Conservative party leadership advisor helped create anti-Islam organization

A senior member of Andrew Scheer’s leadership team helped create an anti-Islam organization during his campaign to lead the Conservative Party. Now, that organization is holding events to protest anti-Islamophobia Motion 103 and is bringing together Canada’s anti-Islam pundits and anti-Muslim groups.

Georganne Burke, the Scheer campaign’s Outreach Chair, was involved in the founding of Canadian Citizens for Charter Rights and Freedoms (C3RF). The group warns that the Liberal government is criminalizing criticism of Islam and opening the door for a Sharia (Islamic) takeover of Canadian law. C3RF plans to hold events across the country to advocate against M103 and the Trudeau government.

Georganne Burke is one of at least three senior members of Scheer’s campaign team that have now been linked to the so-called alt-right or anti-Islam groups. Scheer’s Campaign Manager, Hamish Marshall, was a director of Rebel Media, an alt-right media outlet that pushes narratives of white genocide and hosts prominent alt-right figures, and worked out of the Rebel offices during the campaign. He has been named as a campaign chair for the 2019 general election.

Marshall did not respond to interview requests sent to his email address at the Torch Agency, the public affairs and communications firm he leads. The Conservative Party now led by Scheer did not respond to interview requests.

‘EXPERIENCED’ ORGANIZER

The Digital Director for the Scheer campaign, Stephen Taylor, is linked to the alt-right metacanada subreddit. Last year, for example, he posted a comment to provide additional information to members of the subreddit who were e-mailing complaints to the CBC ombudsman. However, he says that it has been awhile since he participated in the subreddit, that he wasn’t fully aware of the increasingly alt-right nature of the subreddit, and that he doesn’t want anything to do with the alt-right. He says he doesn’t have any particular plans to engage with the subreddit in the future, and declined to comment on whether he has a current role with the Conservative Party of Canada.

Burke invited the first group of members to the C3RF Facebook page (including one of the group’s current administrators) and one of her posts indicates she held a leadership or advisory role while she was working on Scheer’s leadership campaign. In March, the group was preparing a press release to distribute to MPs. “We need to select a media contact,” writes Burke. “Not me. One person who is familiar with working with the media and can manage the press kit and media materials.”

“Some of us reached out to Georganne in the beginning, around spring time, because of her experience,” said Irving Weisdorf, an organizer with C3RF who has been involved since its inception. He’s also the founder of the pro-Israel advocacy organization Mozuud, which has partnered with C3RF on occasion.

Burke is Senior Vice President of the Pathway Group, which is in the business of government relations and providing services for political campaigns, and she has over 10 years of experience as a political operative for the Conservative Party of Canada. She’s a big fan of Donald Trump, according to social media posts and an October 2016 interview with CBC.

“This is what Georganne does you know, and we wanted her advice on how motions work,” Weisdorf noted. Burke’s involvement with C3RF eventually tapered off due to her commitment to the Scheer leadership campaign, he said.

Burke says she “[has] not been involved with C3RF since a couple of weeks after they formed.” She continues to post in the group, but says that “commenting is not involvement,” and declined to comment further.

ANTI-ISLAM INDUSTRY

Burke was also a member of several extreme anti-Muslim groups on Facebook, but says she was only in those groups for information purposes. Burke left at least two of these groups following a story by Anti-Racist Canada which named her as a member of groups like the Worldwide Coalition Against Islam, a group which critics say is anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic. Burke hasn’t posted any explicitly anti-Muslim comments on the C3RF Facebook Page, according to a search of posts in the group.

Scheer has tried to distance himself from the alt-right Rebel Media, and says his party is welcoming to Muslims. The anti-Islam organization co-founded by Burke, however, is connected to the American Islamophobia industry, and anti-Islam figures in Canada.

The anti-Islam industry in the United States and Canada is comprised of dozens of individual pundits, think tanks, and media outlets that host events together and amplify each other’s voices. Some organizations are more careful in their criticism of Islam than others, but they tend to view Islam and the Muslim community as a monolithic entity with a dangerous anti-Western agenda.

On September 10, C3RF held an anti-M103 conference in Toronto which brought together a number of speakers and organizations from the anti-Islam industry.

C3RF has worked with ACT! For Canada (the Canadian branch of ACT! For America) and the Washington DC-based Center for Security Policy, both of which are part of the Islamophobia industry in the United States, according Fear, Inc., a report published by the Center for American Progress.

According to the report, the Center for Security Policy is a “key source of information for the Islamophobia network.” Clare Lopez, CSP’s VP for Research and Analysis, was the keynote speaker at C3RF’s conference, which ACT! For Canada was also a co-partner for, along with conservative think-tank The Mackenzie Institute and the pro-Israel Hasbara Fellowships.

ACT! For Canada has shared articles in support of PEGIDA – an anti-Muslim group in Europe with a Canadian chapter – and frequently links to Robert Spencer and his website, Jihad Watch. Dr. Gad Saad, another C3RF speaker at the September conference, has also hosted Spencer on his Youtube channel. The Southern Poverty Law Centre describes Spencer as an “anti-Muslim propagandist.”

Several members of the C3RF Facebook Page are also members of anti-Muslim groups on Facebook, including the Storm Alliance, an offshoot of the Soldiers of Odin, Blood and Honour, a violent neo-Nazi group, and the III%ers, an armed militia group. C3RF’s Facebook group promoted the September 30 day of action organized by the Storm Alliance and other far right groups to protest the Liberal Party’s immigration policies.

Moreover, the C3RF Calgary Satellite Coordinator is Stephen Garvey, President of the National Advancement Party (NAP) and member of the Worldwide Coalition Against Islam, a white supremacist group. The Jewish Defence League, which has acted as security for several anti-Muslim demonstrations, also provided security for C3RF’s September 10 conference.

‘AGGRESSIVE AND INTOLERANT’

Speakers at the event characterized M-103 as a threat to free speech supported by Muslim extremists whose ultimate goal is to criminalize criticism of Islam.

“The increase in political Islam we’re seeing all across the world is perhaps the biggest threat to Canada,” said Anthony Furey, a Toronto Sun columnist who spoke at the conference. Furey says that the committee hearings on Systemic Racism and Religious Discrimination sparked by M103 can “lead to recommendations” that might suggest outlawing criticisms of Islam.

Another Toronto Sun columnist, Sue-Ann Levy, took it one step further by suggesting that liberal centrists and Islamist extremists have a broad overlap in interest. “I got in trouble for saying that Barack Obama has ties to radical Islamic ideology,” she said. “There’s no question in my mind that he does, and I also think that he’s a Muslim.”

Speakers such as Benjamin Dichter, founder of LGBTory, also suggested that an overly liberal and politically correct culture is helping to open the door for radical Islamists to take over Canadian society.

“Some Western liberal leaders are stopping people from asking a very important question,” said Dichter, “the question of whether a more Islamic Canada will become more tolerant, or more aggressive and intolerant of anything other than itself?”

Talking points shared by C3RF, its speakers and partner organizations are almost identical to the positions of extreme anti-Muslim groups and the so-called alt-right. They broadly warn of an unspecified mass of Muslims in the West who want Sharia law and an “Islamic theocracy.”

“The principles and freedoms that undergird both constitutions in the United States and in Canada are Judeo-Christian based,” said keynote speaker Clare Lopez. “Islam doesn’t have such freedoms, such as the freedom of speech; it has the ‘law of slander,’ which it defines as anything that a Muslim dislikes.”

The C3RF’s brochure warns of Muslims who “want to implement at least some aspects of Sharia law,” and who are either using or partnering with Iqra Khalid to implement the “normalization of Sharia law as a respectable form of multicultural expression.”

They’re also broadly critical of Canada’s immigration and refugee policies. In their minds, Islam and the West are in conflict, both abroad and here in Canada, and they are fighting for Western, Judeo-Christian values.

One of C3RF’s partner organizations, ACT! For Canada, was recently denied space at an Ottawa library to host a screening of Killing Europe, an Islamophobic video. The video screening went ahead last Sunday, hosted by the Jewish Defense League at the Toronto Zionist Centre.

Burke had also planned a “Rally to Turn Khadr Settlement Over To Speer and Morris Families” in late July, which was cancelled after it was reported that over half the people who RSVPd on Facebook were connected with anti-Muslim groups and pages.