Some 2,000 people attend a rally to support religious tolerance after a series of recent anti-semitic attacks struck synagogues and homes at the Lipa Green Centre in Toronto, Canada. (IMAGE: AFP)
Shooting at a Toronto Jewish school, daubing a Holocaust memorial with hakenkreuz and arson at a Vancouver synagogue raises alarm as antisemitic incidents surge.
A detailed report by the Israeli government singled out Canada as a ‘hotbed of antisemitism’ since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel. The report published by Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism this week pointed out that since October 7 attacks last year, antisemitic incidents have increased by 670%.
This is Toronto Canada.A Jewish girls school has been riddled with bullets for a SECOND time. The video is of the 1st shooting.
Mayor Chow couldn’t be bothered to attend an October 7th memorial. The Trudeau government does nothing to address antisemitism.
This is the result. https://t.co/TJLpMWc4GP pic.twitter.com/FzPFrlksKD
— David Jacobs (@DrJacobsRad) October 12, 2024
The report said that these incidents involved targeting of Jewish places of worship, community centres and day schools.
The report also comes amid a shooting incident at the Toronto-based Bais Chaya Mushka Elementary School, a day-school for Jewish girls. This is the second time the school has witnessed a shooting incident.
The report also documented fires set at a Vancouver synagogue and at Toronto’s Leo Baeck Jewish Day School, which happened after May 2024. The Toronto arson attack happened in late July and in the same month an Orthodox Jewish school bus was destroyed in a fire. A kosher grocery store was defaced with anti-Israel graffiti.
The Israeli government report categorized the incidents based on a risk-level assessment and said there were more than a dozen notable antisemitic incidents.
They assigned the stoning of two Toronto synagogues in late June as a ‘red alert’. A ‘red alert’ categorization means the attack ‘could have or did harm a large number of people/community’.
They assigned a ‘Yellow Alert’ for defiling of a Jewish cemetery in Montreal with hakenkreuz signs and for ‘defacement of the city’s Holocaust museum’.
In July, posters demanding Liberal MP Anthony Housefather to “get out of Canada” were marked in green, along with a Montreal sign stating “Globalize the intifada,” indicating they were categorized as verbal or written incidents.
The report highlights that antisemitic acts targeting the Toronto Jewish community were especially alarming to the Israeli government, noting that such incidents accounted for 19 per cent of identified hate crimes in Canada in 2023.
The report identified four individuals—independent Ontario MPP Sarah Jama, former equity consultant Laith Marouf, and others—along with one group, Samidoun, as key contributors to antisemitism in Canada. Notably, Samidoun was designated a terrorist organisation by both Canada and the US on Tuesday.
Marouf, a former government employee who received over half a million dollars in taxpayer funding for antiracism training, garnered attention in 2022 for online statements that many Canadian Jewish organizations regarded as antisemitic.
“You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, a.k.a. the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from, they will return to being low-voiced b—hes of their Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters,” Marouf wrote in one social media post.
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