The Laith Marouf scandal is egregious in its own right, and for this government in particular, it’s indicative of both its obsession with identity politics and its underlying incompetence.
The irony of an anti-racism contract being awarded to an organization run by a man with a long history of making blatantly racist comments about Jews and other groups was hardly lost on anyone, save for Marouf and his lawyer. But the government’s response has left much to be desired.
Marouf espouses the very opinions that should be targeted by any anti-racism program worth its salt
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To make matters worse, a number of his social media posts arguably crossed the line into advocating violence, such as when he wrote that, “Life is too short for shoes with laces, or for entertaining Jewish White Supremacists with anything but a bullet to the head.”
Marouf, in other words, espouses the very opinions that should be targeted by any anti-racism program worth its salt.
Yet when news first broke about Marouf’s blatantly antisemitic comments, Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen tried to deflect the blame back on CMAC, an organization he had previously praised, saying that it needs to “answer how they came to hire” him. In reality, Marouf and his wife are CMAC’s only employees.
Marouf and his wife are CMAC’s only employees? Trudeau cannot even blame this one on the pandemic-related staffing issues that have caused so many problems throughout the federal government in recent months: CMAC has been awarded over $500,000 from the Broadcast Participation Fund and Canada Summer Jobs Program since 2016. Oh well…
It’s one thing to initiate anti-racism programs after anger over George Floyd’s murder boiled over into Canada, for example, but the Liberals took it to the extreme, directing departments to
embrace critical race theory and awarding contracts to organizations like CMAC, which should have raised huge red flags.
After Marouf’s comments were made public, CMAC
released a statement saying that the press coverage reminded it “of how online and mainstream media are powerful tools of white supremacy.” That it thinks exposing racism is a tool of white supremacy should tell you all you need to know about the organization, and the incompetence of the government that gave it both money and praise.
It is important to remember that Marouf — the Palestinian activist who co-founded the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC), which received a
$133,822 grant from Heritage Canada to develop an anti-racism strategy — did not merely make some passing comment that was taken out of context, or a joke that was misinterpreted.
On Twitter,
he wrote, “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 came from, they will return to being low voiced bi–hes of thier (sic) Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters.”
He
called Irwin Cotler, a former Liberal justice minister and noted human rights activist, who is Jewish, the “Grand Wizard of Zionism,” and said that he “looks like a d–k without makeup.”