Anti-Semitic graffiti was found scrawled on various institutions in separate Canadian cities this week, in Manitoba and Ontario.
Messages referencing Jewish billionaire and liberal philanthropist George Soros were found graffitied on surfaces across Winnipeg, including in front of the city’s largest synagogue, the Canadian Jewish News reported.
Messages included “Soros wants you dead,” “Lost white civilizations” and “Soros White extinction?”
“Recent events in the United States may have emboldened Canada’s relatively weaker far-right formations to spread their hateful messages in a more public manner,” Aidan Fishman, interim national director of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights, was quoted as saying by the CJN.
“Even in a city like Winnipeg, which is currently holding a major multicultural festival, complacency in the face of hatred is not an option.”
Three schools in the city of Markham, Ontario, were also defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti over the weekend. All three were likely vandalized by the same people, local police stated.
Graffiti equating a Star of David and a swastika was found scribbled with orange spray paint on a slide at the William Armstrong Public School, accompanied by the letters KKK, a reference to the American white supremacist group.
In May B’nai Brith Canada reported that 1,728 anti-Semitic incidents had occurred in the country over the course of 2016, a 26 percent increase over the previous year.
At that time, Amanda Hohmann, then the national director of B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights, was quoted by the Globe and Mail as stating that she did not believe that the rise could be linked to anything happening in the United States.
“While some have sought to link the global increase in anti-Semitism to November’s presidential election in the United States, it’s worth noting that the months of September through December actually saw a relative decrease in anti-Semitic incidents in Canada, in relation to previous years,” she said.
