The Line Between Anti-Racism and Racism Keeps Getting FainterHow an antisemitic bigot named Laith Marouf built a lucrative career as a Canadian government-funded ‘anti-racist’
Jonathan Kay
25 Aug 2022
There are few politicians who’ve embraced the anti-racism movement more fervently than Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. With great fanfare, his government has launched multiple programs intended to eradicate the “racism, discrimination, and xenophobia” that Trudeau describes as being a major contaminant within Canadian society. Alas, it has now been revealed that a major beneficiary of this Liberal anti-racism largesse is one of Canada’s most outspoken bigots, whose company was promised C$130,000 (about US$107,000) in public funds to mount a six-city national tour aimed at “building an anti-racism strategy” within the Canadian broadcasting industry. And the resulting scandal has become international news.
The bigot in question is Laith Marouf, a fanatical Palestinian-rights activist and one-time campus firebrand whose activities I’ve been following, on and off, for two decades—beginning with his 2001 expulsion from Concordia University in Montreal. Marouf had attacked a campus security guard who’d been trying to help apprehend him for spray-painting anti-Israeli graffiti on a local building. Yet he was able to get the expulsion overturned, and even held on to his gig as VP Internal with the Concordia Student Union (CSU) executive, whose membership was then largely intertwined with a militant student group known as Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights (of which Marouf would become Chapter Coordinator).
This was the same CSU executive that became infamous for distributing a 2001–2002 student handbook that included a cartoon depicting Israel’s military as a drooling bird of prey threatening a tiny child; an article promoting an anti-capitalist holiday called “Steal Something Day” (advising Concordia students to shoplift and “take a yuppie’s BMW for a joyride and [then] crash it into a parked Mercedes just for the hell of it”); and, most notoriously, a graphic showing airplanes smashing into a conference room full of businessmen. (The handbook was published just weeks before 9/11.)
Several months later, in early 2002, Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights activists helped instigate a protest-turned-riot that shut down a scheduled speech at Concordia by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The incident was reported internationally, badly tarnishing the university’s reputation, and sparking a backlash against the student union, whose leaders were accused of letting their anti-Israeli vitriol cross the line into outright antisemitism. I was in Montreal at the time, covering the event for Canada’s National Post newspaper. As I described in my reporting, the riot really did seem like a hatefest directed at the school’s “Zionist” community:
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One might imagine that these developments would have career-limiting implications for Marouf, a Syrian citizen whose father had been sent to Montreal on diplomatic assignment by Hafez al-Assad’s regime. Yet Marouf somehow managed to scratch out a Canadian career as a community activist, equity officer, radio host, and, most recently, government-bankrolled anti-racism consultant—all without making any effort to hide his antisemitic views.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/08/25/the-increasingly-blurry-line-between-anti-racism-and-racism/
