HATE-MONGERS OFF EASY

Antisemitic messaging just ‘mischief’

The blood-red paint was splashed all over the doors and windows of the bookstore in downtown Toronto.

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 St.

There are other bookstores within walking distance, but they weren’t touched – only the one owned by the Jew.

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 on October 7^th.

There is something deeply evil about the 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.

Toronto Police eventually caught up to the antisemites and charged them. Quite a few were proud of what they had done.

Initially, the police acknowledge 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 last week the 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 the bookstore in November 2023 – can be guilty of an indictable offence under the Criminal Code. And they can be imprisoned for up to 10 years for it.

When applying that law in years past, Canadian courts have taken antisemitic graffiti and vandalism much more seriously. Judges have handed out tougher sentences when the wrongdoers have targeted specific racial or religious groups. Because it’s clearly, indisputably hateful.

With the “Indigo 11” – it’s unclear who gave them that Hollywood-style moniker, but it stuck – conditional discharges were the reward. We say “reward” because a conditional sentence means no jail time. They walked, essentially.

Now, their lawyers blithely dismiss their crimes as political expression, as free speech. But if you’re a Jew, you tend to think that free speech ends where hate propaganda begins. And what the Indigo 11 did carried a clear and targeted hateful message – and during a time of heightened antisemitic hostility across Canada.

Discharging the Indigo 11 on the grounds that they somehow pose no threat to the Jewish community?  That’s an affront to the thousands of Jewish Canadians who’ve been victims of a wave of antisemitic hate in the aftermath of Oct. 7^th 2023.

Some might say, as well, that the Indigo 11 got no more than what they deserved. But they’d be wrong about that, too.

In Canada, our courts have often dealt with charges of vandalism with an underlying hateful motive. And, in many of those cases, prosecutors and judges have refused to treat those cases as simple acts of vandalism.