Canada Has Appointed an Israel Basher to a Major Job; But There Is Still Time to Act

My kids have a game called, “Who Said That?” The rules are simple: one player picks a card that has a quote on it, and offers three choices for the speaker or writer.

Let’s play our own version, with this quote:

Contrary to conventional wisdom (which is far more convention than it is wisdom), terror is not an irrational strategy pursued solely by fundamentalists with politically and psychologically warped visions of a new political, religious or ideological order. It is in fact, a rational and well-calculated strategy that is pursued with surprisingly high success rates.

Was that said by:

1. Osama Bin Laden;
2. Timothy McVeigh; or
3. Canada’s newly appointed Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, Birju Dattani?

The correct answer is 3.

The quote above is taken from a 2015 presentation Dattani made to showcase his research as a postgraduate student in England at the London School of Economics, and the School of Oriental and African Studies.

During this time, Dattani also tweeted that “Palestinians are Warsaw Ghetto Prisoners of Today” — which linked to an article with the same title. Another tweet linked to an article suggesting a connection between Israeli actions and summary executions by the Nazis and others.

On another occasion, Dattani shared a stage with a member of an Islamic fundamentalist group that’s banned in Britain, wants to impose Sharia law worldwide, and, of course, opposes the existence of Israel.

A reasonable observer might infer a pattern, and wonder how Dattani passed the vetting that surely must have preceded his appointment to his new post, which he’s set to assume on August 8.

So how did this happen?

To begin with, Dattani had previously served as executive director of the Yukon Territory’s Human Rights Commission, and most recently, at a Toronto community college — roles that did not involve a great deal of public scrutiny.  Moreover, he went by a different name, Mujahid Dattani, during his student days.

Mistakes happen. But this is the third time in the past 18 months that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has stumbled into a major scandal that rocks the trust of the Jewish community.

Last year, it emerged that the Canadian government had awarded a six-figure anti racism consulting contract to Laith Marouf, the son of a Syrian diplomat who opined that “Zionism is Nazism, and Apartheid Canada was a model for both of them,” and had posted this July 2021 tweet about former Justice Minister Irwin Cotler and the National Summit to Combat Antisemitism Cotler was hosting on behalf of the Canadian government:

In a nation of more than 40 million people, surely there was a better candidate to lecture Canada’s broadcasting industry on the alleged scourge of racism than some antisemite who was spewing hate within plain sight of the nearest Google search.

The Canadian Ministry of Heritage has tried to recover the money it paid to Marouf, but since he’s currently living in Lebanon and busy running “Free Palestine Television,” a venture he launched after the October 7 Hamas massacre, the prospect for getting anything back from him is beyond remote.

The third low point was the government’s feting of a Waffen SS veteran in Parliament last September, which cost the Speaker of the House his job.

To call the relationship between Canada’s Jewish community and Trudeau’s governing Liberals “troubled” would be a polite understatement at this point.

And the government has only itself to blame.

The Trudeau Liberals aren’t a collection of raging antisemites, but their fealty to an intersectional ideology that’s hostile to the Jewish State and that sometimes bumbles into open antisemitism has given them a blind spot. Which is why, where the Jews are concerned, Trudeau and his party can’t stop stepping on these metaphorical rakes.

According to intersectional dogma, Jews — and Zionists especially — are “white,” and, as such, are members of an oppressor class that can be offended with little concern.

If someone seeking to be the nation’s top human rights adjudicator had demonstrated bias against any other group — Black, Indigenous, trans, or Muslim, for example — that bias would have been disqualifying at the outset.

If it was missed after an appointment was announced, the outrage would have been widespread, Trudeau’s apology swift, and the job offer immediately rescinded.

Dattani is still set to assume his new role.

His appointment has been made more untenable by virtue of the fact that the job has become more important than it was a few months ago.

An unapologetic progressive activist, Trudeau recently passed an Online Harms Act with broad reaching powers. Some of the measures, such as new obligations imposed on social media platforms to monitor child pornography and so-called revenge porn, are unambiguously good ideas.

But the legislation also gives the Canadian Human Rights Commission new powers to regulate “communication of hate speech” with fines of up to C$50,000 (US$36,500).

The potential chilling effect of that cudgel has always been problematic, which is why ensuring the Commission’s leadership is both unbiased and seen to have unimpeachable judgment is critical.

One might be inclined to attribute the views publicly expressed by Dattani during his student days as the strident immoderation of youth.

In most other jobs, that might be a good enough explanation.

But how would a Chief Commissioner Dattani respond to a Laith Marouf? Would his willingness to sanction Marouf be tempered by fellowship over their shared opposition to Israeli policies? Would his views be any different if instead of being an antisemite, Marouf was a white supremacist, a homophobe, or a cheerleader of militant West Bank settlers?

How would Dattani view the excesses in his own rear view mirror, many of which no doubt have him cringing for reasons beyond the high-status job (which pays between C$335,100 and C$394,200, plus a generous pension) he stands to lose as a result of them.

Very few people are the sum of the worst online posts they send out into the sea of cognitive effluent that is social media.

But the person who is expected to deter and — if necessary, punish — that kind of behavior ought not to be someone who has online excesses of his own, which were made under a different name, and not candidly disclosed to those who vetted him for the job.

At last count, antisemitic outrages represented 56% of reported hate crimes in Toronto, Canada’s largest city. In such a climate, having questions of anti-Jewish bias hang over the nation’s newly empowered hate crimes czar would profoundly undermine the legitimacy of the role and the prospects of success for Trudeau’s new Online Harms bill.

The Canadian Justice Department is currently investigating Dattani’s past conduct. One can only hope that at the end of the process, the government finds itself with a Chief Commissioner who comes to the role with less baggage.

Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer.

The post Canada Has Appointed an Israel Basher to a Major Job; But There Is Still Time to Act first appeared on Algemeiner.com.