Racist behaviour is abhorrent

Re: Swastikas, racist graffiti in third Ottawa anti-Jewish attack in a week, Nov. 17.

On Monday, Rabbi Anna Maranta reported finding a swastika and an anti-Semitic racial slur spraypainted on her door. Then, on Thursday, the Machzikei Hadas synagogue experienced the same thing. These are yet more events in a series of hateful things that have been reported, especially since the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president.

It seems that the election of someone whose campaign was filled with hateful rhetoric against women, immigrants and people of colour, to name just a few, has given permission to those who hold similar views to shed the veneer of propriety and lash out. This behaviour is abhorrent, but more abhorrent still is that it reveals how much racism, sexism and anti-Semitism are bubbling below the surface of our society.

As president of the Capital Region Interfaith Council I want to express, on behalf of our membership, outrage at this behaviour and the attitudes that empower it. These people have no place in civil society. At our council meetings, we regularly meet to encounter one another’s faiths. In the midst of these encounters, we find incredible depths of common understanding, and work together for the common good, knowing that by and large what unites us is far greater than anything that divides us. In our meetings, we develop a great respect for one another’s faiths and cultures.

The spraying of hateful graffiti demonstrates how much more work we have to do as a society. We need to seek more occasions for understanding through education, encounter and compassion. We need to bring the destructive instincts of bigotry to light, where they are seen for what they are, destructive falsehoods that eat at the heart of human community. The Reverend Canon John Wilker-Blakley, Ottawa