- An anti-racism consultant has come under fire for making antisemitic and offensive tweets.
- The Canadian government has cut funding to his organization's program as a result.
- Laith Marouf tweets took aim at people he accused of being "Zionist" and at other groups of people.
The Canadian government has cut funding to an anti-racism initiative after one of its senior consultants was discovered to have made several antisemitic and racist tweets.
Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Housing and Diversity & Inclusion, in a statement on Tuesday, condemned the tweets made by the Community Media Advocacy Centre's senior consultant, Laith Marouf, as "reprehensible and vile."
He said his ministry had suspended a project with the center and cut its funding.
The Community Media Advocacy Centre had received around $103,000 in government funds to work on combating racism in broadcasting, The Guardian reported.
Marouf's Twitter account is now locked, and a previous account he used was blocked by the platform for hateful conduct in 2021, according to a blog post he wrote. However, some of his offensive tweets emerged recently in screenshots posted online.
According to the screenshots, Marouf frequently used vulgarities to describe people he accused of being "Zionists" and "Jewish White Supremacists" and also promoted treating them with "a bullet to the head" on multiple occasions.
"Nothing is more harmful to any decolonisation movements in the world, especially Palestine, than Jewish White Boys/Girls," he wrote in one post, per the screenshots.
Several of his tweets also made derogatory comments about Queen Elizabeth II of the UK and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Photos also show Marouf pointing a middle finger while posing in front of the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam War Memorial in the US, with him writing that he wished the latter "was much bigger with the names of a few million dead corpses" of Americans.
One of the first people to highlight Marouf's tweets, telecommunications consultant Mark Goldberg, also made a blog post showing a tweet in which Marouf calls a First Nations representative a derogatory name.
In his Tuesday statement, Hussen called on the Community Media Advocacy Centre to "answer to how they came to hire Laith Marouf, and how they plan on rectifying the situation given the nature of his antisemitic and xenophobic statements."
"Antisemitism has no place in this country. The antisemitic comments made by Laith Marouf are reprehensible and vile," he added.
Hussen had been earlier quoted in a joint press release also featuring Marouf, in which the center announced the launch of a series of events called: "Building an Anti-Racism Strategy for Canadian Broadcasting: Conversation & Convergence."
According to screenshots tweeted by Hillel Neuer, the Canadian-born founder of non-governmental organization UN Watch, annual returns reports and other filings for the Community Media Advocacy Center are submitted and signed by Gretchen King, Marouf's wife.
King is listed on the center's website as one of its two consultants, with Marouf being the other.
The Community Media Advocacy Center did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
