Controversial anti-racism consultant Laith Marouf now running anti-Israel 'Free Palestine Television' channel (msn.com)
Laith Marouf, the government-funded anti-racism consultant whose record of hateful tweets became an embarrassing controversy for the Liberals, is now the director of an anti-Israel online broadcaster.
Free Palestine Television (FPTV) was launched after the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 and has featured footage of Hamas’s attacks on Israeli soldiers as well as manoeuvres from Hamas-affiliated militias such as the Mujahideen Brigades and Al-Qassam Brigades, which operate out of Gaza and the West Bank. It also published speeches with live translation to English from Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and it publishes press releases attributed to various terror groups, such as Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias.
Marouf, who’s identified on its site as FPTV’s founder, is a senior consultant with the Community Media Advocacy Centre, which had a $122,000 contract with the Liberal government in 2022 to develop an anti-racism strategy for the broadcasting sector.
It subsequently emerged that Marouf had a history of hateful social media posts about Jews, Francophones and Black people.
One read: “You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, a.k.a. 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 b—–s of their Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters.”
The tweets were exposed in news reports and the government cancelled the contract in August 2022, although it emerged that the Trudeau government had known about the tweets a month earlier and had done nothing.
Marouf’s lawyer at the time said the posts were not directed at all Jews, but just certain ones.
Canadian Heritage has since changed the way it vets funding requests for community and anti-racism projects.
The federal government has sought to recoup its funds from Marouf through a collections agency, the Canada Revenue Agency and the courts, but has reported no success. Reports in October 2022 said Marouf was living in Beirut.
Since the national scandal over funding to Marouf’s organization, he has become a regular on various left-wing social media programs, offering opinions on Palestinian politics, Israel and other geopolitical issues. Marouf has also appeared several times on Critical Hour, a podcast hosted by Sputnik News, a state-owned Russian broadcaster, and on programs by Russian propaganda network
Russia Today.
FPTV ’s website says it launched “with the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Flood” — the name Hamas and other Palestinian groups have given to the Oct. 7 massacre. The online station is based out of Lebanon, and is staffed primarily by students, professors and community members, Marouf said in an interview.
“FPTV’s goal is to support the resistance from a media standpoint and to incite free peoples to move and fight Zionism and imperialism wherever they exist,” the online channel’s website says.
“Knowing that there is a huge gap left in news programming in English that is supportive of resistance and the right to liberation … we decided to bring together our communities here to start a project, a community television station,” Marouf said in an
interview with Activist News Network in November 2023.
The Middle East Forum, a n American conservative think tank, published a report on Friday claiming that FPTV had links to the Lebanon-based group Al-Tajammu.
According to Michael Barak, a researcher at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Israel’s Reichmann University, Al-Tajammu is “an international pro-Iranian platform to leverage the resistance axis against the U.S., Israel and their allies.”
Marouf described the attacks on Al-Tajammu as “frivolous” and accused the Middle East Forum of being a “racist organization.”
Marouf and FPTV also downplayed any connections to Al-Tajammu.
In a series of posts to X on Saturday, FPTV alleged that “the largest Jewish White Supremacist accounts in Apartheid Canada are mounting a disinformation campaign against our Community Television station,” and that it “is unaffiliated with any political party or groups, including Al-Tajammu which hosted our studios for a brief time & we have since moved as we expanded.”
Marouf said Al-Tajammu was one of “many” Lebanese community associations that supported the drive to create FPTV, and that he had been invited to give a presentation about it at one of the group’s Zoom meetings.
“So our connection with Al-Tajammu is very brief and … we don’t have any financial or board connections to them,” he said.
The Middle East Forum report, and subsequent social media posts, suggested that Free Palestine TV was “established” in Canada.
Marouf told National Post: “It’s not established in Canada. It’s not based in Canada. There’s no connection there.”
In mid-December, FPTV hosted a fundraiser for the channel on Zoom, which featured various guest speakers, several of them prominent figures in Indigenous advocacy in Canada. Among the expected speakers were Sleydo’, also known as Molly Wickham, a Wet’suwet’en chief and prominent opponent of the Coastal GasLink pipeline in British Columbia, Judy Da Silva, a prominent member of the Grassy Narrows First Nation in northwestern Ontario, and Isaac Murdoch, an artist and member of the Serpent River First Nation. National Post did not attend the event and was unable to confirm that all the guests appeared.
Earlier this month, the channel hosted a live broadcast and translation of a speech from Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, a banned terrorist organization in Canada. It also hosted a speech from Nasrallah in early November.
“I cannot expect anything but more valiant, honourable positions from Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah,”
Marouf said on FPTV on Nov. 2. “This man … has never said anything that he hasn’t delivered on.”
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