Thank you, Mr. Chair.
B’nai Brith is Canada’s largest membership-based Jewish organization. Through its League for Human Rights and Institute for International Affairs, it is the premier advocate of human rights for Canada's Jewish community.
In its submission today, B’nai Brith Canada will focus on one aspect of Bill C-51, that related to the creation of an offensive promotion of terrorism, seizure of terrorist propaganda, and deletion of terrorist propaganda from computer systems.
Our position is in favour of those aspects of Bill C-51, subject to some recommendations for amendments that will help ensure that the provisions are not seen to suffer from problems of vagueness and overbreadth, which may negatively protect the constitutionality of the bill.
My colleague, Mr. Matas, will speak at greater length regarding our recommendations for the actual amendments.
For now I'd like to briefly offer an overview explanation of how we came to the point of supporting the terror propaganda provisions that we are speaking of. In doing so, I point to the context of the Jewish community's vulnerability to hate propaganda throughout the world and particularly here in Canada, the tie between hate and terror, and the context of our anti-hate propaganda legislation.
In our paper we refer to what you all know, that is the recent spate of terror activities in Canada, those actually caught by our investigative authorities before they could be carried out, those that have actually been carried out, and those that are yet to come, including the future behaviour of Canadian children brainwashed to join jihadist groups abroad.
For our community, one part of the hidden context of so much terrorist activity is the fact that the most powerful terrorist groups are now the foremost hate groups as well, with ISIS, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and Hamas supplanting the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the Heritage Front as leaders of the hate movement. These are organizations whose raison d'être focuses in large measure on zealous anti-Semitism.
We know of the terror activities aimed at Jews in France, the Hyper Cacher supermarket slaughter tied to the Charlie Hebdo attacks; the 2012 murders at a Jewish school in Marseilles; the recent murder in Copenhagen of a young Jewish guard at a synagogue, who was protecting 100 people there for a bat mitzvah; the attacks on a Jewish-owned shopping mall in Kenya in 2013; and the attack on a Mumbai religious centre as part of a larger terrorist attack in 2008.
In each of these activities I'm talking about, in each of these crimes, Jews were singled out for attack purely for reasons of hate. There was no other strategic reason to attack these innocents.
In Canada, the Jewish-owned West Edmonton Mall, along with Jewish-owned malls worldwide, was at the centre of a terror threat by al Shabaab. What hasn't been made really clear is that the reason the West Edmonton Mall, as opposed to say the Yorkdale Shopping Centre, was centred out was that it is Jewish owned. The Ghermezians own the mall as well as some of the other malls that were mentioned. The only malls that have been threatened are Jewish-owned malls.
These terror threats come in the context of a worldwide increase in anti-Semitism. Our B’nai Brith audit of anti-Semitic incidents shows that in 2013 vandalism against Jewish targets was up 21.6% and violence, 7.7%. We're awaiting the 2014 numbers, which we expect to be far higher as they have been in Europe, for example, where there has been a 100%, a doubling, of anti-Semitic incidents in France; 60% in Belgium; 50% in Britain; and 33% in Australia. These figures are all in our paper.
Canadian law in the form of a series of Supreme Court of Canada decisions has frequently confirmed the propriety of legal limitations on hate speech, recognizing the tie between hate speech and hate crimes. We say that the tie between speech and action or crime is even greater in the case of the promotion of terror, which is why we support the provisions of Bill C-51 that we are supporting, subject to the caveats that my colleague, Mr. Matas, will now speak of.