KINSELLA: Discharging the 'Indigo 11' an affront to Jewish Canadians

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The blood-red paint was splashed all over the doors and windows of the bookstore in downtown Toronto.

They had put up lots of pictures of the owner of the bookstore, too, atop words accusing her of supporting mass murder.

The owner of the bookstore, Heather Reisman, is a Jew.

That it was antisemitic, Jew hatred, was obvious to anyone walking by the Indigo bookstore on Bay St. There are other bookstores within walking distance, but they weren’t touched – only the one owned by the Jew.

The crime happened in November 2023, while Israel was still locating, and still burying, some of the bodies of the 1,200 Jews and non-Jews slaughtered by Hamas a few weeks earlier. The posters glued to the doors and windows at Indigo accused the Jewish owner of mass murder – when Jews themselves had been the victims of mass murder on October 7.

There is something deeply evil about that kind of inversion.

But that is what the so-called “Indigo 11” did. They went out, with deliberation and forethought, and falsely accused a Jew of acting like the Nazis did.

Toronto Police eventually caught up to the antisemites and charged them. Quite a few were proud of what they had done.

Initially, the police acknowledged the obvious and called the crime “hate motivated.”

And then, somewhere along the way, it all became downgraded to just a bit of mischief. That’s what they called it: “mischief.” No one was charged with a hate crime, even though it had all been deeply hateful. And last week, the remaining defendants got off with “conditional” sentences.

Why? Good question. The law is pretty clear on the subject.

Under the Criminal Code, anyone who commits “mischief” – as at that bookstore in November 2023 – can be guilty of an indictable offence under the Criminal Code. And they can be imprisoned for up to ten years for it.

When applying that law in years past, Canadian courts have taken antisemitic graffiti and vandalism much more seriously. Judges have handed out tougher sentences when the wrongdoers have targeted specific racial or religious groups. Because it is clearly, indisputably hateful.

With the “Indigo 11” – it’s unclear who gave them that Hollywood-style moniker, but it stuck – conditional discharges were the reward. We say “reward” because a conditional sentence means no jail time. They walked, essentially.

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Now, their lawyers blithely dismiss their crimes as political expression, as free speech. But if you’re a Jew, you tend to think that free speech ends where hate propaganda begins. And what the Indigo 11 did carried a clear and targeted hateful message – and during a time of heightened antisemitic hostility across Canada.

Discharging the Indigo 11 on the grounds that they somehow pose no threat to the Jewish community? That’s an affront to the thousands of Jewish Canadians who have been victims of a wave of antisemitic hate in the aftermath of October 7.

Some might say, as well, that the Indigo 11 got no more than what they deserved. But they’d be wrong about that, too.

In Canada, our courts have often dealt with charges of vandalism with an underlying hateful motive. And, in many of those cases, prosecutors and judges have refused to treat those cases as simple acts of vandalism. They’ve treated them as what they are, which is crimes of hate.

So, in 1998, a court upheld a conviction and imposed a sentence of 18 months in prison and three years probation for a man convicted of vandalizing a Jewish cemetery after it was found that he held neo-Nazi views. In his decision on this case, the judge wrote:

“The victims of this crime should be therefore reassured that the criminal laws of this country will be applied by the courts not only to comfort and protect them from this form of hurtful and criminal behaviour but to deter others from like conduct. That is the very least that a free and democratic country can do for its minorities.”

See that? “The very least that a free and democratic country can do” for minorities, for Jews. But that didn’t happen with the Indigo case did it?

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In another case, in 1990, a creep was convicted of mischief to property for defacing a synagogue and a Hebrew school with Nazi and other antisemitic graffiti. He was sentenced to six months in jail and the Crown appealed. The appeal was allowed and the sentence doubled to a year. A tougher sentence turned out to be the right one – because the crime was motivated by a desire to cause emotional injury to a particular group: Jews.

There are lots of other cases like that, where vandalism motivated by hatred resulted in much tougher sentences. Where the sentences fit the crime.

Will we ever get back to that? Who knows.

In this past week, too, the Prime Minister of Canada actually accused Israel of genocide – when the facts, and the International Court of Justice, have found otherwise.

Canadian Jews live in a dark and dangerous time. They live in a time when someone can be motivated by hatred to commit a crime – and the hater will get to go home.

And Jews get to clean up the blood-red paint.