World Social Forum accused of hosting hate

THE ORGANISERS of the World Social Forum (WSF), an anti-corporatist conference taking place in Montreal this week, have been accused of indulging antisemitism and allowing themselves to be hijacked by the Boycott-Israel movement.

Canadian Liberal MPs Anthony Housefather and Michael Levitt accused the WSF of hosting an antisemitic cartoon on its website.

The picture, which showed an American emerging from the mouth of a man with a black hat and hooked nose, accompanied information on a talk by Seyed Ali Mousavi entitled “Terrorism, Wahabbism, Zionism”.

Forum organisers have since cancelled Mousavi’s talk along with two others, and the cartoon has been removed from their website.

The 12th World Social Forum, which runs until August 14, was expected to draw 50,000 people and 5,000 organisations to Montreal.

The forum aims to come up with “concrete alternatives to the neo-liberal economic model and to policies based on the exploitation of human beings and nature”, according to its website.

In a letter to Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Director for International Relations, Shimon Samuels, warned of “the consequences of antisemitic imagery and language pervasive throughout the WSF programme”.

Dr Samuels, who has attended previous WSF assemblies in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Mumbai, India, said: “This anti-globalisation organisation, year after year, has allowed its legitimate agenda — on behalf of victims of violence, poverty and discrimination — to be hijacked by the Palestinian cause, while ignoring constant terrorism against Jewish victims in Israel in Europe and beyond.”