Earlier in my career, I proudly worked for the Opposition Liberals under John Turner and later in the Liberal government of Jean Chretien. They were true Liberals—principled, informed, competent, and aware of history. The Chretien government, like the Mulroney government before it and the Harper government that came after, were sensitive towards Canada’s small but strong Jewish communities and always had their antennae up to ensure spiteful, hateful anti-Semite agendas were kept at bay. Usually, if they reared their ugly head, it was by stealth. Not anymore. Over the past six years, under the stewardship of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, incidents of antisemitism have seen a disturbing increase in the public and government domain.
According to a report released this month by Statistics Canada, Canada’s 380,000 Jews were the most targeted religious minority for hate crimes reported to police in 2021. The report says that the Jewish community comprises about 1 percent of the population yet were victims of 14 percent of reported hate crimes. Further, Jews saw a 47 percent rise in reported hate crimes compared to 2020, according to the bureau. “We are deeply concerned that incidents of hate crimes rose yet again in Canada in 2021,” said Shimon Koffler Fogel, head of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. “This disturbing trend clearly proves the need for more proactive measures to stop the rising hate targeting diverse Canadians based on their identity.” Only Black Canadians, who make up about 3.5 percent of the country’s population, reported more hate crimes. Overall, 1.3 Canadian Jews in every 1,000 reported being victims of hate crime in 2021. “Statistically, Canadian Jews were more than ten times more likely than any other Canadian religious minority to report being the target of hate crime,” Fogel said. “This is alarming.”
In 2020, the Green Party of Canada committed political suicide when it showed its true colours and prejudiced leanings by disposing of party leader Annamie Paul, a racialized Jewish woman, when she called for a de-escalation of violence when Hamas and Palestinian militants in the Gaza strip fired rockets into Israel. Israel fired back and defended itself. A group of breathtakingly ignorant, antisemitic, and racist party members was apoplectic that Paul didn’t condemn Israel and declare it an apartheid state and went on to force Annamie out. In doing so, they suffocated the credibility the Greens had with Canadian voters and led them to a disastrous defeat in the 2021 election. Paradoxically, Paul performed best in the national leader’s debate in that election, but it was too late.
Ironically, New Brunswick MP Jenica Atwin, the only Green MP from West of British Columbia, crossed the floor over the incident and joined the Liberal party because she said she was uncomfortable with Annamie Paul’s reaction to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The stench of hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty in Atwin’s move still lingers, but Atwin still found a comfortable home for her views in the Liberal caucus. At the time, she suggested her crossing the floor to the Liberals was a direct result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict saying Paul’s call for de-escalation and a return to dialogue between the two was “totally inadequate.” On May 11, 2021, Atwin tweeted, “I stand with Palestine and condemn the unthinkable airstrikes in Gaza. End apartheid!” She too, of course, conveniently left out the facts — a key one being that the Israelis were responding to unprovoked missile attacks launched by the Palestinians on their country.
Last week we learned that Canada’s representative to the Palestinian Authority, Robin Wettlaufer, was posting tweets (since deleted) praising Palestinian official and convicted criminal Jibril Rajoub. The tweets showed both sitting on chairs with a Palestinian flag in between them with a picture of a young Yasser Arafat, the former leader of the Palestinian Authority, in the background. The tweet said, “fascinating discussion” about regional politics and described Rajoub as a “great friend of Canada.” Rajoub is chairman of the Palestine Olympic Committee and a former head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Force. He has a well-documented history of inciting violence toward Israel. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1970 after being convicted of throwing a grenade at Israel Defense Forces but was freed 15 years later in a prisoner exchange. Rajoub was rearrested several times after his release for militant activities before becoming a national security advisor to Arafat. In 2013, Rajoub told the Hezbollah-affiliated television network Al Mayadeen that the Palestinian Authority would use nuclear weapons against Israel if it possessed them, saying, “I swear that if we had a nuke, we’d have used it this very morning.” Then, in 2018, he was suspended and fined by the FIFA disciplinary board for inciting hate and violence by calling on soccer fans to burn jerseys and pictures of Argentinian soccer player Lionel Messi ahead of his national team’s expected match in a stadium in Jerusalem.
Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman directed Wettlaufer’s remarks on the matter to Global Affairs Minister Melanie Joly — noting that “Jibril Rajoub has been convicted of committing multiple terrorist attacks. He uses sports to incite hatred and that FIFA agrees. A great friend? Will you denounce this?” she asked.
Joly, of course, was silent. One would think Joly would be at least sensitive to the issue, given that she was the Minister of Canadian Heritage in 2017 when Canada unveiled a new Holocaust Memorial in Ottawa. At the time, officials at Canadian Heritage deliberately, by omission, ignorance, or sheer stupidity, did not mention the word Jews, antisemitism, or the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust on the plaque commissioned for the monument. Instead, Joly and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled a plaque that said the site honoured “the millions of men, women, and children murdered during the Holocaust. Public outcry caused the plaque to be revised.
Oddly, just a year earlier, in 2016, Trudeau and his officials made a similar gaffe when he issued a statement on International Holocaust Memorial Day about hate and failed to mention Jews. Instead, Trudeau said, “The Holocaust is a stark reminder of the dangers and risks of allowing hate, prejudice, and discrimination to spread unchallenged.”
One must wonder why this keeps repeating itself and how the word Jew or Jewish or six million deaths is omitted. And therein lies the problem. The willing ignorance of Canadian officials, ambassadors, and civil servants when it comes to recognizing antisemitism, even when it sits right in front of them. It speaks to the credibility, qualifications, knowledge, and education of staff employed in key offices in the federal public service.
“Jibril Rajoub’s record speaks for itself, and he is certainly no friend to Canada,” says Shimon Fogel. His comments were echoed by Marvin Rotrand, national director of B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights, who said he assumes that the quick deletion of the problematic tweet “indicates that someone spotted it and alerted (Robin Wettlaufer) to Mr. Rajoub’s history.”
The gas in the tank for anti-Semites in Canada is partially fuelled by the Trudeau government’s obsession with identity politics where everyone is a victim, except the Jews. This line of thinking deliberately suppresses historical facts that don’t marry with the ideological Marxist narrative postulated by many left-leaning tenured professors at Canadian universities. Like many Green Party members who attacked and disposed of Annamie Paul, they appear antisemitic and seem to loathe both the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
A big part of the false narrative taught in humanities and sociology departments at Canadian universities for over two decades is that Israel is an apartheid state, the Jews are not victims and, in fact, are to blame for the problems in Palestine and are the sole reason why there is no nation called Palestine. Sadly, we now have a generation of graduates who were sold on this bogus tripe instead of being taught real history, who are now employed in the federal civil service. This fictitious, subtle, and racist line of thinking has been oozing its way into public policy since 2015 and is disturbingly prevalent in the Liberal caucus with MPs and their staff.
That this is happening at all should worry every Jewish person in Canada. It proves the point that ‘the left’ in Canada has elements in it that are as racist and ignorant as the people on the right of the spectrum, who they are often quick to accuse of being prejudiced, and who they smugly attack when their views do not align with their own ideological positions.
Ironically, The Trudeau government has set up diversity and inclusion offices in every department and even has a Minister of ‘Diversity.’ These offices are stacked with left-wing ideologues who see a victim around every corner . . . . unless you are Jewish. If you are Jewish, then you are part of the problem. So it should come as no surprise that the same Canadian Heritage department who could not figure out that the words Jew, or Jewish, or six-million murdered Jews should appear on a plaque at the Holocaust Memorial for Canada would be the same oxygen-deprived brain trust of ‘civil servants’ running ‘diversity programs’ who saw fit to award an overtly racist organization called the Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC) who call for violence in dealing with Jewish people, a $133,800 Department of Canadian Heritage grant to build an anti-racism strategy for Canadian broadcasting.
The CMAC has two partners/owners, the husband-and-wife team of Laith Marouf and Dr. Gretchen King-Marouf. Officials at Canadian Heritage were so enthralled and besotted with them that they did not bother to even Google name search them in the vetting process. They would have easily learned that Laith Marouf has a long history of hate-filled social-media posts, including: “I have a motto: Life is too short for shoes with laces or for entertaining Jewish white supremacists with anything but a bullet to the head.” Marouf’s wife Gretchen has a Ph.D. in ‘Communications’ and claims numerous multimedia initiatives, including “Radio Free Palestine,” an international, twenty-four-hour radio broadcast that marks the anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba. She lives in Lebanon, but both she and her hubby have been spectacularly successful in sucking the hind teat of the Canadian government contract process to provide their ‘diversity expertise’ for work with the CRTC who have awarded them upwards of $500,000 since 2016, according to data compiled by telecoms consultant Mark Goldberg.
Apparently, no one at the CRTC, which regulates Canada’s telecoms, knows how to do a Google search. If they did, they surely would have seen this little gem of a tweet from the self-described anti-racist diversity expert Laith Marouf: “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 come from, they will return to being low voiced bitches of [their] Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters.” Oh, yes and did I mention that according to Goldberg, Marouf’s partner/wife Gretchen King-Marouf has received at least one taxpayer-funded SSHRC “scholarship” grant.
Former Chretien and Martin Liberal government Minister and human rights champion Irwin Cotler pointed out that “over 100 of Laith Marouf’s posts have been compiled with these hateful, bigoted comments that target not only Jews, whom he referred to as 'loud mouthed bags of human feces,’ ‘but also Francophones, and former U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, whom he described as a ‘Jamaican house-slave’ and rejoiced at his death.”
Prime Minister Trudeau’s Minister of Diversity, Inclusion, and Youth of Canada, Ahmed Hussen, gave off the pretense of being astonished to learn that Heritage Canada’s Anti-Racism Secretariat awarded a huge sum of money to a racist antisemite. With feigned outrage, he committed that the CMAC would be contacted to determine how ‘it’ came to hire Laith Marouf. DUH. The CMAC is a two-person operation composed of Marouf and his wife. Another example of the adage, you can’t fix stupid.
The only question Hussen should have been asking if he had an ounce of genuine concern about antisemitism in his department would be to inquire how this cesspool of a mess happened, what steps officials had taken to get the money back, and who – specifically who – in his department reviewed the application when they applied, who vetted it, and who approved it. Then, he would have ensured those people were removed from the file, demoted, re-trained, or fired. And I say ‘people’ because, with these types of programs, there is always more than one person involved in the approval process.
None of that happened because we have since learned that Hussen was warned about the Laith Marouf (CMAC) application and his disturbing anti-semitic tweets by no less than a fellow Liberal MP, Anthony Housefather. Hussen and the department initially ignored Housefather’s concerns until the media started reporting them. If that is true, then given the content of the tweets, Hussen should resign. But of course, that will not happen because Housefather, like most backbenchers in the Liberal government caucus, has no influence, no spine, and is usually perfectly comfortable in being ignored until he needs to show up to vote on things . . . like funding for Heritage Canada’s Anti-Racism Secretariat.
The troubling problem of Liberal MPs obsessed with identity politics was magnified further over the CMAC funding when Chris Bittle, parliamentary secretary to Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, went to Stupidville in a Twitter exchange and suggested that University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, a descendent of Holocaust survivors, was motivated by racism in criticizing how Rodriguez and the Trudeau government handled the hiring of Laith Marouf as an anti-racism expert, despite years of Marouf publicly smearing Jews and other minorities.
Incredulously, Bittle suggested Geist was only being critical because Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen is Black. Bittle accused Geist of “deliberately misleading your followers,” suggesting he was “blinded by hate for Pablo,” then asked if it was “because the minister responsible looks like this,” posting a picture of Hussen under his comment. Geist responded: “I’m the grandson of Holocaust survivors who thinks it shouldn’t be too much to ask the Heritage Minister to say something — anything — about officials in his department funding an antisemite despite multiple warnings. Instead, the Parliamentary Secretary suggests I’m racist.”
Biddle's obtuseness is such that he cannot tell the difference between conduct and colour. Identity politics will do that to a person. Sadly, we have come to a point in Canada that when the Canadian government wrongly funds anti-Semitics who condone violence and are then called out for it by the very Jewish Canadians being targeted, the government minister does nothing to hold officials to account, and his parliamentary secretary has the temerity to suggest the Jewish person complaining is a racist.
Michael Geist is an exceptional lawyer and brilliant academic. Among his many honours and achievements, he was listed globally as one of the top fifty influential people regarding intellectual property globally, and Canadian Lawyer has named him one of the 25 most influential lawyers in Canada on three separate occasions. Geist is widely known and highly respected in Ottawa and beyond for his contributions to the law, academia, and public policy. That he is accused of being a racist by a pipsqueak Liberal MP for calling out the Trudeau government minions responsible for funding a genuine racist and antisemite who has proudly tweeted, “I have a motto: Life is too short for shoes with laces or for entertaining Jewish white supremacists with anything but a bullet to the head” is beyond outrageous. It’s disgusting.
Jews in Canada should be very worried and very afraid of the Trudeau government. If they will go after Michael Geist, you may be next.
