Firas al-Najim, one of Canada’s most prominent peddlers of anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda, both on social media and in-person, has had his channel removed from TikTok following a series of alerts and complaints lodged by HonestReporting Canada.
Al-Najim is no stranger to controversy; he has been the subject of multiple HonestReporting Canada alerts bringing attention to his activities, as well as that of his colleagues at Canadian Defenders For Human Rights (CD4HR). Al-Najim has harassed and accosted members of Canada’s Jewish community, picketing community events and screaming at attendees, and has used his social media to disseminate vile disinformation and antisemitic hate.
Al-Najim’s first TikTokaccount, @firasalnajim, was
previously removed from TikTok in 2022 following multiple alerts by HonestReporting Canada, but soon re-emerged, having created a new account named: @mahdistreammedia, to spread his vile hatred and disinformation.
Across social media recently and on his new TikTok account, al-Najim used his platform to repeatedly
label Jews as Christ-killers, accuse Canada’s Jewish community of
manufacturing incidents of antisemitism, ominously called Israel a “
cancerous entity,” and filmed himself stomping on an Israeli flag and chanting “Zionism is terrorism. Zionism is racism.” In another
recent video, uploaded in September, al-Najim called the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) “the inheritors of the killers of the prophets,” an antisemitic trope he has frequently used and defended Hezbollah and Hamas, calling them “righteous resistance groups.”
Following an HonestReporting Canada alert
published in early January, 2023, sent to our 55,000 subscribers across Canada, many of whom reported al-Najim’s content as hateful, his Twitter account, @Islamic_HR was removed
less than 10 days later.
For al-Najim, social media was just a reflection of his real-life activities.
One of the first incidents where he came to light was in 2019, when he showed up in a U-Haul cube van and
harassed attendees at Toronto’s Walk With Israel event.
Before long, he was regularly seen hounding members of Toronto’s Jewish community at various events and programs.
In September 2022, al-Najim – dressed crudely as an Orthodox Jew –
entered an event hosted by UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, where he verbally accosted a Holocaust survivor. “If you’re a Holocaust survivor, why do you support oppression? Why do you support people who are killing,” al-Najim yelled at the woman.
Once inside, al-Najim veered from anti-Israel propaganda into
unabashed antisemitism, screaming at attendees, “You think you’re God’s chosen people, you think you’re above the law.”
On Canada Day 2022, al-Najim and a group of supporters descended on an Israeli grocery store in Thornhill, a heavily Jewish suburb of Toronto, harassing shoppers with bullhorns and Palestinian flags,
revisiting a location where he had previously called for a boycott in 2019.
According to Thornhill Member of Parliament (MP) and Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Melissa Lantsman, al-Najim’s group yelled “Free Palestine” and shouted antisemitic epithets at Jewish shoppers.
Some of al-Najim’s antics constitute more than harassment.
(full article online)
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