A giant swastika carved into the side of a hill in an Edmonton park seems to reflect a larger trend of anti-Semitic incidents and racism across Canada.
The swastika was found by a worker at Castle Downs Park who said he witnessed a group of young males carving the image into the ground. The Edmonton police are investigating but so far no charges have been laid.
John Reilly, a spokesperson for Racism Free Edmonton, says such incidents are “a disturbing consistent presence within our communities.”
According to B’nai Brith Canada’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, there has been a five-fold increase in harassment and violence against Jews in Canada in the past 10 years.
More than 1,300 incidents were recorded in 2010—the highest in almost 30 years, with the majority occurring in Ontario and Quebec.
The incidents include harassment, stereotyping, discrimination, threats, violence, and vandalism involving “crimes of messaging”—offensive graffiti that contains racial slurs or swastikas.
The identity of the perpetrators is largely unknown due to the frequent anonymity of the crimes, but the audit reported 97 cases where the perpetrator self-identified as being of Arab origin, followed by seven Blacks, three Chinese, and one German.
Reilly says there are known white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups that are often the perpetrators of anti-Semitic attacks, but in a survey of Jewish Canadians commissioned by B’nai Brith, the greatest single concern amongst Jewish communities was about extremist Islamic organizations and dictatorships, not neo-Nazis or other sources.
Social media and the Internet were also reported in the audit as being used increasingly for spreading hate, or assembling groups to participate in anti-Jewish events.
“The key interest of the hate-motivated groups is to recruit. Everything that we can do to infiltrate and stop that kind of recruitment is a benefit to the community,” says Reilly.
Anti-Semitic incidents are less common in Alberta, but are increasing consistently across many Canadian provinces.
Last month, vandals in Toronto used stencils to spray-paint black and red swastikas in visible locations in Jewish communities. In one incident, a swastika and the words “Islam will rule” was spray-painted near a synagogue entrance in broad daylight.
In July, a Calgary man who identified himself as a white supremacist was sentenced to 18 months probation and 150 hours of community service for defacing a Holocaust memorial and two Jewish synagogues in a 2009 crime spree that shocked Calgary’s Jewish community.
Anti-Semitism on Campuses
In 2009, the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism was formed and brought together 22 parliamentarians of all political stripes for the purpose of confronting and combating anti-Semitism in Canada.
The committee recently ended a two-year inquiry which concluded that anti-Semitic incidents were on the rise on some university campuses. The committee cited B’nai Brith Canada’s findings that cases of anti-Semitism on campuses increased by 80.2 percent from 2008 to 2009. The number of incidents dropped in 2010, but the overall figure was up from 2006.
The report, however, drew criticism because the committee had used a new definition of anti-Semitism from a 2008 conference in London on combating anti-Semitism around the world that includes undefined forms of attack, both verbal and physical, against the state of Israel.
According to a 2010 study by Tel Aviv University, anti-Semitic incidents have been on the rise not only in Canada, but around the world. Researchers attributed the rising occurrences in 2009 to the Israeli government’s military operation against Hamas in Gaza in late 2008, which triggered global anti-Semitic sentiment.
Reilly says virtually any clearly identifiable group can become a target or scapegoat for racism, noting the spike in discrimination against Muslim and Arab communities following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre.
In 2006 the Canadian Coalition of Municipalities Against Racism and Discrimination was formed to monitor systemic and individual discrimination in Canada. The coalition now includes 47 municipalities from across the country.
“Cities have come together in response to try and address racism where it manifests itself. However, we’re not just responding to those overt kinds of blatant incidents of hate. We’re also looking at the embedded systemic racism that takes place within our institutions that we want to begin to address,” says Reilly.
