Canada _ (Commonwealth Union) _Laith Marouf became well-known in August for making derogatory remarks regarding Jews. This month, Marouf, a Beirut-based consultant and founder of the Community Media Advocacy Centre, whose goal statement is “To disrupt settler colonialism and oppression in the media,” was uncovered to have published antisemitic comments online. Marouf has previously tweeted that “Jewish White Supremacists” were “loud mouthed sacks of human poo” and that “life is too short…for entertaining Jewish White Supremacists with anything other than a gunshot to the head.” Marouf was removed from Twitter after his statements were widely reported, a decision he blamed on the “Zionist lobby” pressing the social media platform. But Marouf was not your run-of-the-mill anti-Israel activist; more disturbingly, his distribution of misinformation was aided by federal public monies.
Marouf’s entity had received more than $130,000 in federal taxpayer funds from the Division of Heritage to run “anti-racism” workshops, in addition to more than $500,000 through the Broadcast Participatory Fund, a body set up by the Canadian Radio-Television and Comms Commission (CRTC) to groups who participated in public broadcast hearings.
Because to the study of media consultant Mark Goldberg and writer Jonathan Kay, the government apologized, criticized Marouf’s sentiments, pledged to avoid employing his group again, and conducted assessments and audits of the actions that led to the Community. However, it appears that not all of the tax monies were used to support the operations of Laith Marouf and his group.
On December 19, the Western Standard’s Matthew Horwood published a report based on research conducted by Blacklock’s Reporter titled “Subsidies continue for consultancy cited for anti-Semitism,” which noted that the September publication of the Canadian Journal Of Interaction had wrote a piece from the Community Advocacy Centre on the topic of the “lens of whiteness” in the field of broadcasting.
