Saturday, February 28, 2009

Saturday Morning, Pounding Your Fist on the Breakfast Table Article

As the Daily Salt Shaker has stated before, the Canadian government has a bizarre policy of paying groups to lobby them. Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail has an article on one of those groups:

Last week, Mr. Kenney bit back. He asked his bureaucrats to yank the CAF's $447,000 grant. "They can say what they want within the parameters of our laws, but they shouldn't expect a priori funding." Now the CAF is accusing Mr. Kenney of trying to stifle its right to democratic speech. According to executive director Mohamed Boudjenane, the government's real motive for punishing the CAF is most likely political. "They maybe decided to go after the Zionist vote, like Reisman and Schwartz and Tannenbaum - people who used to be Liberal."

With a budget of more than $1-million a year, the Canadian Arab Federation depends heavily for its existence on taxpayers' money. It claims this funding is used entirely for programs that help newcomers adjust to Canadian society, and to fight racism and Islamophobia. "Our activity as an advocacy group has nothing to do with our political activity," Mr. Boudjenane says.

But the CAF's website tells another story. The home page urges people to join protests against the "massacre on Gaza." It links to dozens of anti-Israel articles, and gives prominent play to the winners of a recent essay contest on "the ethnic cleansing of Palestine." The website was developed with a grant of $60,000 from the federal Department of Heritage.

The CAF is a prominent sponsor of anti-Israel demonstrations, which feature people waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags, and people calling for the state of Israel to be wiped off the planet. One video shows a woman pointing toward the camera and declaring: "Jewish child, you're going to f------ die. Hamas is coming for you."

(...)

On top of the money it gets from Ottawa, the CAF also gets money from Ontario, Quebec and even the cash-strapped city of Toronto, which recently gave it $25,000 for a public media campaign to address the "misrepresentation" of Arabs and Muslims in the media. It got another $75,000 from Ontario's government to help victims of crime and to conduct a survey on discrimination against Arabs and Muslims. It and other groups also get income from conducting anti-racism education; the Canadian Islamic Congress (which is ideologically identical to the CAF), for instance, was invited by the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority to give "sensitivity" training to the people whose job it is to keep terrorists off airplanes.


Your taxpayer money at work. We're paying for this. It's almost beyond comprehension. It's against the law for me to cheat taxes and this is what the money is going to.

2 comments:

  1. Ugh... buying clusters of votes on our dime. Sickening. Sadly, not all that surprising anymore. It's only going to get worse.

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  2. This is why the voting participation levels continue to drop. More and more people are starting to realize our so-called democracy is a joke. Remember Dalton McPuke giving out a million dollars to some East Indian Cricket Club located in Toronto. The club only asked for a $100,000, but the government gave them way more.
    Tax freedom day in Canada is already past the six month mark. Half your earnings are given to government, and this is the sort of government program you hear about.
    People in Ontario took up arms against the corruption of The Family Compact. Today The Family Compact sounds like a pretty square deal, compared to our current government.

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