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.
However, the board included among its members a politician who had previously rejected describing the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades as a terrorist organization, along with a lawyer who had represented anti-Israel encampment activists.
At a speech at the Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, Carney acknowledged that “Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians.”
He appointed a former senator, Marc Gold; an LGBT activist, Martine Roy; a retired Olympian skater, Catriona Le May Doan; and a Metis advocate, Gary LaPlante, as well as academic Aftab Erfan, litigator Avnish Nanda, and former transport minister, Omar Alghabra, to the Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion.
Among them, Alghabra, the former president of the Canadian Arab Federation, 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 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 toward all Canadians, not just Arabs and Muslims,” Alghabra, then-CAF president, said. “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 Alghabra condemned violence against civilians, he 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 (PIJ), and Hezbollah on Canada’s list of terrorist organizations.
The former CAF head also praised former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestinian Authority (PA) 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 said then, according to the Globe and Mail.
In 2005, he 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, as well as 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 that 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 said the encampment was peaceful, and there was no evidence that the organizers encouraged antisemitism. Yet the occupation of the campus grounds had seen manifestations of extremism.
Signage at the encampment called to “Globalize the intifada,” according to Hillel Edmonton, listing Zionism as a form of discrimination that it did not tolerate alongside antisemitism and Islamophobia in the encampment rules.
Ahead of the encampment, its leading organizations protested on behalf of Palestinian “hostages” in Israeli prisons, which, according to an April 16 Instagram post, included Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) 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 Assata Shakur, who was convicted of murdering a New Jersey State Trooper, and about PFLP airplane hijacker Leila Khaled.