Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller yesterday said he had no idea his office approved a Canada Summer Student grant for a group whose anti-Semitic senior consultant campaigned against Jews as “human garbage.” Miller said the funding should be returned..“In a place like downtown Montréal hundreds of organizations get slots allocated for summer students,” Miller told reporters. “I’ve never heard of this group. I’ve never heard of this individual until a couple of weeks ago. He’s held horribly anti-Semitic statements that we should have known about earlier.”.According to Blacklock's Reporter, records show Miller’s office in 2018 approved a $2,882 grant to the Community Media Advocacy Centre located in his constituency Ville-Marie. The same group subsequently successfully applied for $16,815 from the CRTC and $113,822 from the Department of Canadian Heritage in the name of anti-racism..“If this organization truly was given funding it should be looked into and clawed back,” said Miller. “I’ve never heard of this guy. If this guy had walked into my riding office my team would be rightly justified in kicking him out.”.“I never heard of the guy until three weeks ago, never heard of the organization until this current matter was raised,” said Miller. “If it was indeed granted in 2018 I would strongly recommend as the Member of Parliament for downtown Montréal that the money be clawed back.”.Laith Marouf, the senior consultant for the Media Advocacy Centre, had a “20-plus year history of making outrageous and hateful statements,” according to the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. He was earlier expelled from Concordia University for anti-Israel graffiti, according to records..Marouf as a Concordia student in 2001 wrote a Student Union commentary claiming Zionists controlled the press. Marouf in recent social media posts referred to Jews as “human feces,” “ugly,” “inbred,” “garbage” and “little castrated bitches.”.“Life is too short for shoes with laces or for entertaining Jewish white supremacists with anything but a bullet to the head,” he wrote in one Twitter post..Under the Canada Summer Student grant program individual MPs are asked to veto or endorse applications in their home ridings. The program is typically oversubscribed with more requests for funding than can ever be approved..In the year of the Montréal grant, applicants were required to sign a federal oath proclaiming they would “respect individual human rights in Canada including the values underlying the Canadian Charter Of Rights And Freedoms.”.Miller yesterday said he was unaware of grant applications vetted by his staff. “There are a lot that we’ve never heard of,” he said. “We don’t know all the organizations.”
