Courtesy of the ever-generous Canadian taxpayer – but unbeknownst to the vast majority of them – thousands of dollars will be awarded to a filmmaker who creates a project focusing on “anti-Palestinian racism.”

While combating racism appears unobjectionable at first glance, anti-Palestinian racism (APR) is an initiative launched in 2022 by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association which is a thinly-veiled attempt to demonize critics of Palestinian terrorism and extremism, and label them as racists.

As articulated by Dania Majid, the president of the lawyer’s association (and who is a signatory to a hateful 2023 open letter which justified Hamas terrorism against Israel), “anti-Palestinian racism” can include “denying the nakba or Palestinian ties to their land…or are supporters of terror or hate.”

On March 5, The Toronto Palestine Film Festival, in conjunction with the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, announced a call for filmmakers to apply to “create new 10-20 minute film/video projects on Anti-Palestinian Racism” as part of a residency.

According to the post, selected filmmakers would receive financial support to help offset production costs, up to $5,000 per filmmaker.

The costs of this project are being shouldered, in part, by the Canadian taxpayer, as the Instagram post noted, acknowledging that it was supported in part by the Government of Canada, namely the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Despite the seemingly unobjectionable name, ‘anti-Palestinian racism’ represents a full frontal attack on free expression.

As the National Post covered in April, 2024, “an official committee within York’s Department of Politics has proposed that any defence of Israel be viewed as ‘anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic, and anti-Arab.’” Tristin Hopper, the article’s author, later commented that “the term ‘anti-Palestinian racism’ has been brazenly adopted as a means to shut down legitimate criticism of this country’s worst modern hate movement.”

That move by a York University committee is hardly anomalous, and fully in line with what proponents of APR are seeking to create: an environment where opposing Palestinian rejectionism, extremism and terrorism is not seen as free expression, but as racism.

In the summer of 2024, Salma Zahid, a Toronto Member of Parliament (MP) for the Liberal party, suggested that failing to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state was not just illegitimate, but an example of anti-Palestinian racism.

Even expressing the truth, albeit in an indelicate way, is now “racist” according to proponents of this theory. As claimed by one columnist in Le Devoir, former British Columbia Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) Selina Robinson, who referred to pre-state Israel as a “crappy piece of land” devoid of development, expressed a racist view, even though her statements were hardly disputable, given that author Mark Twain referred to the same land as “hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.”

The Toronto Palestine Film Festival (which itself receives funding from the City of Toronto and the Government of Ontario) and the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association, the two organizing partners behind the initiative, were the subject of a fawning April 2024 article in The Toronto Star which laid bare the insidious goals behind the attempt to label criticism of Palestinian terrorism as racism.

While most Canadians would surely agree that discrimination based on ethnicity or national identity is problematic, ‘anti-Palestinian racism’ is little more than anti-Israel activism hiding behind a veneer of protecting Palestinians from discrimination. And now, thanks to the Government of Canada, Canadian taxpayers are helping to foot the bill for this hateful project.