"Combating Anti-Semitism and Anti-Palestinian Racism for All"

"[The  grant funding was intended to] promote understanding, foster dialogue and build allyship between Palestinian and Jewish communities across the Greater Toronto Area."

"The Government of Canada remains committed to ensuring that public funds are allocated responsibly and in alignment with Canadian values, ensuring that every dollar spent contributes to fostering equity, inclusivity and respect for all Canadians."

"Grants and contributions are actively monitored by the [Heritage] department to ensure program funding terms and conditions are duly respected." 

"Jewish-Canadians deserve to feel safe, supported and accepted, and the government reaffirms its commitments to ensuring they can practise their religion and culture freely."

"The country cannot tolerate any form of antisemitism in any context." 

Daniel Savoie, spokesman, Canadian Heritage 

Honest Reporting Canada

 

In 2022 it was revealed that the Canadian Heritage Department had paid out $500,000 to Laith Marouf who presented himself as a human rights expert, a 'consultant' with his organization Community Media Advocacy Center under a departmental Anti-Racism Project to teach the parameters of human rights to public sector employees in the federal government. The then-minister of Canadian Heritage, Ahmed Hussen had seen fit to dismiss charges brought to him by an investigative journalist that Laith Marouf happened to be an ardent anti-Semite whose social media postings revealed the depth of his racism.

 

The reaction from the Jewish community was understandably aghast that a man who posted such abusive sentiments as to describe Jews as "bags of human feces" for whom "a bullet to the head" would end their existence. As Jaime Kirzner-Roberts of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies responded: "Regardless of the hate and propaganda he promotes, for years [Marouf] was able to sell himself to the government as a legitimate enterprise, regardless of how absolutely offensive his communications were. It is profoundly troubling that this individual was supported and enabled in his hate speech, and the government needs to overhaul whatever problem is in these programs."

 

Laith Marouf in 2002 when he was a Concordia University student who helped coordinate the school's infamous anti-Israel riots. Photo by Gazette-Pierre Obendrauf

 

Several years on, we find that same government department, under the same Liberal government, finding it expedient to fund yet another group, ostensibly as a bridge between communities at loggerheads with one another. Bearing in mind that it is Palestinian groups in Canada -- and in Toronto in very particular -- that go out of their way in every conceivable venue at every opportunity to slander, threaten and intimidate the Jewish community, whereas the Jewish community commits no such aggression against their counterparts.

 

Yet a group calling itself Toronto Palestinian Families -- describing its purpose as "a grassroots group led by Palestinian families advocating for safe and inclusive spaces free from anti-Palestinian racism and other forms of inequity", which has links to other Palestinian groups that deny the legitimacy of the state of Israel and have occupied the streets of cities in Canada in brazen displays of antisemitism since October 7, 2023's Hamas terrorism atrocity in southern Israel -- was deemed fit for government support in its activities.

 

In 2019, the Canadian government officially adopted the International Holocaust 
Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism, one of whose tenets is that it is antisemitic to deny "the Jewish people their right to s elf-determination" through denial of Israel's right to exist. Directly contradicting this very issue, the Toronto Palestinian Families states as one of its goals to "build collaborations with organizations that teach Jewish identity that is not inherently linked to Israel". In other words "progressive Jewish voices"; that minimal percentage of Canadian Jews who are anti-Zionist. 

 

Once again Canadian Heritage failed its due diligence in awarding grant funding to an organization that promotes hatred. Toronto Palestinian Families presented a proposal which they titled "Combating Anti-Semitism and Anti-Palestinian Racism for All", to which the department of Canadian Heritage responded with a $100,000 funding grant. The Palestinian group, in supposed collaboration with a Jewish group of a similar name deplore the "unparalleled and unprecedented" killing of civilians leading Gaza to become "a graveyard for children", in the words of the UN's Antonio Guterres.

 

What, one may ask, is anti-Palestinian racism? The Palestinians are not a race, they are a conglomerate of Arabs originally from Syria, Egypt and Jordan which settled in the Palestine of Judean origins dating from the Roman Occupation and now claiming the title of Palestinians. And it has always been those Arab Palestinians whose violent, deadly assaults against Israel and Jews that have roiled their region of the Middle East, with Israel left to protect its citizens from the Islamist-jihadist mentality of Islamofascism. Imported directly to Canada to enrich the notion of multiculturalism. 

 

 

 

On Instagram, Toronto Palestinian Families  advises its followers through a guide  to "Navigating the TDSB (Toronto District School Board): For Palestinian & Ally families" listing as a priority "ending collaborations with groups that erroneously teach that Jewish identity is inherently linked to the State of Israel". A post created by the Toronto faction of Palestinian Youth Movement, a group with ties to Samidoun, listed as a terrorist organization in Canada, was shared by TPF featuring a masked man raising a Palestinian flag and alerting followers to a demonstration to mark the "second anniversary of the ongoing genocide against our people in Gaza".