Is antisemitism really rampant in Canada?
JVL Introduction
Antisemitism – discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish) – is a form of racism to be opposed passionately, like all other forms of racism.
The story in Canada is familiar to us: of antisemitism becoming a weapon in a pro-Israel agenda with the threat of antisemitism being ramped up out of all proportion to the real problem.
It both creates real fear among Jews, suggesting that Jews are the most targeted minority group in Canada, and isolates them from those suffering other forms of racism.
Here IJV/Canada tells another story, exposing the methodological biases of the Canadian antisemitism surveys.
This report concludes: “The B’nai Brith Audit portrays antisemitism as an exceptional and perhaps decisive form of hatred, thus unfailingly signalling a hierarchy of oppressions in which Jewish suffering trumps that of other groups.”
It makes the fight against genuine antisemitism all that harder to wage.
This article was originally published by IJV Canada on Thu 1 Apr 2021. Read the original here.
The Use and Misuse of Antisemitism Statistics in Canada
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Sent this to anti-fascist comrades in Canada who responded that it is an excellent and accurate account of the current situation there.
The following clip is from the Community Security Trust’s Annual Review for 2019:
CST attributes the high post 2016 antisemitic incident levels to fundamentally British causes and politics, these being controversy over antisemitism in the Labour Party and an increase in overall hate crime, following the referendum to leave the EU. Repeated discussions of antisemitism, racism and hate crime in media and politics are likely to embolden antisemites….
Check out the monthly graph on page 15 covering the period from 2007 to 2019…… So apart from several spikes, the level of A/S incidents remained pretty much level for 8.75 years (and I assume it had been at a similar level in the years prior to 2007) , but then, as of September 2015…..
Yes, well it’s obvious innit! As soon as that well known, infamous anti-semite Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the LP all the anti-semites were emboldened and hastened forth from the woodwork to do their master’s bidding to attack and bully the British Jewish population and vilify and demonise them. And the more ‘discussions’ of anti-semitism there were in the media and politics, the more emboldened they became of course!
Here’s a link to CSTs Annual Review for 2019:
https://cst.org.uk/data/file/a/c/Annual%20Review%202019-web.1615560208.pdf
NB It just occurred to me to check their Annual Review for 2020, and this is what it says on page 15:
In 2019, CST recorded 224 Labour Party-related antisemitic incidents, most of them online, sparked largely in response to events early in the year, when several MPs decided to leave the Labour Party, some of whom cited antisemitism as an important reason for their decision. Another surge was seen during the general election campaign in December 2019, when some high-profile Jewish community leaders urged voters to consider the Labour Party’s problems with antisemitism when deciding how to vote. While the change in the party leadership and the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report into Labour Party antisemitism both triggered smaller surges in antisemitic incidents in 2020, it is an issue that was generally less prominent than it was throughout 2019….
https://cst.org.uk/data/file/7/2/Incidents%20Report%202020.1615559608.pdf
Well what a turn-up for the book…….
I must have read literally hundreds and hundreds of articles about (alleged) anti-semitism in the LP over the past few years (on JVL and Skwawkbox and The Canary and Vox Political and the Electronic Intifada etc), as well as hundreds of so-called articles on MSM websites, and I never-ever heard/read anything about THIS before:
Tony Blair to tackle European antisemitism in new role
Former PM will become chairman of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/tony-blair-to-tackle-european-antisemitism-in-new-role-1.66946?highlight=the+lobby
The article is dated June 4th, 2015.
Anyway I couldn’t remember exactly when it was that Jeremy threw his hat in the ring to contest the leadership, but I was thinking it was a few weeks later, but thought I would just do a quick search anyway to verify, and lo-and-behold, it was the day before! The following is from wikipedia:
Jeremy Corbyn, the Member of Parliament for Islington North, stood as a candidate in the 2015 British Labour Party leadership election, in a successful campaign that made him the leader of the Labour Party.
His campaign was announced in an article for the Islington Tribune on 3 June 2015. Corbyn pledged to stand on a “clear anti-austerity platform” and because he wanted to “give Labour Party members a voice” in the debate.
What an amazing coincidence!
Anyhow, I thought I’d check out the organisation and did a search as such, and clicked on the wikipedia entry in the results. I skimmed through it and there wasn’t any mention of him, and one would have thought that his name would have been in the list of ‘notable political and public figures’ at the beginning of the piece, but it wasn’t, so I was somewhat perplexed and, as such, assumed he must have vacated the position at some point. Anyway, there was a link to their ‘Official Website’ right down the bottom of the page, and so I clicked on it so as to go and investigate, clicked on ‘Members’, and there he is!
https://ectr.eu/members/
PS And I should point out that I only came across the JC article by chance when doing a search on the JC in relation to Alan Duncan, and it just happened to be on the third page of the results that came up.
I passed this to anti-fascist comrades in Montreal and they said it was very good and very accurate.