Toronto Police are called to investigate reports of hate crimes five times a day in Toronto (once) the good.
It’s not so good anymore when it comes to people getting along. More than half of those calls are for alleged anti-Semitic crimes.
“We are attending an average of 145 hate crime calls for service a month,” Deputy Chief Rob Johnson told the Toronto Police Services Board on Monday. “Since Oct. 7, we have attended 1,378 hate crime calls for service.”
On Monday, June 10, Toronto police announced they had charged 32-year-old Lou-i Bou-Chahine with public incitement of hatred, under Section 319(1) of the Criminal Code. He allegedly stomped on an Israeli flag at Sunday’s reportedly 50,000-strong Walk for Israel march.
It should be an interesting case to watch. With respect to alleged expressions of hate, Canadian politics has developed a rich lexicon of wishful thinking masquerading as fact since the October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel, and the ensuing and often antisemitic anti-Israel protests.
Stomping a flag? Sounds condescending frankly.
Since Oct. 7, and frankly long before, we repeated in countless interviews and wrote in these very pages about the alarm we felt regarding the antisemitism we see in our city. Since then, the hate and intimidation on our streets, in our workplaces and on our campuses have continued to threaten not only the Jewish community, but also our very society and the values that underpin it.
We have hate speech laws.
“From the river to the sea” is hateful but to ban this and statements like it crosses a line and becomes political censorship.
Police have raided more than 70 homes in Germany concerning incidents of so-called “online hate posting”, the country’s justice ministry said.
According to a press release published late on June 6, residences in every German state were raided in the latest attempt to crack down on “hate speech”.
Numerous justifications were given for the action: some residents were suspected of issuing “threats” against politicians, while others were suspected of merely targeting them with “insults”, which is also a crime in Germany.
The text from a Toronto police spokesperson came at 8:30 on a Friday morning. A synagogue in the city’s north end had been vandalized overnight. Our crew could meet detectives from the force’s Hate Crimes Unit on site.
We arrived at the Kehillat Shaarei Torah synagogue to find congregant Norman Mosselson quietly sweeping up broken glass. When we asked him how he felt, his voice broke and he stifled a sob.
“Well, shock. Total shock… This is my home,” he said. This was the second time the synagogue had been attacked in a month.
The Countering Antisemitism Act overthrows one form of tyranny by replacing it with another. Congress can’t legislate away hate.
The ADL already accused me of being a Holocaust denier.
See the problem?
Anyone who supports this is my enemy. https://t.co/8cGEVMd4vN
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 3, 2024
Police say a 44-year-old woman has been arrested in a hate-crime investigation over a speech in Vancouver that praised the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.
A statement from the Vancouver Police Department says the woman “referred to a number of terrorist organizations as heroes.”
It says a criminal investigation is underway to determine if her comments violated hate-crime laws.
Police Scotland has been overwhelmed by a “deluge” of ‘hate crime’ reports in the week since the country’s new public order act came into effect.
The force’s commitment to investigate every report—currently totalling an average of 60 an hour—means that it is failing to solve an increasing number of shoplifting cases, sexual assaults, and car thefts, according to analysis by The Daily Telegraph.
Scottish football fans face hate crime complaints from members of the public who hear chants on TV at home, a senior lawyer has warned.
Police Scotland, which has already received 8,000 reports since the new laws came into force last week, is facing warnings that as many as 2,000 further complaints will be made on Sunday due to the Rangers vs Celtic clash at Ibrox.
Sectarian songs are often heard at Old Firm matches, raising fears that partisan supporters watching the game live on TV could swamp the force with new hate crime reports.
Police Scotland will target young men with “with ideas about white-male entitlement” under the new Hate Crime Act.
Scotland recently took a giant step towards becoming one of the most restrictive countries in Europe. The adjective ‘Orwellian’ trips too easily off of the lips these days, but with severe and significant restrictions to free speech being introduced in the contents of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021, which came into force on 1 April 2024, it is hard to imagine a more apt description.
Scotland’s sweeping new ‘hate crime’ law, designed to protect a wide range of individuals (except women) from hatred, came into effect on Monday.
The Hate Crime and Public Order Act, under which police have even been told to target ‘hateful’ comedians, has received criticism from almost all quarters of Britain’s political society. Even The Guardian insisted that officials “should not stymie public debate,” despite noting that the law might well be “well intentioned.”
JK Rowling has challenged Scotland’s police to arrest her under the SNP’s new hate crime laws after stating that a series of high-profile trans women are men.
The Harry Potter author, who lives in Edinburgh, tweeted: “Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.
Like other western countries, Canada isn’t immune to “cancel culture,” a disturbing sign of the times. The term itself may be contemporary but cancel culture’s unholy mix of defamation, intimidation and threats is anything but new. Variations on this practice date back millennia, with Jews often the prime target.
Amid rampant antisemitism and the current tyranny of cancel culture run amok, the anti-Israel camp is leading the charge in trying to silence the voices of Jews. Sadly, they’re succeeding far too often as organizations and institutions capitulate to pressure from those seeking to cancel Jews.
Some kinds of hate are less worthy than others in Canada. Our schools, governments and even human rights commissions openly abuse Whites, both children and adults. Only rarely does it merit attention from the media as the Bilkszto case did. Typically there are no repercussions for discriminating against Whites, the DEI huckster in the Bilkszto case is still in business.
“Nobody from TDSB interjected to defend Bilkszto and stop the DEI trainers from berating a staff member…. Bilkszto was given a talking-to by his higher-ups about his ‘male white privilege’ …. Instead of defending him, they berated him further.”https://t.co/ocsEizf9FW
— Jeff Wells (@JeffWellsRigInt) July 21, 2023
About 70 percent of Canadian youth have been exposed to online hate, says a Statistics Canada report released the day after the Liberal government tabled its Online Harms Act aimed at the problem. The alarmingly high number suggests Bill C-63 has arrived just in time to address a widespread problem, but a closer look at the StatCan survey questions tells another story.
“Hate” is in the eye of the beholder. Survey participants were given no guidance on what “hate” means, and sociologist David Haskell says young people are increasingly taught to perceive hate in comments previously considered offensive, but not truly harmful or “hateful.”
“There is lots of evidence coming from current psychological research showing that educational environments are ’training’ students to experience a phenomenon that does not exist in objective reality,” Mr. Haskell, an associate professor in the faculty of Liberal Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University, told The Epoch Times via email.
The Liberal government’s newly tabled Online Harms Bill will, if passed, allow people to report others to a provincial court judge out of fear that they may commit a hate crime in the future. As well, investigators will be allowed to enter people’s workplace without a warrant and demand access to records, and in some cases, people can file anonymous complaints alleging “hate speech.”
These are just some of the many red flags lawyers have identified in Bill C-63 since it was tabled before the House of Commons on Feb. 26.
