Ottawa cancels funding for anti-racist conferences under pressure from Zionist lobby

Written by: William Ging Wee Dere

Laith Marouf, a Palestinian/Syrian activist used some strong and emotional language to denounce the Israeli occupation of Palestine. His work as a supporter of Palestinian liberation is well-known. Marouf is also a long-time multimedia consultant and producer, who currently serves as Senior Consultant at the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC), which received a $133,800 grant from Canadian Heritage to hold six conferences across Canada on “Building an Anti-Racism Strategy for Canadian Broadcasting.”

This funding has now been cancelled by Heritage after three of the six conferences were held. Ahmed Hussen, minister of diversity and inclusion, took this step after anti-Zionist tweets by Marouf were revealed by Mark Goldberg, a media consultant, who had been monitoring his private social media feeds. The sensational tweets appearing in the mainstream news coverage do not give the full context, as they only show Marouf’s response to provocative tweets, since deleted, aimed against him. Laith Marouf’s Twitter account is now suspended. Israeli apartheid apologist organizations such as B’nai B’rith and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs demanded and cheered upon CMAC losing the grant, and Marouf being suspended from Twitter.

Marouf is a long-time supporter of the Palestinian people’s struggle against Israeli occupation. He came to the public’s attention in 2001 when he and another student, Tom Keefer were arrested and subsequently banned from Concordia University, but later re-instated, for spray painting pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli slogans. Marouf was VP-Internal of the Concordia Students Union. The students gained the support of Noam Chomsky and former NDP MP, Libby Davies. He was coordinator of the Concordia chapter of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights which led the protest that forced the cancellation of the appearance of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September 2002.

Marouf moved into a career in broadcasting media and as a political commentator for Press TV and Radio Sputnik. He worked as the Executive Director of Community University Television (CUTV) and developed its award-winning Quebec Spring live broadcasts embedded within the student movement (2010-13). He won the “Best Special Programming” award at the NCRA for his work on a 12-hour radio marathon with stations from Palestine, England, Canada and the United States that commemorated the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Radio Free Palestine, 2008). He worked with the Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations (CACTUS) and developed a business plan with the Nishnawbe Aski Nation to build multimedia community hubs in 49 Aboriginal communities (2014).

In 2015, he was named as a Senior Consultant for CMAC.

In 2017, he led a multi-cultural team of community media activist to apply to the CRTC for a community broadcast license for the Independent Community Television (ICTV). Subsequently, CRTC awarded the license to corporate giant, Rogers.

Marouf under fire

The pro-Israeli media and politicians are having a field day distorting anti-racist and anti-Zionist remarks into anti-Semitism. The wall-to-wall coverage is Canada-wide in both the English and French media. Globally, it ranged from the Guardian to the Jerusalem Post to the Falun Gong Epoch Times. Here are some examples of sensationalist comments:

“How an antisemitic bigot named Laith Marouf built a lucrative career as a Canadian government-funded ‘anti-racist’” writes Jonathan Kay in a hateful article exposing Marouf’s career as a pro-Palestinian activist.
“The Canadian government had funded a firm whose leading consultant Laith Marouf said Zionists should be shot in the head” headlines an article in the Jerusalem Post.
“Canada cuts anti-racism program after lead consultant’s ‘vile’ tweets surface” – The Guardian.
The French media focused on Marouf calling Francophones “frogs.” - DU FINANCEMENT D’OTTAWA COUPÉ À UN CONSULTANT QUALIFIANT LES FRANCOPHONES DE « FROGS »

In a statement to The Canada Files, Marouf responded to the attacks against him, saying that his tweets were taken out of context and that he was responding to other tweets that have since been deleted. First, Marouf addressed the issue of “frogs.” From his statement:

“It is astounding how easy it has been for the pro-Israeli lobby to whip the racist media in Quebec into a frenzy against a Palestinian Arab man. All journalistic standards of investigation, verification and rigor have been thrown out the window simply because an Arab man dared to use the “Frog” word as parody and political satire in reply to a deluge of Quebecois white settler nationalists insisting on using the N-word on air and twitter.”

What Marouf is referring to is the case of Ricardo Lamour, a Black Quebecois social worker and artist who filed a complaint with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission after hearing a journalist and a commentator repeat the offensive N-word several times on air in 2020. After two years, the CRTC on June 30, 2022, ruled in Ricardo’s favour and ordered Radio-Canada to publicly apologize as well as to report on ‘internal measures and programming best practices, including guidelines to on-air hosts, commentators and guests, that it will implement to ensure that it better addresses similar issues in the future, if they come up in the news.’ The use of the N-word was in reference to Pierre Vallière’s book, “White N…s of America.”

Immediately, a dozen White prominent members of the Radio-Canada establishment, composed of former and present journalists, star hosts and ombudsmen, pushed back, saying they are “alarmed” and calling the CRTC ruling an attack on journalism and freedom of expression. Then another group of 50 Radio-Canada “headliners” issued another statement coming to the defence of their Radio-Canada colleagues and calling on the state broadcaster to disavow the CRTC ruling. This 2nd list of journalists appears to be also all-White. Quebec’s premier and cultural minister chimed in their support for the statements and opposition to the ruling.

While Radio-Canada issued an apology, it also appealed the CRTC ruling and included Lamour as a co-respondent thus imposing a legal and financial burden on him. Lamour has been vilified in social media including death threats. The Progressive Chinese of Quebec, one of the few organizations that came to Lamour’s support issued a public statement, unreported by the media, signed by 8 other mainly racialized organizations and individuals:

“The signatories of this Statement are particularly alarmed by the repercussions that Mr. Lamour has suffered for exercising his right to use a legitimate and legal recourse for a violation of his human rights and dignity by Canada’s largest public media institution, and we hope that this overwhelming backlash will not become a deterrent for other minorities from speaking out in the future.”

Marouf went on to say in his statement regarding the F-word:

“As a media rights activist, I visited his (Lamour) posts to reply satirically and in parody to all those who insisted on using the N-word -- by using the F-word. If you dish it out, you must be ready to receive it. What is bizarre about this ordeal was not that the racist media in Quebec was attacking me for using the “Frog” word but the fact that SRC/Radio Canada, who are using taxpayers money to appeal the CRTC ban on the N-word at the Federal Court of Appeals, and named Mr Lamar as a respondent in the case to bleed him financially, reported my satirical use of the “Frog” comments as racist.”

As for Marouf’s “intemperate” language on Zionism as reported in the media:

“Not one journalist wanted to verify the screenshots of the tweets in question. None wondered why the tweets were all edited into a stream with no visible handles for the clear replies I had written. No one looked online to see if they could find the complete story. La Presse, Journal de Montreal, SRC/Radio Canada and many more, all libeled me and spread misinformation about my opinions and my words. This would have been a normal day for me in Quebec if it were not for all the death threats I started receiving, the doxing of my home address, and the release of names of my underage children along with the complete genealogy of my wife’s family.”

Why the media attack against Marouf? The mainstream media trails behind the position of the Canadian government in being cheerleaders of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. No matter which prime minister is in power, Canada continues to oppose any United Nations resolution condemning Israeli atrocities against the Palestinian people. Canada votes alongside Israel, the US and the small Pacific island nations of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands, whose government survive by the grace of the Americans. Since 1972, the US has vetoed at least 53 security council resolutions critical of Israel for violation of Palestinian human rights.

In December 2017, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, China and 162 other nations all supported UN resolution 17/96, guaranteeing the protections of the Geneva Convention to Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories. Again, Canada along with the US, Israel and the same three Pacific countries opposed. The Canadian government sets the tone in supporting the Zionist agenda in this country and opposes the “rules based” resolutions of the world community. Another egregious action of Canada is when Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem. Despite the international condemnation and criticism, including from some Western countries, like Britain, France and Germany, Canada remained silent.

This episode shows not only how powerful the Zionist psychology is in Canada but also how easily anti-racism efforts can be manipulated by the White supremacists into being thought of as anti-Semitism.

What work does CMAC do?

The CMAC is an anti-racist organization active since 2015, advocating for Indigenous and racialized people in the media. It is “a non-profit organization that offers advocacy and support to Indigenous and community organizations that wish to explore licensing, funding, and launching their own non-profit broadcasting organizations.”

CMAC’s latest project for which the Heritage funding was obtained is the series of cross-Canada conferences entitled, "Building an Anti-Racism Strategy for Canadian Broadcasting: Conversation & Convergence." The conference featured distinguished speakers and active participation in Montreal, Vancouver and Halifax.

Here is CMAC’s response, in an August 26 email, on the cancellation of the funding for the remaining 3 conferences:

“After this week’s media coverage, CMAC is reminded of how online and mainstream media are powerful tools of White Supremacy. From Turtle Island to Palestine, CMAC continues to see the need for an anti-racism strategy for broadcasting that disrupts settler-colonialism and oppression in the media. CMAC’s mission is the opposite of the false statements made recently online and in media about our organization and members. CMAC is a not-for-profit
corporation engaging in research, relationship-building, and learning to advocate for the rights of Indigenous, Racialized and disability communities within the communications, broadcasting, and media industries.

Some online posts and media coverage have misrepresented the objectives, facilitation, and success of the funded events, which achieved all of the goals proposed. With a quick look at the Facilitation Guide made available to all participants, it can be confirmed that the events are “taught” by those who participate, meaning the presenters and participants are the experts. These deliberative events also draw on a large body of legislation, policies, reports, and scholarship on race and media as compiled on the website’s resources page.”

Canadian Heritage has hired a consultant firm, Goss Gilroy Inc (GGI) to interview some of the people who participated in the “Building an Anti-racism Strategy” conferences to “gain (their) perspectives” on the project.

Jooneed Khan, a Montreal-based anti-imperialist and retired journalist, commented for this article:

"The struggle for the right to criticize Israel as any other State, and Zionism as any other ideology, has been going on for decades and has progressed in leaps and bounds, with global and Israeli Human Rights bodies like Amnesty International and B'Tselem both condemning 'Israeli Apartheid' in detailed reports.”

Khan wrote on international affairs for nearly 40 years for the Québec’s largest newspaper, La Presse. He’s also volunteered regularly on community and university radio and worked with Laith Marouf and others to persuade the CRTC to fund independent, non-profit community media, as envisaged in the 1991 Canadian Broadcasting Act. He fought and won against the Zionist lobby which tried to get the Quebec Press Council to blame him for 'inciting hatred' in his unprecedented month-long, on-the-ground reports on the First Intifada (1988) from Occupied Palestine for La Presse.

"The world has come a very long way from 1988 to 2022, from the 1st Intifada to Israeli Apartheid. Yet our governments keep giving in to Zionist pressure and propaganda and pushing Canada into irrational positions where anti-racism becomes perverted into racism by agents of the Canadian state. It's more than time for Canada to regain its balance and credibility, and to rejoin the global consensus for Human Rights, individual and collective, and for Justice and Peace, on Palestine and on other issues”, Khan adds.

These recent events offer lessons for anti-imperialists and pro-Palestinian liberation activists. Any declaration by activists, either privately or publicly will be used by the Zionists and mainstream media to automatically tarnish the individuals as anti-Semites. Laith Marouf’s tweets were taken from his private account. The long-term effect is to scare people away from supporting the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation. The most insidious lesson is that any statements against racism and White supremacy can easily be twisted into being supposedly anti-Semetic.

Anti-racists and anti-imperialists are determined to oppose racism in all its forms and to support the liberation of the Palestinian people from Zionist apartheid.

William Ging Wee Dere is the author of the award-winning “Being Chinese in Canada, The Struggle for Identity, Redress and Belonging.” (Douglas & McIntyre, 2019). He was a political organizer and a leading activist in the 2-decade movement for redress of the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act.

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