— Musings —04.13.2025 03:08 PM
My latest: Jew-haters, Jews and the law
The blood-red paint was splashed all over the doors and windows of the bookstore. They had put up lots of pictures of the owner of the bookstore, too, atop words accusing her of supporting mass murder.
The owner of the bookstore, Heather Reisman, is a Jew.
That it was antisemitic – Jew hatred – was obvious to anyone walking by the Indigo bookstore on Bay Street. There’s other bookstores within walking distance, but they weren’t touched. The one owned by the Jew was.
The crime happened in November 2023, while Israel was still locating, and still burying, some of the bodies of the 1,200 Jews and non-Jews slaughtered by Hamas a few weeks earlier. The posters glued to the doors and windows at Indigo accused the Jewish owner of mass murder – when Jews themselves had been the victims of mass murder October 7. There is something deeply evil about that kind of inversion.
But that is what the so-called “Indigo 11” did. They went out, with deliberation and forethought, and falsely accused a Jew of acting like the Nazis did.
The police eventually caught up to the antisemites and charged them. Quite a few were proud of what they had done. Initially, the Toronto Police Service acknowledged the obvious, and called the crime “hate motivated.”
And then, somewhere along the way, it all became downgraded to just a bit of mischief. That’s what they called it: “mischief.” No one was charged with a hate crime, even though it had all been deeply hateful. And this week, the last remaining defendants got off with “conditional” sentences.
Why? Good question. The law is pretty clear on the subject.
Under the Criminal Code, anyone who commits “mischief” – as at that bookstore in November 2023 – can be guilty of an indictable offence under the Criminal Code. They can be imprisoned for up to ten years for that.
When applying that law in years past, Canadian courts have taken antisemitic graffiti and vandalism much, much more seriously. Judges have handed out tougher sentences when the wrongdoers have targeted a specific racial or religious groups. Because it is clearly, indisputably hateful.
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Warren,
The TPS doesn’t take orders from the politicians, but at the same time, they don’t ruffle the political chances of the incumbent masters at City Hall either. Pretty much it.
But if you’re a Jew, you tend to think that free speech ends where hate propaganda begins.
This is a point lost to too many people in our society. We have an epidemic of conspiracy theory and hate filled nonsense that spreads like cancer – with modern communication technology it spreads like wildfire and we have to do so much more to counter this crap. Free speech is one thing, but the garbage we see these days is something else entirely.
Curious,
Fortunately, at least in this country, hate speech is not acceptable free speech. Thank God.
I agree, this is not simply “free speech”, and needs to be pursued as what it really is.
I would like a similar approach taken to the increasing graffiti “Land Back” that is spray-painted on government buildings and the offices of businesses. It promotes hatred against an identifiable group, and is a catch-phrase used by those who seek to usurp legitimate land ownership.
I say that somewhat comically, because there is no way the groups spray-painting Land Back will ever be critiqued. Heck, we can’t even recognize that generic anomalies on ground-penetrating radar need actual forensic investigation before declaring them “unmarked graves” and then triggering church-burnings.