Thread by @IndJewishVoices

This week @StatCan_eng released their hate crime statistics for 2021, prompting various pro-Israel groups to claim that Jewish Canadians are the most targeted religious minority in Canada, a claim resting on major methodological weaknesses and assumptions.

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All hate crimes must be taken seriously and those targeting Jews are no exception. When hate crime stats are reported in ways that are misleading, however, their usefulness is undercut, and harmful narratives are spread. @CRRF

#cdnpoli

During a time of increasing weaponization of antisemitism accusations against supporters of Palestine by right-wing and pro-Israel actors, statistics which over-represent Jews and under-represent other groups risk feeding into hierarchies of racism which prioritize antisemitism.

Last year, we published "The Use and Misuse of Antisemitism Statistics in Canada". It shows how claims portraying Jews as the most targeted religious group in Canada ignore widely known problems with hate crime stats, despite being based on StatsCan data.
ijvcanada.org/the-use-and-mi…

What groups like @CIJAinfo and @bnaibrithcanada tend to ignore is that these stats are based solely on incidents reported to police, which some experts estimate at accounting for as little as 1-5%!
thestar.com/opinion/contri…

We also know that racialized and indigenous persons are less likely to report hate crimes, as they tend to lack trust in the justice system due to systemic racism and histories of police violence.
justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-…

By contrast, Jews tend to report incidents at much higher rates on account of well-developed relations with police dept’s, communal institutions encouraging reporting, etc. High reporting is a good thing, but calls into question comparisons btwn groups.
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the…

By ignoring these methodological concerns, and by conflating *reported* hate crimes with *actual* hate crimes, groups like @CIJAinfo are able to portray Jewish Canadians as more likely than other religious minorities to be targeted for hate crimes.

https://twitter.com/CIJAinfo/status/1554819682699735041?s=20&t=IJwn-cafBixr7ABnhiAJXw

Case in point: According to this year’s Stats Can’s statistics, there are over 3x more antisemitic hate crimes than Islamophobic ones. Compared to anti-indigenous hate crimes, that number grows to over 6x more antisemitic incidents. @Yellowhead_

The inflation of these figures reinforces feelings of Jewish victimhood, so often channeled to push for further securitization of our community (and with it policing of others), and support for Israel as a safe-haven/fortress state. @SURJto

It is also used to push the dangerous and discredited IHRA definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and is often deployed in ways that are harmful to other groups, as discussed in our recent webinar. @CanArabLaw

Making these claims at a time of rising and increasingly deadly Islamophobia (2021 was the year of the London Islamophobic attack, after all) shows that groups like @cija are shamefully willing to use misleading stats to push a political agenda. @nccm @antihateca

Antisemitism cannot be fought in isolation, and attempting to do so harms both other minority groups and Jews. As we lay out in our "5 Principles for Fighting Antisemitism", only by uniting to combat all forms of hatred and oppression can we effectively fight antisemitism.