Neo-Nazi Hate Groups Flourish in Ontario, Canada
While much of our attention is understandably focused on anti-Israel and far left pro-terrorist organizations advocating in Canada and marginalizing Jewish and Israeli Canadians, we are sadly also victimized by far right neo-Nazi hate groups who are rarely policed effectively.
I live in a city with a history of neo-Nazi white supremacist organizations, and with Canada’s highest national rate of hate crimes per capita against all minorities. Jews are most frequently victimized in religiously-based hate crimes, but these also affect BIPOC communities (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), immigrants and other visible minorities, Muslim Canadians, and LGBTQ Canadians.
https://rcmp.ca/en/corporate-information/publications-and-manuals/hate-crimes-and-incidents-canada
Please see these related reports from CBC, despite its documented anti-Israel bias. These should be of special concern to our Jewish organizations and law enforcement, as several white supremacist groups implicated in antisemitic hate crimes and attacks on Jewish sites and individuals have already been added to Canada's list of banned terrorist entities. Some of their members have been found to be active in our Canadian Armed Forces. Many of these groups are recruiting members with combat or weapons training.
https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/ntnl-scrt/cntr-trrrsm/lstd-ntts/crrnt-lstd-ntts-en.aspx
The organization featured below in recent media reports, Nationalist-13, has been organizing in 'active clubs' and 'fight clubs' in local parks and gyms in Hamilton, Ontario and surrounding small town communities. It uses 'white pride' and fitness and social club connections to attract new members, often with posters in inner city neighborhoods. It has not yet been added to Canada's list of banned terrorist entities. One of its slogans is "No Blood For Israel".
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/ns13-gathering-city-hall-9.7103114
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/white-nationalists-are-posting-pictures-from-the-london-area-here-are-the-locations-1.7603054#:~:text=Social%20Sharing,Alessio%20Donnini/CBC%20News)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/active-clubs-facts-1.7586641
While local politicians and anti-racist groups have decried their presence and messaging, police have failed to make the link between their white supremacist ideology and hatred of minorities and Jews and the potential risks they pose to community safety and hate crimes rates. Why don't our white elites police their own thugs? We see the pattern. Why can't they?
Police have failed to investigate fully or to apprehend these gangs in criminal acts, and so tend to disregard them as 'fitness clubs' in local parks or to dismiss their activities as 'free speech and right to protest', despite their intimidating and menacing presence in public spaces, intimidating local minority and immigrant communities in their own neighborhoods and dissuading them from pursuit of their lawful purposes and enjoyment of their local parks and recreation centers.
There is a long history of fascist and neo-Nazi white supremacist groups in Canada, and especially in Hamilton, Ontario. In the 1930s, there were fascist gangs in Quebec and Ontario, complete with uniforms as well as swastika gangs, victimizing and intimidating Jewish immigrants in local parks and downtown neighborhoods. Today we have similar neo-Nazi graffiti and symbols and harassment in our public schools and parks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Nazism_in_Canada
Hamilton, Ontario seems to present the 'perfect storm' for neo-Nazi organizing in Canada. It has a large population of undereducated, underemployed and economically dislocated white working class youth who seem to resent the success of other minorities in Canada and seek to thwart them by implicit harassment and threats of violence.
These groups recruit with nationalist arguments on the inherent racial superiority and entitlement of White Anglo Saxon Christian Canadians and appeal like Archie Bunker to an idyllic postwar period of prosperity and male and white supremacy pre-dating immigration in Canada rather than actually educating or bettering themselves. They are 'the deplorables' in Hillary Clinton's terms, and they are dangerous.
Hamilton has a large white supremacist community previously associated with the anti-immigration Canadian Nationalist Party as well as Holocaust denier and white supremacist neo-Nazi Paul Fromm, a local resident and die-hard advocate of free speech and debates of attrition, who was denied the opportunity to speak to Hamilton City Council following the controversy surrounding the discovery and dismissal of a neo-Nazi on the staff of Hamilton City Hall in 2019, and related demonstrations by white supremacist groups and attacks on attendees at Hamilton's Pride Festival in the summer of 2019.
These led to extensive and costly independent reviews and recommendations to improve policing of extremist groups in Hamilton, as well as a change in our local police leadership.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fromm_(white_supremacist)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/marc-lemire-city-investigation-1.5248972
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/pride-1.5602856
Hamilton continues to have Canada's highest national rate of hate crimes against all minorities, and the development and strengthening of this Nationalist-13 group and related 'active clubs' in our community remain deeply concerning, despite lukewarm protestations by our local civic leaders.
This is a textbook case of neo-fascist radicalization and extremism right out of Hannah Arendt's classic study, The Origins of Totalitarianism, but our white Christian elites seem reluctant to investigate and police their own, despite widely documented failures in our law enforcement in Ontario.
From my perspective as the daughter and grand-daughter of immigrants who contributed to Canada lawfully and with distinction, and as the child of a Holocaust survivor, it is troubling to see the obvious ideological divisions continuing to put our Jewish community and people like me at risk in our own community. Can our civic and political and media elites be so blind to their own biases? Do they think we don't notice?
The left and their media opine at length about Israel and alleged 'genocide' and 'war crimes' and 'apartheid' while denying the reality of the Islamist terrorist movements and ideological front groups on campus and in the community threatening Canada's national security in a context of permanent postmodern Islamist global terrorism.
The political right and their media (including the National Post, widely read by the Jewish community) opine at length against the human rights gains made by women, LGBTQ folks, and visible minorities and immigrants and their contributions to Canada, by recklessly endorsing 'free speech' at all costs, presumably by entitled elite white heterosexual men. Yawn. Does this include workplace harassment and human rights violations likely to be enforced in law?
All we can do is advocate and stay as safe as we can. Sadly, this is not the Canada we dreamed of or pay taxes to support. Our authorities continue to 'govern by press conference' and posture to media while failing to ensure that our communities are safe and inclusive and productive. Our proposed federal hate crimes legislation, Bill C-9 continues to languish in Parliamentary committee over petty press conference posturing by the governing Liberal and opposition Conservative parties. Nothing gets done.
Antisemitism and related hate crimes and harassment are a non-Jewish problem. Isn't it time our non-Jewish elites began policing their own thuggish white youth and started doing something about it?
