Canadian anti-racist organisation loses federal funds after researcher’s “Jewish White Supremacists” tweets surface
The Canadian Minister for Housing and Diversity, Ahmed Hussen, has said that no more federal funds will be allocated to an anti-racist organisation after one of its researchers was reported to have posted a series of antisemitic tweets.
In 2021, the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC) received C$133,800 from the Department of Canadian Heritage (known as Canadian Heritage), whose stated aim is to promote and support “Canadian identity and values, cultural development, and heritage”.
However, that grant has come under scrutiny after the twitter activity of one senior consultant to CMAC, Laith Marouf, has come to light.
Mr Marouf is alleged to have written: “You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from, they will return to being low voiced bitches of thier [sic] Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters”.
The phrase “Jewish White Supremacists” has featured in some of Mr Marouf’s other tweets as well, such as one that read: “Life is too short for shoes with laces, or for entertaining Jewish White Supremacists with anything but a bullet to the head.” He also seems to have called Israel the “Zionist Colony of Human Feces”.
Another time, when commenting on alleged Israeli military action in Syria, Mr Marouf allegedly said, “May death visit the home of every Zionist on this earth,” and he appears to have described Israelis as “filthy Zionist scum”.
Mr Marouf is also alleged to have said that “Nothing is more harmful to any decolonisation movements in the world, especially Palestine, than Jewish White Boys/Girls.”
In May 2022, Mr Marouf took to Twitter to say that “The little castrated b***** who are rampaging through old Jerusalem and alAqsa Mosque today, will be packing their bags & going back to where once they were treated as bitches and never dared to fight back”, apparently referring how how the Jewish diaspora in Europe was treated historically.
In March of this year, Mr Marouf apparently described the Ukrainian President, Volodomyr Zelenskyy, who has a Jewish background, as “pretend-Jewish” and claimed that there was a “Zionist-Nazi alliance” at work in Ukraine that aims to move Ukrainian Jews to Israel following the Russian invasion of the country.
It is alleged that Canadian Heritage has been paying Mr Marouf C$470 per day for his contributions to CMAC.
The group Canadian Defenders for Human Rights (CD4HR), whose Director was found to have posted a virulently antisemitic meme and antisemitic text on Facebook and Twitter, defended Mr Marouf on Twitter, writing: “#zionists in #OccupiedPalestine kill the opposition with gun fire or missiles & in #Canada they kill the opposition by defamation or making them lose contracts/funding. These are ugly & evil sophisticated methods to bully & assassinate all opposition. #LaithMarouf is a victim.”
Mr Marouf’s lawyer, Stephen Ellis, wrote an e-mail saying that his client’s tweets should be quoted “verbatim” and made a distinction between what he called Mr Marouf’s “clear reference to ‘Jewish white supremacists’” and Jewish people in general. Mr Ellis also said that Mr Marouf does not have “any animus toward the Jewish faith as a collective group.”
In a statement, Mr Hussen said: “We condemn this unacceptable behaviour by an individual working in an organisation dedicated to fighting racism and discrimination. Our position is clear – antisemitism and any form of hate have no place in Canada.”
The former Justice Minister, Irwin Cotler, who was also appointed as Canada’s Special Envoy on Antisemitism, said that Mr Marouf’s tweets were “beyond the pale”.
Campaign Against Antisemitism reports on news and incidents relating to antisemitism throughout Canada, which have dramatically increased according to a recent audit.
