Montreal City Weblog

Kate 10:46 on 2024-12-18 Permalink Reply  

• Ephraim 13:41 on 2024-12-18 Permalink

  “The Canadian Muslim Forum also condemned the attack and expressed deep concern”

  FInally, now, the same should be done by the Imams

  There ar 4.3X as many Muslims in Montreal compared to Jews… so using the data provided by the SPVM in reported crime: About 35K vs 155K…

  “According to preliminary and subject to change data provided by the SPVM, 237 hate crimes (against the person or property) and hate incidents were reportedly targeting the Jewish community from October 7, 2023 to December 11, 2024. In addition, 81 were reportedly perpetrated against the Arab-Muslim community during this period.”

  That’s 237/35=6.77 hate crimes per thousand Jews and 81/155=0.52 hate crimes per thousand Muslims. So, someone want to tell me that we don’t have an anti-semitism problem in Montreal? Wonder why Jews don’t feel safe in Montreal? Property (reported) crime in Montreal is 19.54 per 1000. I don’t have access to the raw data, but I can pretty much guess that it’s statistically significant.

• Ian 14:46 on 2024-12-18 Permalink

  Not to disagree with the crux of your argument but rather to question your methodology… I thought you were the one who said we shouldn’t believe the statistics for “reported crime”. What if, an just hear me out, what if Muslims don’t report these crimes as much because they think the police don’t care about them?

  Of course nobody should be firebombing anything let alone synagogues and yeah, it’s pretty safe to say a synagogue getting firebombed is blatant antisemitism. That said, I feel really uncomfortable with anyone making “all Jews” or “all Muslims” arguments…

• jeather 15:15 on 2024-12-18 Permalink

  I’d assume that hate crimes against property are more likely to be reported (can’t hide a firebomb) — and I wonder what the ratio changes to when we include only those.

• bob 15:24 on 2024-12-18 Permalink

  Muslims haven’t reported mosques being shot at or firebombed?

• jeather 15:36 on 2024-12-18 Permalink

  I assume they have, I just don’t have the statistics. My guess, based on not much, is that the rate of hate crimes that aren’t reported are a lot lower when they come with property damage, while I agree with Ian that I imagine a lot of minorities, and especially Muslims, would not bother to report ones that are just words, so the number of property-related hate crimes is probably a better proxy.

  (Also, antisemitism and islamophobia show up in very different ways, and there’s no need to pit them against each other — they can, and do, both exist in the same place.)

• Joey 16:15 on 2024-12-18 Permalink

  So comments are back on this topic?

• Ephraim 16:19 on 2024-12-18 Permalink

  @Ian – Not the kind of unreported crime. Rape and especially rape of men… unreported and unreported to the extreme. Unreported crime tends to be crimes where people or companies see no point or want to hide the data, especially when shame or embarrassment is involved and/or people imagine that the police are totally incapable of actually pursuing or doing anything about. For example, banks don’t want embezzlement to be reported because they don’t want the public to know that someone got away with it. And people don’t report bike thefts, because they imagine that police are completely incapable of actually finding their bike.

  The opposite also is true, police don’t want drug crimes reported because they can’t really do anything about it and it just makes them look bad. And to make it look like they do, they inflate the value of what they do manage to catch by valuing it at the cut value on the street, rather than the wholesale value, which is where they are trying to stop it, because arresting 600 people per day in the city would just clog up the system. And prostitution, where you likely won’t get a conviction, it’s really not very illegal (solicitation is) and is a crime that should be regulated, rather than illegal, because any time where apprehension is particular hard, it’s easier to tax and regulate.

  But attacks on a building… big news. And I will make a bet that the number of letters, emails and other threats is MUCH higher. We should be more evolved than blood libel by now, no? And yet the new “Woke” seems to somehow embrace it. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rise-of-woke-anti-semitism-11621881999

• AMF 16:46 on 2024-12-18 Permalink

  This is the second time this synagogue has been firebombed. There is a school inside. Other synagogues have also been firebombed, and Jewish schools have been shot at–so many times I’ve lost count–7? 8? A dramatic increase in antisemitism, and normalized and justified so much more than I ever would have imagined possible.

• Kate 17:10 on 2024-12-18 Permalink

  Joey, comments are on because this is a local incident. I’ve only turned comments off a few times when the topic is more specifically about happenings in the Middle East, because I don’t think there’s any way we can do or say anything new or anything helpful about all that, on a blog about Montreal.

• jeather 17:40 on 2024-12-18 Permalink

  That’s why I think that crimes against property are going to have the highest relevance — you might not bother with letters or other threats because you think (probably correctly) that the police will do nothing. But your insurance probably requires that you report crimes against property.

• Ephraim 19:44 on 2024-12-18 Permalink

  @jeather – That’s why I think that banks and other businesses shouldn’t be allowed to write/off credit card theft without having an actual police report. If we force them to repot it, we might realize that it’s in the best interest of society, shareholders and owners to do something about it… rather than simply hide it, statistically. They “estimate” it at $800M. But looking at BMO (just as one of the Big 5/Big 6), the word “FRAUD” appears 24 time in their annual report. And none of those are in their balance sheet. It’s hidden under “impaired loans” and if you look hard and find it, you find $366M in provision for credit card losses. And the whole CC portfolio is 12.294B. So about 3% of the total. But if just BMO is $366M, and by estimates, they are 12% of the market, so calculating… that’s over $3B in losses to credit card fraud versus telling the public it’s just $800M.