FIRST READING: The Laith Marouf antisemitism affair continues to get worse

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TOP STORY

The Laith Marouf scandal has largely disappeared from the headlines as Ottawa has promised to cut Marouf’s funding and conduct an “extensive review” into federal anti-racism funding.

But the interim days have dredged up a whole battery of evidence to show that the affair was far worse than initially suspected — prompting Jewish leaders to express dismay that such overt antisemitism was able to dwell so comfortably on the federal payroll.

“Looking back on events over the last week (with) regards to Marouf affair, I’m utterly disheartened,” read a Monday statement by Michael Levitt, a former MP who served in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal caucus. “Taking a stand against antisemitism should be a given (and) yet so few of my former Liberal colleagues have done so.”

Earlier this month, it made international headlines that Marouf had collected $133,000 from Canadian Heritage as an “anti-racism” trainer despite having an extensive history of public statements referring to Jews as “bags of human feces” worthy only of a “bullet to the head.”

But it wasn’t just the $133,000 that Marouf collected for a series of “anti-racism” seminars directed at Canadian broadcasters. Since the swearing-in of the Trudeau government in 2015, Marouf’s Community Media Action Centre has collected more half a million dollars in federal contracts.

In a recent blog post, longtime Marouf critic Mark Goldberg, a telecommunications consultant, dug up federal records to show that CMAC collected $517,480 from the Broadcast Participation Fund between 2016 and 2021. CMAC is also turning up as a beneficiary to other federal grant programs, such as in 2018 when it received almost $3,000 from the Canada Summer Jobs Program. 

Meanwhile, as scrutiny has descended on Marouf’s online writings, critics have revealed that his slurs were not at all limited to Jews.

Marouf has referred to Black and Indigenous figures as “house slaves.” Marouf received his Canadian citizenship in 2020, which he celebrated with a post slamming “Apartheid Canada” for taking so long to process his application.

In a series of tweets from July alone, Marouf said French is an “ugly language,” French-speakers have “IQ less than 77” and used the anti-Francophone slur “frogs” no less than six times.

But the lion’s share of Marouf’s ire has been directed against Jews and Israelis. Only days before Canadian Heritage publicly announced their partnership with CMAC, Marouf was posting to his public Twitter feed that “nothing is more harmful to any decolonisation movements in the world … than Jewish White Boys/Girls.”

Ahmed Hussen, the minister in charge of Canadian Heritage, initially expressed shock at Marouf’s role as a federal contractor — despite the fact that he had been personally praising CMAC as recently as April.

Hussen then called on CMAC to investigate how they had hired an “antisemitic” and “xenophobic” figure such Marouf – seemingly unaware that the organization’s entire staff consists exclusively of Marouf and his wife.

In recent days, Jewish figures have lamented that it ultimately fell to them to expose Marouf’s role within the federal government.

Montreal-area Liberal MP Anthony Housefather told the National Post last week that Hussen had dismissed his earlier warnings about Marouf. On Tuesday, Housefather began calling on “all 338 MPs” to condemn the “antisemitism & hate expressed by Marouf.”

Last week, when University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist accused the feds of remaining strangely silent on the Marouf affair despite multiple warnings, Liberal MP Chris Bittle obliquely accused Geist of racism against Hussen’s Somalian heritage (Bittle has since apologized).

In its only public statement on the scandal thus far, CMAC sent an email to supporters saying that “online and mainstream media are powerful tools of White Supremacy.”

Marouf, meanwhile, has blamed the whole affair on “the Zionist lobby.”

In a recent statement published by the far-left blog The Canada Files, Marouf referenced Quebec backlash to his “frog” comments, saying “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.”

NEW SUPREME COURT JUSTICE

Michelle O’Bonsawin, who is set to become Canada’s first Indigenous Supreme Court justice, may also be the most unqualified new justice in the court’s history. In a National Post op-ed, legal writer Leonid Sirota went through O’Bonsawin’s job application for Canada’s top court and found that her experience was rather sparse: She spent only five years on the Ontario Superior Court, and before that picked up a few jobs as an in-house counsel. As for O’Bonsawin’s view of Canadian jurisprudence, Sirota said her answers on the application were vague and often contradictory. One example was O’Bonsawin writing that “a judge must remain independent from influence or pressure,” while simultaneously claiming that judges should “respond” to social changes. “Neither her career nor her thinking come close to qualifying her for the Supreme Court of Canada,” he wrote. “Her appointment is transparently political.”

One of the signature problems in securing Indigenous representation on Canada’s highest court has been a Trudeau government requirement for French-English bilingualism. While there is plenty of bilingualism among Indigenous Canadians, it’s very rarely of the French-English variety. Canada has more than a dozen Metis, Inuk and First Nations jurists, many with far better resumes than O’Bonsawin (think Murray Sinclair; the former Manitoba judge who oversaw the Truth and Reconciliation Commission). But O’Bonsawin is basically the only one among them able to hear a case in both French and English. Harry LaForme was the first Indigenous judge to sit on an appellate court; the last stop before a case gets appealed to the Supreme Court. Since his retirement, LaForme has been outspoken about his contention that Trudeau’s Supreme Court language requirements are effectively an assimilationist policy designed to screen out Indigenous applicants who aren’t “like us.”  

This exact same problem emerged during Trudeau government efforts to find an Indigenous Governor General. Eventually, they just skirted their own rules on French-English bilingualism and nominated Mary Simon, who spoke Inuktitut and English – but not French.

IN OTHER NEWS

After the greatest public debt binge in Canadian history, two provinces are now back to running budget surpluses. This week, B.C.’s NDP government announced that they’ll be in the black to the tune of $1.3 billion despite early forecasts that the province would be running a deficit. And they join Alberta, which was posting a $3.9 billion surplus in June. As to how this occurred, it certainly helps that both provinces sit atop oceans of natural resources currently commanding some of the highest commodity prices ever known. Alberta is raking in the dough from an oil spike, and B.C. is reaping a whirlwind on everything from timber to natural gas.

A foreign media outlet mentioned us! BBC Travel did a feature on the “rough-and-tumble” sound of Quebec French, and noted that it’s actually a close approximation of how French was spoken during the 17th century when New France was colonized. Thus, while the rest of the Francosphere often mocks French-Canadians for speaking a backwoods, hickish version of the language, it turns out they speak the most authentic French of them all.

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