In response to rising antisemitism in Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a new racism advisory board on Monday and tasked it with assessing antisemitism in the country, but included among its members was a politician who had previously rejected describing the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades as a terrorist organization, and a lawyer who had represented anti-Israel encampment activists.
At a speech at the Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, in which Carney acknowledged that “Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians,” the prime minister appointed former senator Marc Gold, LGBT activist Martine Roy, retired Olympian skater Catriona Le May Doan, former Transport Minister Omar Alghabra, Metis advocate Gary LaPlante, academic Dr. Aftab Erfan, and litigator Avnish Nanda to the Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion.
Alghabra is the former president of the Canadian Arab Federation, and in a 2004 press release, chided CanWest publications for adding descriptions of Middle Eastern groups as “terrorists” into news wire stories. The example given in the statement was a National Post story in which the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades was called a terrorist group. CAF and NCCAR argued that the qualifiers about such groups indicated bias toward Arabs and Muslims in reporting.
“CanWest, one of the largest media conglomerates in Canada, is failing its responsibility towards all Canadians, not just Arabs and Muslims,” said Omar Alghabra, CAF president. “The media has moral and ethical obligations to report the facts when it comes to news reporting, not the opinions of their editors.”
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades had been listed by Canada as a terrorist entity in 2003, a year before Alghabra took issue with the descriptor.
Alghabra downplays radicalism of Hamas, Hezbollah
The politician has downplayed the radicalism of other terrorist organizations, telling the Jewish Tribune in a 2006 interview that he “didn’t believe that Hamas wants the elimination of Israel.” While the politician condemned violence against civilians, Alghabra refused to comment when specifically asked about denouncing suicide bombing, because he claimed the question was trapping him.
Alghabra described Hamas as a terrorist organization in a 2016 parliamentary debate. Prior to his tenure at CAF, the organization had argued against the inclusion of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah on Canada’s list of terrorist organizations.
The former CAF head had also praised former Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat upon his death in 2004, joining former prime minister Paul Martin in offering condolences to the Palestinian people.
“He has played a tremendous role in highlighting the Palestinian struggle for independence and making it visible in the international arena,” Alghabra had said, according to the Globe and Mail.
In 2005, Alghabra had chastised former Toronto Police Service chief Bill Blair for his decision to lead that year’s Walk with Israel event, describing it in a letter as “a show of solidarity for a foreign state currently in the midst of an unresolved conflict; a country that is conducting a brutal and the longest contemporary military occupation in the world.”
University encampment supporter appointed to council
Another new advisory council member, Nanda, represented the University of Alberta Students for Justice in Palestine’s founder and a Jewish faculty member associated with independent Jewish Voices in a complaint against the university alleging that it had violated their freedom of expression and assembly rights by dismantling the 2024 anti-Israel protest encampment.
The 2024 encampment had occupied a section of the university campus, demanding the academic institution divest from companies with relations with Israel. The encampment was removed by the Edmonton Police Service two days after it had been established, at the behest of the university administration. A report later that year by retired judge Adèle Kent the encampment was peaceful, and that there was no evidence that the organizers encouraged antisemitism.
Yet the occupation of the campus grounds saw manifestations of extremism. Signage at the encampment called to “globalize the intifada,” according to Hillel Edmonton, and listed Zionism as a form of discrimination that it did not tolerate alongside antisemitism and Islamophobia in the encampment rules.
Ahead of the encampment, the encampment’s leading organizations organized a protest on behalf of Palestinian “hostages” in Israeli prisons, which according to an April 16 Instagram post included Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine cell commander Walid Daqqa and teenage stabber Ahmad Manasra. The SJP chapter had also held a women’s history month in which, according to advertisements, they learned about cop killer Assata Shakur and PFLP airplane hijacker Leila Khaled.
