר למשטרה. ככל הידוע הוא כנראה לא היה מקובל חברתית בבית הספר וסבל מהטרדות מצד תלמידים אחרים. בדף הפייסבוק שלו (שהורד בינתיים) הוא ציין את תמיכתו בטראמפ, לה פן ובהוגה דעות מקוויבק שדבק בלאומנות והתנגד לרב-תרבויות. פעילים בקהילה של קוויבק סיטי למען פליטים וכן סטודנטים באוניברסיטה, הכירו את ביסונאט ותמונותיו בשל דעותיו הרדקליות. הוא פירסם בפייסבוק ובאמצעי מדיה אחרים תגובות כנגד הגירת מוסלמים לקנדה. עמית לספסל הלימודים באוניברסיטה אמר כי אצל ביסונאט התפתחו עם השנים דעות רדקליות והוא אף התנגד לפמניזם. אגב הנהלת אוניברסיטת לאוול הזרזה והודיעה ביום שני כי הרוצח הורחק מלימודים והעונש יהיה בתוקף, כל עוד עומדות נגדו הרשעות פליליות.

בשנים האחרונות נרשם גידול משמעותי בפעולות השינאה נגד זרים בקנדה, בעיקרם מוסלמים ויהודים. מרבית האירועים התרחשו במחוזות של קוויבק, אונטריו ואלברטה. קהילות המוסלמים והיהודים נמצאות ביחסי שכנות טובה בכל רחבי קנדה, והן משתפות פעולה באירועים שונים ומגנות כל פעילות נגד אחת הקהילות. בחודש יוני אשתקד (בתקופת חודש הרמדאן) הונח ראש חזיר מול דלת הכניסה למסגד בו התבצע הטבח ביום ראשון. בקהילה המקומית מציינים שהם פנו מספר פעמים לשלטונות בקוויבק לפעול לאור האיומים וההתקפות נגד מסגדים בעיר אך דבר לא נעשה.

ראש ממשלת קנדה, ג’סטין טרודו, כינה את הטבח במסגד פעולת טרור והוסיף: “אנו מגנים את מתקפת הטרור שכוונה נגד מוסלמים במרכז פולחן ומקלט. קשה מאוד לחזות באלימות חסרת פשר שכזו. הרב תרבותיות היא העוצמה שלנו, וסובלנות דתית היא ערך שאנו כקנדים מוקירים מאוד. המוסלמים הקנדים הם חלק חשוב במרקם הלאומי, ולפעולות חסרות פשר כאלה אין מקום בקהילות, בערים ובארץ שלנו”.

הרב ראובן פופקו, שמשמש היו”ר המשותף של ועד הרבנים בקנדה ויו”ר הסניף בקוויבק של המרכז לענייני ישראל והיהודים בקנדה, אמר: “הקהילה היהודית מזועזת מהירי הרצחני במסגד. שום דבר לא מצדיק רצח של אזרחים חפים מפשע שהתאספו במקום פולחן”.