Canada cuts off anti-racism program after senior staffer exposed as antisemite

Laith Marouf publicly compares Israel to Nazis and rants against “Jewish White Supremacists.”

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Canada has cut off a government-funded anti-racism program after one of its leaders was exposed as a virulent Jew hater.

“Antisemitism has no place in this country,” Housing, Diversity and Inclusion Minister Ahmed Hussen announced Monday.

“The antisemitic comments made by Laith Marouf are reprehensible and vile. We have provided notice to the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC) that their funding has been cut and their project has been suspended,” he tweeted.

Update by the Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion on the status of the Community Media Advocacy Centre project. pic.twitter.com/LPqMsv3hQP

— Ahmed Hussen (@HonAhmedHussen) August 22, 2022

Hussen also called on CMAC, “an organization claiming to fight racism and hate in Canada, to answer to how they came to hire Laith Marouf, and how they plan on rectifying the situation given the nature of his antisemitic and xenophobic statements.”

Marouf, based in Lebanon, was listed as a CMAC senior consultant who led a project to curb biased reporting among Canadian broadcasters.  The organization was funded by the government’s Heritage Canada’s Anti-Racism Action Program to the tune of over $130,000.

Last week, Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay exposed a number of tweets that Marouf has posted over recent years which, among other vilifications, claimed that there was “no such thing as ‘the Jewish people,’” compared “Zionists” (meaning Israelis) to Nazis, and called Jews “loud-mouthed bags of human feces” and white supremacists who should all get “a bullet to the head.”

He also seemingly had no qualms about biting the hand that was feeding him, calling the Canadian prime minister “Apartheid Canada PM @JustinTrudeau” when he hosted a national summit against antisemitism in July 2021.

According to Shimon Koffler Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), an advocacy agent of the country’s Jewish Federations, Marouf has a “more than 20-year history of making outrageous and hateful statements – against Jews, Blacks, Quebecers, and others.”

Kay linked one of his tweets to a 2002 article from a Canadian paper reporting that Marouf, “a Syrian national,” had been banned at one point from Montreal’s Concordia University when he was a student there, for spraying anti-Israel graffiti on campus. He also vocally participated in anti-Israel demonstrations.

Marouf’s history as an antisemite was not limited to his private Twitter account. As Kay revealed in other posts, in the months before being hired by Hussen’s ministry Marouf had written at least one article for an Arab media outlet that denounced Israel for all sorts of imagined crimes against the Palestinians, including genocide and infanticide.

One member of Parliament has publicly taken the government to task after the revelations of Marouf’s record of hateful activism. MP Anthony Housefeather tweeted his demand that “the Ministry of Canadian Heritage accepts accountability. We need a thorough review and measures taken to stop this happening again.”

Jewish groups such as B’nai Brith Canada and CIJA applauded CMAC’s cancellation while also demanding that better oversight be established so that groups promoting hate do not receive citizens’ tax dollars.

AntisemitismB'nai Brith CanadaCanadaCIJAJustin TrudeauRacism