B’nai Brith Audit: Incidents of Anti-semitism Up in Canada

B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights has found that the number of reported incidents of anti-Semitic harassment and vandalism in 1995 stood at its highest point in 14 years.

The league’s annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, released last week, showed that there were 331 incidents in 1995, compared with 290 reported the previous year.

The 1995 figure may be an underestimation of the actual number of anti-Semitic incidents, and Karen Mock, national director of the League for Human Rights.

“The audit depends on the voluntary reporting of incidents,” she said, adding that “people are often afraid to report, and frustrated when they fear nothing will be done.”

She noted that only “one in 10 anti-Semitic incidents are ever reported, similar to incidents of child abuse or wife assault, both of which are notoriously underreported.”

The increase of reported incidents in 1995 over previous years may be result of the “quite sophisticated” high-tech system used to report the incidents, said Robert Libman, the BBC Quebec’s regional director.

He added that a new hate-line installed in the group’s Toronto office had made reporting the incidents easier, contributing to last year’s higher total. Nearly 50 percent of the reported incidents occurred in Toronto.

Libman said the number of hate messages transmitted over the Internet has become a growing concern.

There is a debate over the best way to combat this, “either with laws to restrict it or to use the (Internet) to actually combat racism” with anti-hate cybermessages, Libman said.

By contrast, the United States witnessed a drop in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in 1995.

In its annual audit released last month, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 1,843 incidents last year, a decrease of 11 percent from 1994.

It was the first decline in three years.