Regional News
April 11, 2008 09:59 PM
David Fleischer
Anti-Semitism continues to exist in York Region and across Canada, but new numbers show a drop in local incidents, despite a rise in the national numbers, according to a study by B’nai Brith Canada.
The organization’s annual audit of anti-Semitic incidents recorded 1,042 incidents across Canada in 2007, up 11.4 per cent from last year.
There were 427 incidents recorded in the GTA, 38 of which took place in York Region. That number is down from 51 last year and the overall GTA numbers dropped 4 per cent.
Nearly half of those were in Thornhill, where most of the region’s Jewish community lives. There were eight incidents in Richmond Hill, three in Markham and seven in Newmarket.
One example cited in the report is of a Thornhill rabbi who received an e-mail “containing ugly anti-Jewish epitaphs that repeat material from a white supremacist website”.
Over five years, the study says, the total number of incidents increased 35.6 per cent and across the GTA, violent incidents rose 25 per cent.
This is the 26th edition of the League for Human Rights report of B’nai Brith Canada, released each year. It includes everything from harassment and Holocaust denial, to vandalism and violence.
The most common cases were incidents of harassment, comprising 67.1 per cent of all reported incidents across the country. “The 2007 findings indicate anti-Semitism is not just at the fringes of Canadian society, nor the work of a few lone bigots,” said B’nai Brith Canada’s executive vice president, Frank Dimant.
Canada’s rising numbers, breaking 1,000 incidents for the first time, stand in contrast to the United Kingdom, France and the United States where decreases have been seen, the report says.