Canada's Trudeau government has cut its funding of the 'Building an Anti-Racism Strategy for Canadian Broadcasting' tour, after it became known that the organizer was an anti-semitic bigot.
The Line Between Anti-Racism and Racism Keeps Getting Fainter | Quillette - Jonathan Kay:
August 25, 2022 - "There are few politicians who’ve embraced the anti-racism movement more fervently than Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. With great fanfare, his government has launched multiple programs intended to eradicate the 'racism, discrimination, and xenophobia' that Trudeau describes as being a major contaminant within Canadian society.
"Alas, it has now been revealed that a major beneficiary of this Liberal anti-racism largesse is one of Canada’s most outspoken bigots, whose company was promised C$130,000 (about US$107,000) in public funds to mount a six-city national tour aimed at 'building an anti-racism strategy' within the Canadian broadcasting industry. And the resulting scandal has become international news.
"The bigot in question is Laith Marouf, a fanatical Palestinian-rights activist and one-time campus firebrand whose activities I’ve been following, on and off, for two decades — beginning with his 2001 expulsion from Concordia University in Montreal. Marouf had attacked a campus security guard who’d been trying to help apprehend him for spray-painting anti-Israeli graffiti on a local building. Yet he was able to get the expulsion overturned, and even held on to his gig as VP Internal with the Concordia Student Union (CSU) executive....
"In an era when people can get fired for clicking the like button on a problematic social-media post or using the wrong pronoun, this out-and-proud hatemonger has — until just days ago — maintained his entree with Canadian broadcast regulators, even while tweeting that 'there are none on this earth more cunty than Zionists'; describing his desire to beat up 'ugly inbred fucking Zionist Colonist tourists'; rhapsodizing about the coming liberation of Palestine, when 'all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists … will return to being low-voiced bitches of their Christian/Secular white supremacist masters'; and describing his personal 'motto' as being that 'Life is too short for shoes with laces, or for entertaining Jewish white supremacists with anything but a bullet to the head'....
"He also called Colin Powell 'the Jamaican house-slave of the Empire,' dismissed Canada’s Francophone population as 'frogs,' and celebrated the outcome of a Beirut bombing that, he crowed, turned French soldiers into 'bags of minced meat.' During a recent trip to Washington, DC, Marouf took a selfie at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which he tweeted along with the wish that the memorial were 'much bigger, with the names of a few million dead corpses of [American] dirtbags.'
"That last tweet is especially notable because he posted it just last month, by which time he’d already launched his aforementioned government-financed anti-racism tour, which he billed as 'Building an Anti-Racism Strategy for Canadian Broadcasting: Conversation & Convergence.' The full slate of events was to include regional gatherings in Montreal, Vancouver, Halifax, Calgary, and Winnipeg, “culminating in a national conference to be held at Carleton University in Ottawa.” The April 14th, 2022 press release announcing the tour was published under the name of the formal grant recipient — the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC), a company composed of Marouf and his wife. It contained lengthy quotes from two men: Marouf himself, and Ahmed Hussen, Trudeau’s Minister of Housing and Diversity and Inclusion, who pronounced Marouf’s travelling anti-racism road show to be a 'timely intervention with the potential to shape how Racialized Canadians experience the media space.'
"Marouf’s Twitter account is now protected. But its contents had been closely tracked for more than a year by a prominent Canadian telecommunications consultant named Mark Goldberg.... Goldberg has been publicly ringing alarm bells over the issue since April, and raised the issue directly with Liberal MP Anthony Housefather last month. Housefather responded on July 19, telling Goldberg that the issue had been flagged to Hussen and his team, and that Hussen 'will get back to me.'
"Yet it was only a month later, on August 21, once I’d been signal-boosting Goldberg’s research for a week, that anyone in government deigned to acknowledged that they’d effectively put a lifelong Jew-hater on the government’s anti-racism payroll. And even then, Hussen declined to include Marouf’s name in his initial statement.
"And on Monday, Trudeau’s government was finally shamed into ending its contract with Marouf, in large part, apparently, thanks to pressure applied by prominent Jewish groups such as CIJA and B’nai Brith. The Liberals are now in damage-control mode, with Housefather admitting publicly that Hussen had been briefed about Marouf’s background before the scandal broke in the mainstream media. It is unclear, as yet, whether the scandal will lead to the resignation of Hussen; or that of Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, whose ministry controls the Anti-Racism Initiatives Program that doled out Marouf’s grant. But either way, it’s already done much to discredit the cash-bloated anti-racism bureaucracy that Trudeau’s been touting since 2019."
Read more: https://quillette.com/2022/08/25/the-increasingly-blurry-line-between-anti-racism-and-racism/
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