The surge of crimes against Canada’s Jewish community that began after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and Israeli military response in Gaza has resulted in the first handful of criminal convictions.
In February, Omar Elkhodary was convicted of assaulting a woman as he tore down the posters she was putting up on a Toronto street showing children held hostage by Hamas.
Waisuddin Akbari, the owner of a Newmarket, Ont., shawarma shop, was convicted of threatening to bomb Toronto’s synagogues and “kill as many Jews as possible,” Global News revealed in March.
And on Thursday, Kenneth Gobin was to face sentencing for doing a Nazi salute, spouting Hitler rhetoric and spitting on a Jewish couple walking home from their synagogue in Vaughan, Ont.
The trio of cases has caught the attention of national Jewish organizations, which said they would be reading victim impact statements at the sentencing hearings of all three men.
A hate crime is more than an attack on an individual, said Richard Marceau, vice-president of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. “It is made to send a message to an entire community, to make that community feel unsafe.“
Antisemitic incidents spiked across Canada after Hamas members attacked southern Israel 19 months ago, killing 1,200 people and taking hundreds more hostage.
Since then, Jewish schools, places of worship and businesses have been shot at, torched and threatened, and the RCMP disrupted an alleged plot to bomb a pro-Israel rally on Parliament Hill.
“Caustic protests” have also targeted Jewish institutions, B’nai Brith Canada wrote in a letter last week to Prime Minister Carney, urging him to address the “crisis of antisemitism.”
According to Statistics Canada, incidents of hate crimes against the Jewish community jumped to 900 in 2023, from 527 the previous year. Last year, the number remained high at 816.
Although comprising just 1 per cent of Canada’s population, Jews are by far the top victims of hate crimes against religious groups, accounting for more than two-thirds of incidents, StatsCan data shows.
“The situation has created an atmosphere of fear for the Jewish community that is untenable,” said Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, senior policy director at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
One of those incidents took place on Toronto’s Yonge Street on Nov. 2, 2023. Vicky Moscoe was putting up posters of children kidnapped by Hamas when a man confronted her.
Calling the leaflets “stupid-ass propaganda,” he ripped them down in front of her. Moscoe told him the children on the posters were hostages, but he was unmoved.
When Moscoe put her hand over a poster, he shoved her and knocked her forehead, according to Ontario court verdict, which dismissed Elkhodary’s claim he was acting in self-defence.
Elkhodary testified that his step-father was Palestinian and his actions were a protest against “misinformation,” since he considered the flyers “fabricated” and “hateful propaganda.”
The judge ruled Elkhodary had assaulted Moscoe “for the purpose of getting her out of the way, effectively to intimidate her so that she would remove her hands from protecting the posters.”
“His goal and purpose was laser-focused; it was to tear down the posters of the children in front of Ms. Moscoe,” the judge said in a decision handed down in the Ontario Court of Justice on Feb. 19.
“The court finds that he did not push the complainant in a purpose related to any self-defence but rather to engage his goal of successfully taking down the posters.”
A Montreal woman was charged last week with uttering threats over an incident allegedly involving the Nazi salute and her use of the term “final solution” at a pro-Palestinian protest.
Toronto police announced in March that Amir Arvahi Azar had been charged with allegedly setting fires outside Toronto synagogues and advocating genocide against Jews.
Like many of the incidents since Oct. 7, Azar’s case remains ongoing, but the first trials have now ended in convictions, and the accused are being sentenced, starting with Gobin.
On March 12, a judge convicted Gobin of assaulting a couple as they were returning home from the Chabad Flamingo synagogue in a Jewish neighbourhood north of Toronto.
A 35-year-old landscaping and snow removal business operator, Gobin was riding an e-bike on Bathurst Street on Jan. 6, 2024 when he approached Tilda and Malcolm Roll.
They were walking with two others. The men were dressed in suits for the Sabbath. As Gobin neared them, he mounted the sidewalk and sped straight at them.
The couple jumped out of the way but Gobin then turned around and came back, raised his arm in a Nazi salute and said, “Heil Hitler,” according to the court decision.
“Hitler should have killed you all,” Gobin continued, the judge ruled. “Hitler was right.” He then spat on the Rolls before riding down a cul-de-sac and entering a park.
“I remember being shocked,” Tilda Roll told Global News. “Like he was saying to me, ‘You are a worthless human being and I wish that Hitler had killed you in the gas chambers.’”
“That was the messaging,” she said. “I wasn’t going to take that. I was like, ‘I’m done, I will see you in court and I will address you,’ and so on May 8th, I will be addressing him.”
She said she would read a victim impact statement at Gobin’s sentencing hearing Wednesday at the Newmarket courthouse. Jewish advocacy groups intended to do the same.
While Gobin testified he had no idea the Rolls were Jews, the judge said he told police immediately following his arrest that they, “looked like they may have been coming from the synagogue.”
“You see what’s going on in the news. Palestinians versus Jews, right?” Gobin told police. “I guess I’m brown, so maybe they think I’m Palestinian.” He also claimed he was high on cannabis.
The judge said Gobin’s attack was unprovoked and his testimony about the events was inconsistent, made little sense and was refuted by multiple witnesses. He was convicted of assault.
“I was minding my own business,” Roll said. “I was worshiping the Sabbath. I came home from synagogue, and this individual chose to confront me, to spit at me, to say hateful things.”
“It was just a random occurrence on a Saturday that could have happened anywhere to anybody. And because it happened to me and because I’m a lawyer and because I know the legal system, I decided I was gonna stand up for myself.”
Two months after that incident, the owner of a Newmarket shawarma shop told a witness he was planning attacks on Toronto’s Jewish community in retaliation for the war in Gaza.
“I’m going to plant a bomb in every synagogue in Toronto and blow them up to kill as many Jews as possible,” Akbari said, according to the court ruling. “I’ll make sure those attacks are filmed and posted online so the world can see what I’ve done.”
On Nov. 1, 2024, Akbari was convicted of threatening death and property damage. Approached by Global News, he called the witness a liar and denied knowing what a synagogue was.
His sentencing was also to begin Wednesday, but has been delayed until July. Jewish community representatives will also be giving a victim impact statement in that case.
The sentences are an opportunity for the courts to show that hate crimes will not be tolerated in Canada, said Kirzner-Roberts of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal.
“Way too often we are seeing hate criminals walking away with a slap on the wrist for what are essentially deeply anti-social, perverse kinds of crimes,” she said.
She wants the Carney government to look at stiffer sentences for hate crimes. “This is a problem that only our political leaders can fix. And we are hoping the newly-elected prime minister is going to rise to the occasion.”
Seeing convictions gives “some relief,” Roll said. But she was also dismayed by the continued high incidence of antisemitic incidents, and believes politicians and police were not getting the message.
“As a lawyer, I am happy that the system worked the way it worked,” Roll said. “But this is like one incident.
“We need to have, I think, a bigger community discussion about how we’re going to tackle this.”
The CIJA vice-president called the convictions a “good sign,” but said more needed to be done to address the spike in antisemitism — an issue the group intends to raise with the new government.
Protests should not be permitted outside schools or synagogues, and legislation was needed to outlaw the glorification of terrorism, said Marceau, who also called for greater enforcement of existing laws.
“We’ve seen a normalization of this type of conduct, but also of rhetoric that has real consequences. And the promise of Canada towards the Jewish people has been broken,” he said.
“Jews are afraid, Jews are scared. If you look at Jewish schools, they look more like prisons than Jewish schools. That shouldn’t be like that. Kids should not feel this way.”
Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca
