By PAUL LUNGEN, Staff Reporter (
CJN)
TORONTO ? Anti-Israel agitators, far-left groups and ?Islamists' have ?latched onto Nazi motifs and age-old anti-Jewish stereotypes' and are pushing up the number of incidents
of anti-Semitism, according to a survey released last week.
?Anti-Jewish messaging is spiralling out of control with the resurrection of the old canards and calumnies of the past,? states the 2009 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents by B'nai Brith Canada.
?These have become the norm, not the exception, in many of the incidents classified in this audit.?
In its survey of anti-Semitic incidents for the 2009 calendar year, B'nai Brith's League for Human Rights recorded 1,264 incidents, an 11.4 per cent increase over the year before. Nearly 70 per
cent of the incidents were classified as ?harassment,? including verbal slurs, while 27.5 per cent were described as ?vandalism' such as graffiti. Only 32 cases of violence were reported, or 2.5
per cent of the total.
The audit found that incidents of anti-Semitism have risen fairly consistently, from less than 300 such occurrences 10 years ago. Going back further, the rise in reported incidents is even
greater: ?When the League released its first audit 28 years ago, the number of reported incidents was only 63,? B'nai Brith said.
The first three months of the year saw the largest number of anti-Jewish events ? 16 per cent of the total in January alone ? while an additional 268 events were registered in February and March.
Those spikes coincided with tensions connected to Israel's military operation in Gaza and paralleled a similar jump in incidents during the 2006 war in Lebanon.
The elevated levels continued into February and March, largely due to ?the aggressive atmosphere in campuses' connected to Israeli Apartheid Week, the audit suggested.
Another spike took place in September, when 105 incidents were recorded, coinciding with the High Holidays, ?when across Canada, 10 synagogues were the subject of attack in that month alone. Four
of them, in Quebec, had their windows smashed in what looked like a co-ordinated attack just before the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur.?
In releasing the report, Frank Dimant, B'nai Brith's executive vice-president, called it ?a barometer of the times.? Parents are calling B'nai Brith for advice on which campuses are safest for
their children. Jewish students were chased to a club room by anti-Israel agitators at an event at York University last year while ?hate-fests' on campus have led to Jew- and Israel-bashing, he
said.
He was particularly critical of York University, which recently shut down a pro-Israel event after organizers could not meet onerous conditions, including paying for police security. Don't expect
similar conditions to be placed on opponents of Israel, Dimant suggested.
Anticipating arguments that the audit is exaggerating anti-Semitism (the National Post ran an editorial saying the audit treats serious assaults on par with schoolyard taunts when compiling its
statistics), Dimant said B'nai Brith is not ?fear-mongering.?
?We are living the anti-Semitism that is written in the [audit]. Not every Jew, but certainly enough who face the ugly face of anti-Semitism in this country.?
He said Jews who hide their kippahs or Stars of David, who don't wear obviously Jewish garb or who avoid pro-Israel comments in social situations can avoid anti-Semitism.
He said education in core Canadian values such as tolerance is an antidote to the problem.
Anita Bromberg, B'nai Brith's national director of legal affairs, said 17 cases reported in the audit led to police charges. She suggested an absence of political will was limiting the number of
criminal cases, while Dimant said police are reluctant to identify certain incidents as hate crimes.
Turning back to campuses, Dimant suggested the labelling of Israel as an ?apartheid state' could be a red herring aimed at deflecting attention from a real issue.
?We need to emphasize what is the driving force for these groups on campus,? he said. ?The world is today fighting a very dangerous element of radical Islam, which is a threat to this country and
is being ignored.?
