The federal Liberals had two years to make sure the guy appointed to head the Canadian Human Rights Commission wasn’t wholly inappropriate for the job — and they failed.
On Monday, incoming human rights commissioner Birju Dattani resigned before he could even take his chair. He had, according to the external law firm tasked with investigating his appointment, “intentionally omitted” key information about his past in relevant forms and interviews. Namely, his record of speaking at anti-Israel academic functions.
It’s good news, but only in the most direct sense. Dattani was the wrong man for the job, and it’s a relief that he won’t get to carry it out. The fact that his application got as far as it did, and that his position is poised to come with new online censorship powers, are of grave concern.
Dattani’s appointment, if you may recall, inspired a good bit of public furor. Shortly after his appointment was announced in mid-June, media and Jewish groups trawled up old records created under his Islamic name, Mujahid Dattani. The government launched an investigation and, with the resulting report’s release, he resigned.
The complication comes down to a name. Born Birju, Dattani adopted Mujahid when he converted to Islam in 2001. He switched back to largely using Birju in 2017. He therefore has two paper trails: one for Birju Dattani, and another for Mujahid Dattani. In his initial 2022 application for commissioner, he didn’t list Mujahid as a name; in a 2024 background check form, he included “Birju Mujahid” as a name — but not just “Mujahid.”
The government, evidently unable to search beyond the exact phrasing provided on a form, was missing pieces of the puzzle. Screeners didn’t know that Mujahid Dattani had been quoted (in his view, misquoted) during a protest at the Israeli Embassy in the United Kingdom. They also missed his old Twitter account, which had been used to post articles, like one from Russia Today, headlined, Palestinians are Warsaw Ghetto Prisoners of Today.
Also overlooked was Dattani’s record of attendance, as Mujahid, at various activist events: a 2014 panel at Cambridge University and a 2015 lecture at the London School of Economics for Israel Apartheid Week; a 2014 panel about the boycott, divest and sanctions movement at Turkey’s Bogazici University; and a 2015 panel called “The Fragmentation of the Arab World: A Centenary of Betrayal” at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
A couple of these events included shadowy figures. Adnan Khan, a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir terrorist organization whose writings were found in Osama bin Laden’s library, was on one of the panels. Another featured a member of an activist flotilla that tried to supply Gaza in 2010 (nine activists were killed by Israeli forces, after attacking the soldiers with knives, clubs and pistols).
As Mujahid, he also moderated a discussion to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in the context of Israeli independence, and gave a lecture in 2015 about his draft PhD dissertation, titled, “Terrorism and the Targeting of Civilians under International Law.”
“Contrary to conventional wisdom (which is far more convention than it is wisdom), terror is not an irrational strategy pursued solely by fundamentalists with politically and psychologically warped visions of a new political, religious or ideological order,” reads Dattani’s description of the draft paper, which became a subject of controversy in late June. “It is a rational and well-calculated strategy that is pursued with surprisingly high success rates.”
Dattani told the reviewing law firm that terrorism is “not ever justified as a strategy or tactic, or anything else”; his PhD was simply investigating when “terrorism” is permitted under international law. He took ire with the line of questioning, advising the firm later that “he found this question ‘triggering’ due to common stereotypes that Muslims are associated with terrorism or harbour terrorist sympathies and because ‘multiple media outlets’ had reached out to him to ask him a similar question,” according to the report.
Speaking at the same event as someone else is not clear evidence of endorsement, and academic work should be free to explore controversial topics. Indeed, Dattani told his interviewers that he wasn’t familiar with the questionable figures with whom he’d shared a stage, and that, even though he had some criticism of Israel, he believes that Israelis had the right to their own state. He often described his participation in panels and lectures as that of a scholar: presenting the information, and allowing the audience to decide.
That said, such things should have been disclosed and discussed long ago.
The reviewing law firm was concerned about all this. Dattani was sometimes forthright, but at others, he “deliberately de-emphasized the manner in which his academic work was critical of the State of Israel in respect of its treatment of Palestinians.”
Though they did not find evidence of antisemitic beliefs, they concluded that his “efforts to downplay the critical nature of his work was concerning and, certainly, his failure to directly disclose this work deprived the government of the opportunity to have a discussion with Mr. Dattani about what, if any, impact his scholarship and perspective would or could have if he were appointed to the role of chief commissioner.”
Nor did the firm believe that Dattani’s choice of first name was unintentional. He was “strikingly thoughtful” in this regard: in the past, when an audience was largely Arabic-speaking, he went with Mujahid, but when not, he chose Birju.
Dattani’s record as an activist-not-activist should have thrown his candidacy into question. The Canadian Human Rights Commission has already been radicalized enough — it has complained that Canada’s only religious holidays stem from Christianity, claimed that “systemic racism is deeply entrenched in Canadian society” and, if the Liberals succeed in passing online harms legislation, will have the authority to deal with complaints about online conduct.
An activist at the top won’t do Canada any good. But nor does a vetting process that takes years, only to fail to miss key information because a public servant couldn’t conduct some basic web sleuthing. What else has been missed? It sure makes you wonder.
National Post