Canada’s federal government has cut funding to an anti-racism initiative after one of the program’s main consultants was found to have written a series of “reprehensible and vile” tweets.
The minister of diversity, Ahmed Hussen, said on Monday that his department had cut funding to Montreal-based Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC), which had received more than C$133,000 (US$103,000) in funding from the heritage department to develop a project on combating racism in broadcasting.
Laith Marouf, listed as senior consultant at the CMAC, was recently discovered to have tweeted a series of offensive messages, many of which were antisemitic.
“You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, a.k.a. 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,” said one post by Marouf, who has since locked his Twitter account. A previous account used by Marouf was suspended by Twitter.
Hussen said in a statement that “antisemitism has no place in this country” and that he had directed his department to determine how such tweets were initially missed during the vetting process.
“We call 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 comments,” said Hussen.
CMAC has already held workshops in Halifax, Montreal and Vancouver. The organization also had upcoming events planned in Calgary, Winnipeg and Ottawa.
Hussen was made diversity minister after the agreement with the CMAC was signed. Because the contract was with the CMAC and not Marouf, it complicated efforts by the government to sever the agreement.
Last week, Marouf’s lawyer Stephen Ellis attempted to distinguish between Marouf’s tweets about people he calls “Jewish white supremacists” and Jewish people in general, saying Marouf held no animus towards the Jewish people.
“While not the most artfully expressed, the tweets reflect a frustration with the reality of Israeli apartheid and a Canadian government which collaborates with it,” Ellis told the Canadian Press on Monday. “Apartheid is a crime against humanity under international law and no amount of Zionist hand-wringing can obscure that fundamental fact. Canada ought to be ashamed.”
In other tweets, Marouf called the former US secretary of state Colin Powell “the Jamaican house-slave of the Empire” and celebrated his death from Covid-19.
The tweets were first raised by Mark Goldberg, a telecoms analyst.
“Never too late to do the right thing, but there are so many questions about this matter,” he tweeted following Hussen’s announcement. Goldberg also called for a parliamentary investigation into the issue.
