Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen said Monday that his department had cut funding to the Montreal-based Community Media Advocacy Center (CMAC), which had received more than C$133,000 (US$103,000) in funding from department of cultural heritage to develop a project to combat racism in radio broadcasting. Laith Marouf, listed as a senior adviser at CMAC, was recently discovered to have tweeted a series of offensive messages, many of which were anti-Semitic. “You know all those loud bags of human excrement aka Jewish White Supremacists. when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they came from, they will go back to their (sic) christian/secular white teachers in low tones,” said a post by Marouf, who has since locked his Twitter account. . A previous account used by Marouf was suspended by Twitter. Hussen said in a statement that “anti-Semitism has no place in this country” and that he had instructed his agency to determine how those tweets were initially lost during the vetting process. Ahmed Hussen, the diversity minister, condemned Laith Marouf’s anti-Semitic tweets. Photo: Blair Gable/Reuters “We are calling on CMAC, an organization that claims to fight racism and hate in Canada, to respond to how they hired Laith Marouf and how they plan to remedy the situation given the nature of his anti-Semitic and xenophobic comments,” Hussen said. CMAC has already held workshops in Halifax, Montreal and Vancouver. The organization also had upcoming events planned in Calgary, Winnipeg and Ottawa. Hussen became diversity minister after signing the agreement with CMAC. Because the contract was with CMAC and not Marouf, it complicated the government’s efforts to sever the deal. Last week, Marouf’s lawyer, Stephen Ellis, tried to draw a distinction between Marouf’s tweets about people he calls “Jewish white supremacists” and the Jewish people in general, saying Marouf had no animosity toward the Jewish people. . “While not the most eloquently expressed, the tweets reflect a frustration with the reality of Israeli apartheid and a Canadian government that cooperates with it,” Ellis told The Canadian Press on Monday. “Apartheid is a crime against humanity under international law and no Zionist handshake can disguise this fundamental fact. Canada should be ashamed.” In other tweets, Marouf called former US Secretary of State Colin Powell “the Empire’s Jamaican house slave” and celebrated his death from Covid-19. The tweets were first posted by Mark Goldberg, a telecom analyst. “It’s never too late to do the right thing, but there are so many questions about this,” he tweeted after Hussein’s announcement. Goldberg also called for a parliamentary inquiry into the matter.
