A board member with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, an arms-length federal government agency established to counteract racism, has been fired amid concerns over what Muslim advocacy groups describe as “Islamophobic commentary” and her “public association with purveyors of hateful propaganda.”

Christine Douglass-Williams has been a board member since 2012 and her dismissal was confirmed on Wednesday to foundation chairperson Albert Lo. He said he was notified by the Department of Canadian Heritage, which is responsible for the foundation.

Lo said he was not provided with an explanation for Douglass-Williams’ dismissal. But a government source told the Star she was removed because of comments she has made online which “do not reflect the goal of the foundation.”

“They do not work to eliminate racism or promote inclusion, and that is the mandate of the foundation,” he said. “That’s why her contract has been terminated.”

Douglass-Williams addressed her dismissal in an email to the Star and on Jihad Watch.

“Why? Because I dared to criticize political Islam,” she wrote.

“I make a distinction between those who practice Islam in peace and harmony with others, and those with an agenda to usurp democratic constitutions, demand special privileges over other creeds and who advocate the abuse of women and innocents as a supremacist entitlement.

“It is odd to be removed from a race relations foundation for my private work in criticizing this aspect of Islam, of which the latter is not a race.”

She called her removal a “dishonourable decision” on the part of Heritage Minister Melanie Joly and accused her of acting “at the behest of questionable sorts.” On Jihad Watch, she wrote that she is “investigating some avenues concerning this ruthless and agenda-driven decision to dismiss me from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.”

In August, the Canadian Press reported Douglass-Williams’ position had come under review after she published an essay in May about her visit to Iceland with Robert Spencer, founder of Jihad Watch.

Spencer has been characterized as an “anti-Muslim extremist” by the Anti-Defamation League and is considered “one of America’s most prolific and vociferous anti-Muslim propagandists,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights organization that tracks extremism.

Jihad Watch, where Douglas-Williams frequently writes, has also been designated a hate group by the SPLC, which describes it as “one of the oldest, most prolific and popular anti-Muslim websites.”

“Jihad Watch is one of the leading voices pushing Islamophobic sentiment today,” Amarnath Amarasingam, a prominent Canadian researcher of terrorism and Islamic extremism, said in an email. “The idea that someone who sits on the Canadian Race Relations Foundation’s board would have anything to do with Jihad Watch or Robert Spencer is mind-boggling to me.

“The CRRF is supposed to be about fostering inter-cultural understanding, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what Jihad Watch stands for.”

Following her trip to Iceland, Douglass-Williams published a post on Jihad Watch under the headline “Christine Williams: My Personal Warning to Icelanders,” in which she cautioned the island country that “many friendly, seemingly ‘moderate’ Muslims are deceiving you.”

“You are in trouble,” she wrote on May 16. “Your numbers are too small in a vast land to continue as you are, in allowing Islamic supremacist incursion into your country as you have.”

She later continued: “You need street smarts with regard to immigrants. Islamic supremacists will smile at you, invite you to their gatherings, make you feel loved and welcome, but they do it to deceive you and to overtake you, your land and your freedoms.”

The post raised alarm bells with fellow board members and was flagged with Heritage Minister Joly, according to the Canadian Press.

“The country’s leading organization dedicated to the elimination of racism and the promotion of harmonious race relations, the Canada Race Relations Foundation, must have a board that recognizes the importance of diversity and inclusion in our society,” Simon Ross, a spokesperson for the minister, said in an statement to the Star on Thursday.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims also expressed concerns and sent a formal letter to the government in October. Executive director Ihsaan Gardee said Douglass-Williams’ removal is an “appropriate corrective measure taken by government to address (her) disturbing public record.”

“The removal of Ms. Douglass-Williams is long overdue in light of her known Islamophobic commentary and her public association with purveyors of hateful propaganda, such as Robert Spencer who has long been identified by human rights institutions as a leading figure of the Islamophobia movement in North America,” he said in an emailed statement.

The Canadian Race Relations Foundation was created out of a settlement deal between the federal government and Japanese Canadians over their internment during the Second World War. As a part of the agreement, the government promised to create a foundation that would “foster racial harmony and cross-cultural understanding and help to eliminate racism.”

Launched in 1997, the foundation has an office in Toronto but hosts anti-racism workshops, training and roundtables across the country, in addition to funding research projects and publishing an academic journal.

Board members are appointed by the governor in council on the recommendation of the minister in charge of multiculturalism. Douglass-Williams was appointed in 2012 on the recommendation of Jason Kenney, who was then the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism.

Douglass-Williams’ biography on the foundation's website has now been taken down but it listed affiliations that included the Hudson Institute in New York and the Anti-Semitism Task Force with the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies. The latter organization says that Douglass-Williams was asked to join the task force in 2012 but it was never implemented. However, according to FSWC president and CEO, Avi Benlolo, Douglass-Williams has contributed to FSWC.

Her biography also stated that she previously worked as a television journalist with a Christian broadcaster, in addition to regularly contributing to the NewsReal blog and Front Page Magazine.

The latter two are published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a major media player in the United States’ Islamophobia network, according to a 2011 report by the Center for American Progress. A Washington Post investigation also found that the Freedom Center has “helped cultivate a generation of political warriors seeking to upend the Washington establishment,” including figures such as Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s senior policy adviser, and Breitbart News chairman Stephen Bannon, which Front Page Magazine described as the “man of the year” in a 2016 article.

Jihad Watch is also a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a blog where Douglass-Williams has become a prolific contributor, sometimes posting up to three times a day.

In August, she wrote a post defending her “personal writings on Jihad Watch” and included a statement she sent to the Canadian Press. She wrote that her writings are compatible with her work on Canadian Race Relations board and that she has “the greatest respect for its pure, original mandate of human rights for all.”

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“It is not racist to oppose the jihadist-Islamist agenda,” she wrote in the post, which is headlined “Christine Douglass-Williams: unjustly targeted by Canada’s ‘Islamophobia’ agenda.”

“Any efforts currently against me in my private work are an unjust, agenda-driven and a cruel attempt to intimidate me for my distaste for all supremacist agendas.”

Other posts on Jihad Watch by Douglass-Williams have appeared under headlines such as “UN launches app to ‘empower’ migrants, encourage them to ‘migrate safely’” and “Jesuit scholar: Islam is an open-ended declaration of war against non-Muslims.”

In June 2016, she wrote about a message she received from a friend who requested she write more positively about migrants. “At first I thought: go do some yoga and count your blessings as a citizen of our free country, and shut up,” she wrote.

She later continued: “How many Westerners want our cities and countries to become replicas of Islamic states, with the full range of all the atrocities committed in them? We’re on our way there, folks, unless we hold leaders accountable; those who should be protecting the citizens of our countries from bloodthirsty criminals and people who are encroaching upon our freedoms and safety.”

Foundation chairperson Albert Lo said this is the only time a board member has been dismissed since he joined the organization in 2007.

Lo said he is not familiar with Jihad Watch or Douglass-Williams’ writings online and declined to comment on them. But he said his interactions with her as a board member have always been positive.

“We always appreciated her positive contributions,” he said. “She’s always supportive of positive race relations.”

He added that Douglass-Williams has been involved with a number of foundation initiatives involving Muslim issues. “I saw quite a number of participants in the Muslim community say they were very warm to her and always positive and friendly.”

On Jihad Watch, Douglass-Williams has written that she is “pro-Muslim and pro-human rights,” pointing to her book The Challenge of Modernizing Islam, where she “differentiates between Islamists and human rights-respecting Muslims who strive to live peaceably and equally among Westerners.”

“I am appalled at Islamist intolerance and murder today of non-Muslims and even their fellow Muslims who strive toward human rights,” she wrote.

On Thursday, she wrote that “many letters” were sent to the Heritage Department on her behalf, in addition to a petition “attesting to my deep regard for human rights.”

But extremism researchers like Amarasingam say Jihad Watch is one of the leading platforms in the “counter jihad” movement, which has been described as a loose international network based on the belief that Islam is at war with the West and Muslim immigration is a conscious effort to spread Sharia law.

“For a lot of commentators on the site, the only way for a Muslim to be less violent is to be less Muslim,” he says. “The common assumption of most writers on the site is that Muslims are secretly planning a takeover of the Western countries through a slow erosion of western culture. This is why they also have pretty wild views against immigration and letting refugees into Western countries.”

Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, said Douglass-Williams has been “on the anti-Muslim circuit for some time” and has written hundreds of articles for Jihad Watch since 2012.

In an emailed statement, the Mosaic Institute, a non-profit that promotes diversity, said the removal of Douglass-Williams “reflects that the personal behaviours of a board member do actually matter.”

“Ms. Douglass-Williams, through her writing and public comments, has revealed that she sees the Muslim community as categorically homogenous, assigning a particular set of characteristics and behaviours to them that, in her view, are a threat,” the statement read. “This type of thinking is the root of prejudice and discrimination. And that is what the Canadian Race Relations Foundation needs to dismantle.”

Clarification- December 22, 2017: This article was updated from a previous version to include information from the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies that its anti-Semitism task force was never launched.

Clarification – December 27, 2017: This article was further updated to make clear that Christine Douglass-Williams was asked to join the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies in 2012. According to Avi Benlolo, president and CEO of FSWC, while the task force has not been implemented, Douglass-Williams has contributed to the FSWC.