Source: MintPressNews.com
The Israel lobby is working directly with the Canadian government and with Silicon Valley corporations to quash the voices of those critical of its expansionist policies and systematic oppression of its indigenous population.
One clear example of this came last September when an international parliamentary committee met in Congress in Washington, DC, to demand that Twitter remove the account of Palestinian-Canadian Laith Marouf. Marouf is a multimedia producer who currently serves as a senior consultant at the Community Media Advocacy Centre and the coordinator of ICTV, a project to secure a national multi-ethnic news television station in Canada. He also has a long record of active support for Palestinian rights.
As such, Marouf – whose Community Media Advocacy Centre is funded by the Canadian government – faced official consequences for comments he made critiquing Israel. But the Trudeau administration went further to secure his erasure from social media, which should concern all those who believe in free speech.
Marouf’s case is just one in an endless stream of such acts happening all over social media and beyond. Marouf, in other words, was not the first and certainly will not be the last. Furthermore, his case opens the floodgates for the stream of suspensions to become a torrent.
As a major human rights abuser engaged in apartheid and military occupation of Palestinian land, Israel’s working relationship with big tech and the Canadian government is showcasing how antisemitism is being weaponized to target, flag and now vanish accounts critical of the apartheid state.
Marouf’s case also highlights the existence of a nearly fifty-year alliance between a Canadian national and a former Soviet dissident – a relationship that began as part of an Israeli intelligence operation. This history directly ties what happened to Marouf to Israel’s foreign policy strategies developed between 2000 and 2016.
A biased group
The Interparliamentary Task Force To Combat Online Antisemitism is, as the name suggests, an international grouping of parliamentarians. Launched in September 2020, the task force is focused on increasing awareness of and developing responses and solutions to allegedly growing online antisemitism. Its first hearing was held on September 16, and the committee called executives from Twitter, YouTube, Meta, and TikTok to testify and explain how and why accounts like those of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, were still in existence. Khamenei’s English Twitter account has nearly a million followers. At the time of writing, it and its Russian, Spanish, Arabic and Farsi alternative accounts remain live.
Former Canadian member of parliament (MP) Michael Levitt went over his five allotted minutes in his enthusiasm to denounce Marouf’s tweets. Another member of the task force devoted some of her time to arguing that “Zionism as an identity” should be included as a “protected characteristic.” She elaborated, “Zionist is an integral part of the identity of the majority of Jews and many non-Jews who self-define as Zionists.”
But who is on this committee, and why would they make such an argument? Answering this question accurately involves peeling back several layers of the onion and tracing back the origin story of this latest assault on online Palestinian speech….